Established Values

Written by Jim Ribbans

Sunday, 20 April 2008

As has been widely acknowledged, in acres of newsprint and millions of pixels, cricket seems to be going through a somewhat turbulent period at present.

With the rise of T20, and its star studded progeny the IPL, global cricket’s ‘great and good’ have been taxed by some increasingly troubling questions of late: Is there too much money in the game? Are we witnessing the death of Test cricket? Are things about to change forever?

Of course such doomsday scenarios are nothing new. Bodyline, World Series Cricket and Hansie Cronje’s match-fixing misdemeanors all prompted heartfelt obituaries in their day – the sense that this was the final nail in the coffin, that cricket may as well just turn it’s face to the wall.

Somehow though the game has always managed to move on, sidestepping the grave to emerge older, though perhaps no wiser, than in its previous incarnation.

From an historical perspective then it would appear that our current obsession with the ‘soul’ of cricket is little more than a way to fill up column inches, another excuse to jam the internet with (…ahem…) pointless debate. Perhaps, given cricket’s phoenix-like ability to rise from the ashes, we should just cease wringing our hands and enjoy all the fun.

Well maybe.

However there is one major difference between the controversies of the past and those of the present: They all occurred, almost without exception, in spite of ‘The Establishment’.

Bodyline was the brainchild of a maverick captain, not a strategy dreamed up by huddled mandarins at Lords, World Series Cricket was Kerry Packer’s challenge to a system that he perceived to be denying him a ‘fair go’ and of course match-fixing, while a symptom of the ICC’s obsession with one day cricket, was never officially condoned.

In contrast the changes that currently appear to be ‘threatening the very fabric of the game’ are occuring because of ‘The Establishment’, a worrying trend that should concern cricket fans whatever their ilk.

Now I bow to no one in my admiration for the sheer chutzpah and business savvy of the current lords of ‘The Establishment’: the BCCI. Turning the pipedream that was IPL into a multi-million dollar concern within the space of eight months was a feat of which Houdini himself would have been proud.

However, as a cricket fan, I can’t help feeling that the motivation behind this masterly piece of sleight of hand had less to do with the game I love and more to do with the dollars it generated.

Now I don’t believe for one minute that were the respective boards of say England, Australia or the West Indies able to wield the kind of financial and political power that the BCCI currently enjoys that they would do things any differently.

But the truth of the matter is they don’t, it’s the BCCI that holds all the aces and will do so for some time to come.

And that’s a worry, not because of some real or imagined East/West split, but because the BCCI has, in the recent past, shown itself to have scant regard for the game, the media and most importantly the fans.

From gagging and banning players to the petulant brinkmanship on Australia’s tarmac last year and their current draconian manhandling of the Indian media this BCCI regime appears to have one goal and one goal only…dollars.

Indeed in a recent interview outgoing BCCI President Sharad Pawar described the biggest single achievement of his tenure in charge as ‘the aggressive marketing strategy adopted by Lalit Modi and his committee in raising huge sums of money in a transparent manner’.

Not, you’ll note, ‘a better and more accomplished Indian team’ or ‘the work we’ve done in rebuilding India’s cricket infrastructure’. No, his term was all about the moolah.

Now it may be that the ‘huge sums of money’ generated by the BCCI will trickle down to the further flung reaches of the Indian game (and who knows may even the world game at large), but given ‘The Establishments’ record of looking after itself, that appears highly unlikely.

(Click here to know more about Jim)

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