Cricket's Winter of Discontent

GH has dark thoughts

Hubble Space Telescope image of the cubewano 19521 Chaos (1998 WH24)

Normally when Australian cricket goes a little dark, it is because of some misadventure of the national team, usually in a foreign clime. It is not, usually, because of the activities of its administrative elite. But right now it feels like cricket is on the verge of a full-scale nervous breakdown. And if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs….then maybe you haven’t caught up with the latest in the ‘privatisation process’.

Australian cricket has still to benefit by a cent from all the jawing. It has, however, thrown away fifteen years’ hard-scrabble brand-building in its biggest market by foreshadowing the scrapping of two teams who last season drew nearly 70,000 people to the MCG. All because….remind me why we’re doing this again. Watching Cricket Victoria’s CEO Nick Cummins trying to explain his ‘merger’ is like Trump trying to explain war with Iran. It’s because fans are too ardent in supporting one team; it’s because fans aren’t ardent enough and support no team; it’s because there’s uncertainty, even though the outcome is further uncertainty; it’s because the focus groups told us, even though we only have his word on this.

Let’s just dispense with the Big V nonsense, and the distraction of the name generally. Blazers? They’re what administrators used to wear, usually with dandruff on the collar.

Melbourne Blazer

The bottom line is that Cricket Victoria, because they’ve proven incapable of making it work themselves, want to sell the second Melbourne licence as a greenfields site to a new investor, free of nominative, chromatic or heritage encumbrances. A lay fan would be entitled to ask: is this really so urgent? Why not just give the new owners an option over what exists? Maybe they’ll continue it; probably they won’t. But in the meantime, what’s the loss?

The only conceivable rationale is that Cricket Victoria, and their Jolimont enablers, wish to engineer a fait accompli, creating a ‘burning platform’ by setting fire to it themselves. It’s perfectly possible, by the way, that a potential buyer already lurks in the wings, perhaps Mumbai-adjacent given Cummins’s recent trip there with Cricket Australia counterpart Todd Greenberg, and there exists a deadline to act, with CA assuming that the sale will cause an orderly stampede among the other states. But is shouting ‘every man for himself’ the way to maximise value in what Greenberg has called cricket’s most momentous strategic step? Isn’t this meant to benefit everyone? Before executives start trousering bonuses and bankers success fees, have they quite thought everything through?

It was interesting last week, for example, to hear Cummins’s proposition that an Indian-owned franchise would immediately engage with the local Indian diaspora in a way that the Melbourne teams, apparently, have not. This was, on its face, quite an admission. Is Cummins not only the man who couldn’t sell sport to Melburnians but who failed to sell cricket to Indians? Yet would Indian owners make such a difference? Isn’t it players who really move the dial? Perhaps the assumption is that Indian capital would bring Indian players - but that is a largeish assumption given that none have been sighted in The Hundred, the SA20 or IL20, where Indian capital is already heavily deployed.