The Mourning After the Night Before

GH wonders what's next

Mic, Baird

A week is a long time in cricket politics. Only last week, momentum in the cause of the privatisation of the Big Bash League seemed to lie entirely with Jolimont’s boosters, Cricket Australia preparing to push on over the objections of Cricket New South Wales; now, after a vintage reverse ferret, the impetus has gone, and the Royal Mumbai Melbourne Indians seem further off than ever.

It is not simply that Queensland Cricket changed their minds. It is that the consensus was never as robust as CA believed, that the FOMO message was no more persuasive for all its repetition, that nobody could articulate purposes for new capital beyond smartening balance sheets and paying more to Marcus Stoinis, and that the potential pitfalls were never conceded let alone addressed in a serious manner. At yesterday’s media briefing, when I gently offered to CA’s CEO Todd Greenberg that the objectives of external investors may not be guaranteed to align with those of Australian cricket’s best interests, he responded that external forces such as these already existed. Sure, but is the best response to outside pressures merely to give into them? Maybe Greenberg sees Australian cricket’s independence as unsustainable, and wishes merely to extract the best possible surrender terms for it. If so, he should say this out loud.

Yesterday proved a bad day for the cause of private capital in sport, its march hitherto seen as inexorable. Turned out that the Saudis, who folded their $7 billion LIV Golf tent, don’t have limitless resources and endless patience. Silver Lake’s investment in the All Blacks hardly looks like the coup it seemed at the time either, while European football is suffering sellers’ remorse with clubs as storied as Inter Milan moving from pocket to pocket. The World Triathlon, meanwhile, has pointedly abjured private investment, and private equity’s incursions into US college sport questioned. The point is not that private investment is altogether objectionable; it’s that business’s purposes and priorities, time cycles and financial models, are not for sport always a natural match. And when the likelihood was that much of the Big Bash League’s new capital would have flowed from India, a comradely rival on the cricket field but a ruthless hegemon off it, one was reminded of the fable of the scorpion and the frog.