The enemy within cricket is killing the game - Telegraph
The enemy within cricket is killing the game
Cricket's big beasts are carving up the sport for their own grubby interests with no care for the damage they're doing
The head of the ICC Narayanaswami Srinivasan has shown Blatterish skills of obfuscation Photo: PA
By
Simon Heffer
5:09PM BST 31 Aug 2015
In a love affair with cricket lasting nearly half a century the game has only twice genuinely distressed me. The first time was when a freak ball killed Phillip Hughes last November, and cricket lost its innocence far more utterly than in any of the appalling, but more comprehensible, match-fixing and betting scandals of the 2000s. The second time was last week, when I caught up with Sam Collins and Jarrod Kimber’s documentary about the future of Test cricket, Death of a Gentleman.
It is customary when reviewing a film to build to a climax either of praise or disdain, but I shall not detain you. This is one of the most important documentaries I have seen, and by far the finest about cricket. No one with an interest in the game – including anyone who ever intends to pay again to watch a match – should fail to see it. I watched it with a mounting sense of grief, rage and disgust as it told the story of how three cricketing nations – England, Australia and, calling the tune, India – have stitched up international cricket and with it millions of cricket lovers all over the world.
Collins and Kimber set out to explore whether the five-day game – to serious cricket lovers the apogee of the sport – could survive much longer. Over three years they found that the film they hoped to make became another one altogether, focusing on a secret deal the three richest cricketing nations did to use money from short-form cricket in particular to enrich a small group of people – mainly in the subcontinent – while reducing funds to countries such as West Indies, New Zealand and South Africa, where Test cricket is rapidly dying.
Test cricket is dying in countries such as New Zealand Photo: John Robertson
There is a complete absence of transparency in the international game. The man now running the International Cricket Council, Narayanaswami Srinivasan, has the distinction of having had the Supreme Court of India rule against him chairing his own national board. He agreed to be interviewed in the film, and displays Blatterish skills of obfuscation. Srinivasan is in a civil war with the equally unreliable Lalit Modi, the progenitor of India’s T20 franchise. The film asks whether cricket is to these people a sport or simply a money-grubbing form of entertainment. And they conclude that if it is to become the latter – which it will, at the present rate – then like all entertainment shows cricket will, one day, be cancelled.
The Indians have so much money that other boards cannot afford to disoblige them. When South Africa appointed to run their affairs an articulate critic of Srinivasan the Indians threatened to cancel a tour there, and ended up shortening it at huge cost to South Africa. England and Australia, desperate to maintain their own high earnings, seem willingly to have connived with India at cutting the other nations out of the deal. It is a horrible thing to do to a sport that was supposed to convey values of decency and fairness.
India have a huge amount of power in the world of cricket
It is unclear what personal fortunes those who run cricket on the subcontinent may make. The man who runs it here, Giles Clarke, now elevated to the presidency of the England and Wales Cricket Board, says on camera that he works for no payment. I am sure that is true. This charity work should not, however, shield him from the criticism he richly deserves for acting as an impresario rather than as a custodian of cricket’s interests.
Whoever advises Clarke on his PR – and to judge from the sinister way he conducts himself in the interview he gave Collins and Kimber, perhaps nobody does – deserves never to work again. Clarke gives a bravura display of the arrogant, patronising, utter lack of self-awareness one normally associates with the unpleasantly stupid: yet he is a an Oxford man and a successful businessman, so has clearly had to work at cultivating this persona. He strikes one as the type of man who, to cannibalise an old Monty Python joke, would if he found himself accidentally being civil and straightforward immediately become vile again just to keep his hand in.
Lord Woolf, the former Lord Chief Justice and one of the most distinguished and brilliant jurists in the world, conducted at the ICC’s invitation a study of its governance. He issued a damning verdict on the lack of accountability, especially in financial matters. Clarke dismisses him contemptuously, which is shameful and raises questions about his moral fitness for his job. Cinema audiences are reported to have booed when he came on screen later in the film, having seen an hors d’oeuvre of his nastiness early on. I am not surprised: by his third or fourth appearance, even Mother Teresa of Calcutta would want to punch him.
Thoroughly objectionable people running English cricket is not a novelty. What is new is their determination to change the game without consultation, even of their peers in other nations. I am not saying Clarke is corrupt: but he seems unconcerned that those he deals with might be.
India threatened to walk out of the international game a few years ago if it did not get its own way. The others should have told it to get lost. Instead, those with financial clout have colluded with it to prostitute the sport, and further enrich a few Indian moguls. Like so many other sports, people whose only interest is the bottom line now run cricket. This film protests against them. Will it succeed?
Like all MCC members I am invited each year to their Spirit of Cricket lecture. The club apparently refused to screen Death of a Gentleman in case it upset the ECB. How craven: how can MCC pretend to champion the spirit of the game if it is afraid to question its destruction? The club owns Lord’s: the ECB needs Lord’s more than Lord’s needs the ECB. MCC itself has had its controversies in recent years, and has created the impression that it, too, is run by a oligarchy of unsatisfactory people. Death of a Gentleman presents the world’s supposedly leading cricket club with a moral challenge. Is it equal to it?
Until it rises from its knees and questions how Clarke and his friends are changing cricket, no one can take it seriously as an incarnation of the game’s traditional values.
The driving force behind these shenanigans is the money cricket extracts out of broadcasters. I heard Nasser Hussain during the Oval Test say we should give one-day cricket priority over Tests if necessary, to create a better one-day team. Was that him speaking, or his employer, Sky Sports? There is a conspiracy of interests between the big three cricketing nations and the broadcasters to create a small group playing lucrative one-day cricket and some Tests: and if Test cricket elsewhere dies, it dies. Should England support this? Or should those in whose name the ECB acts get up and say, to the authorities and the broadcasters, that enough is enough? Or is cricket now only about money?
Watch the film. Sign the petition on its website. But let us think constructively about what can be done. It is not only about transparency, and accountability. It is also, I think, about whether cricket should now have two codes, like rugby football: the short game, which some of us struggle to take seriously, and proper, first-class cricket. It is happening by default, and the first-class code may not survive except in three or four countries. Better to plan the break, properly fund it, and give the traditional game a chance to survive in a world too full of those who wish only to exploit it.
