A ROOM WITH A VIEW

GH on cricket's future

Artwork by Fisher Classics

The Long Room at Lord’s: ah, what images it summons, especially for the last year, since Marylebone members made such an empurpled exhibition of themselves on the last day of the most recent Ashes Test.  Last Friday’s occupants were altogether better behaved, and a great deal soberer, for World Cricket Connects, a future-focused gathering of the game’s great and good.  

The guest list included the chairs of boards in Australia, England, New Zealand, South Africa, Pakistan and the International Cricket Council.  There were CEOs from West Indies and Scotland, of the Rajasthan Royals and Kolkata Knight Riders, of the Professional Cricketers Association and Australian Cricketers Association, of the SA20 and IL20.  There were members of Marylebone’s World Cricket Committee including Kumar Sangakkara and Justin Langer, Clare Connor and Jhulan Goswami.  There were past masters from David Gower to Barry Richards, Ravi Shastri to Graeme Smith, and cricket identities so unmistakable they can be referred to by nicknames, from Baz, Jos and Keysey to KP, Straussy and Dada.  Also one committeeman of the South Yarra CC ie me.

All credit to Marylebone president Mark Nicholas, whose brainchild it was, and who performed most of the hosting in that unmistakably smooth and infectiously enthusiastic manner of his - and I mean that in a nice way, because these things can be staid and ceremonial.  Instead the tone was fluid and conversational, so much so that the four panels, entitled Cricket’s Future, A Question of Economics, Cricket’s Growth Opportunity and It’s a Player’s World, ended up blending - a cascade of contentions, projections and even admissions.

Where’s Wally? Can you tell us who Gideon is stood next to?

ICC chairman Greg Barclay set a good example of candour at the outset by stating that, no, his organisation is not ‘fit for purpose’.  No, as a ‘members’ organisation’, it falls well short of being a global governing body - not exactly a revelation, although still something when the chairman states it and everyone nods.  There were a range of responses to this: the ICC should be either stronger, more independent, a bit more independent or, well, nothing.  Because Ravi Shastri put the Indian position, which is really the only one that matters: the ICC is as strong as it needs to be; that is, not very.

Because, of course, the whole show was a bit like Hamlet without the prince, Jay Shah having sent his apologies, being busy posing with the T20 World Cup.  In the end, the cricket world proposes, the Board of Control for Cricket In India disposes, and nothing World Cricket Connects could arrive at would make all that much difference.  Which did not diminish the exercise.  On the contrary, given that such conversations commonly occur behind closed doors, interest attended one where the doors were ajar.  So what do cricket’s thought leaders talk about amongst themselves?

The short answer is that they talk about money: indeed there were phases where one listened in vain for anything recognisably cricket-y about the dialogue; it could have concerned almost any industry, any market, any consumer good.  There was lots of talk of growth, of leverage, of leveraging the growth, of growing the leverage, and, above all, responding to commercial forces, which were viewed as vast, irresistible and immutable, and barely the stuff of human agency at all.  

Barclay’s opening, for example, was followed by an Arthur Jensen impression from Manoj Badale whose book is one of the most mind-expanding on cricket I have read in the last five years but whose there-is-no-alternative technoutopianism here sounded perfectly soulless, everything reduced to the level of content, nobody more than a consumer, with cricket a mere handmaiden of capitalism. I’m obviously out of step because everybody else was as transfixed as Howard Beale in Network, but, then, I find Big Tech more than a little menacing, and at its worst a conspiracy against the public.

Another object of my interest was the ubiquitous Sundar Raman because of his start in life was as Lalit Modi’s point man in the inchoate Indian Premier League.  Today a 12.5 per cent shareholder in SA20, Raman evangelised about the technological enrichment of the entertainment experience, and bemoaned that cricket does not give the public more opportunities to spend money on it.  An intriguing inversion this - that really all fans crave is to splash out more cash, and cricket’s job is to help by philanthropically soaking them.  But again, nods all round.

Some of the sums slipped into the conversation could not help but catch the ear.  Mike Baird quantified CA’s COVID losses at $100 million: no wonder times are tight. Richard Thompson divulged that three quarters of the ECB’s income derives from bilateral cricket, and only four per cent from ICC distributions: no wonder they’re spruiking the Hundred.  Ramiz Raja costed security for the Pakistan Cricket Board at $4-5 million a series, a burden no other country suffers, and referred to the need to refurbish stadia that languished during the country’s long inability to host inbound tours.  Maybe most telling was Sanjog Gupta of Star TV reporting that ODI viewership has fallen twenty-three per cent since 2019, further confirmation that T20 is eating fifty-over cricket’s lunch.

One point where conversation strayed, briefly, beyond the realm of ‘petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels’ was in the vexed matter of Afghanistan, following last week’s approach to ICC about the establishment of a women’s team in exile.  Nicholas introduced the inspirational Dr Sarah Fane, director of the MCC Foundation, who has more than twenty years’ involvement in providing support for health, education and cricket in Afghanistan. 

Without any grandstanding or garment-rending, Dr Fane laid the issues before us, including the observation that Afghanistan’s men’s team brings joy to both men and women in that benighted country.  CA’s Baird then glibly counselled patience - a bit ironic, considering how swiftly his board slammed the door in Afghanistan’s face.  Still, maybe, at bottom, Australia's position is itself transactional - it being the kind of moral stance that leaves a pleasing sense of rectitude at minimal cost.

There was a fair bit of airy talk about there being ‘too much meaningless cricket’.  But, well, who’s entitled to draw the distinction?  All cricket is meaningful to someone.  The impressive Aussie CEO of Cricket Scotland, Trudy Lindblade, talked about her country’s desperation for fixtures given how they languish outside the Future Tours Programme: they have twelve male and eight female players on contract, and no certainty at the start of each year how much they will play. Maybe you won’t watch Scotland’s imminent Cricket World Cup League 2 series against Oman and Namibia at Forfarshire and it will cost rather than make money.  But it sure as hell won’t be meaningless.

The best anyone could suggest was that old chestnut of shrinking to victory by having fewer Test nations, as mooted by the ubiquitous Neil Maxwell, who would like the calendar of his client Pat Cummins freed up to make more money, and endorsed by Shastri, probably because he just likes the sound of imperious diktats.  It struck a chord with both Sangakarra and McCullum too.  So, asked Nicholas of them later, how would they feel if Sri Lanka and New Zealand were excluded from that putative half-dozen.  ‘I’ll feel sad but there’s nothing much i can do about it,’ said Sangakarra, shoulder-shruggingly.  ‘What Sanga said,’ assented McCullum.  They got their Test cricket, eh?  When Nicholas alluded to the recent World Cricket Association player poll that found forty-eight per cent of players believing Test cricket the most important format, versus eighty-six per cent five years ago, McCullum muttered about maybe cricketers feeling differently if a match fee of £100,000 was standard.  Again, who could be motivated by anything but money?  

Actually, lots of people.  I could not help thinking of my previous exposure to the Long Room, in the context of last year’s Lord’s Test, and the ensuing week of people losing their shit about the ‘spirit of cricket’.  Of course, I thought it was nonsense. I still do.  But part of me also enjoyed it, found it stimulating, relished people caring, and appreciated an argument that transcended the bottom line.  ‘Passion’ is increasingly something that cricket’s administrators, broadcasters, entrepreneurs and chancers wish to bottle and sell back to us, and the experience of World Cricket Connects suggests that they’re hard at work.  I just hope they’re not too successful.