by Minos
Feb 2, 2014
As of 1st February 2014 India is officially the Number Two team in all the world, across all three formats* according to the dubious system of ICC Rankings. This factoid provides me with the typically tenuous excuse I need to weigh in with my own two-and-a-bit bits worth. This time around on the Great Revamp Debate.
Many voices, articulate and otherwise, have campaigned for and inveighed against the proposed changes.
Those in favour cite the inherent right of India to retain a larger portion of the massive earnings that it generates, though even these supporters are unable to come up with convincing arguments for why India’s two fawning sidekicks should be allowed to dig their fingers deeper into the pie.
Those against are fired with righteous indignation. They decry the hijacking of the noble game by rapacious pirates, and the dangers inherent in reverting to the “dark days” of the Imperial Cricket Conference and the reviled veto of the time. “An evil money-grubbing plutocracy in the making!” is the most commonly heard slogan in the protest camp.
Phew! All that rhetoric...
The truth is that cricket – at least as we know it – has one foot in the grave. Let’s be honest. Much as it pains me to say this about the game I love, the sport I grew up playing, following and obsessing about, cricket is an anachronism in this 21st Century world of ours in the way that the phonograph is a relic of the past.
Like cricket, the phonograph gained acceptance in the 19th Century. It flourished in the 20th, when there were few alternative forms of entertainment. While it is now considered by purists and audiophiles to provide the most authentic sound reproduction of any form of recorded music – analogue or digital – its use is now restricted to said purists and audiophiles. The rest of us make do with CD, MP3 and Youtube streaming, our ears having adjusted to the compressed, lifeless sound these digital formats produce.
Entertainment options available to today’s youth are multiplying rapidly. Smartphones do everything but trim your sideburns. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat seem to occupy a young person’s every waking moment (and the odd sleeping one too!). 21st Century attention spans have been compressed by the ubiquitous microchip from hours and minutes to mere seconds.
What will be the attention span of a generation of children who have been thrust into cyberspace, literally at birth, by parents who Snapchat and Instagram a wee newborn’s images from the moment it pops its li’l head out of mommy’s glabrous pudendum? Certainly not long enough to sit through a 5-day test match. In fact, I predict that within 20 years a T20 match, at merely 3½ hours from start to finish, will be considered too long and tedious to follow all the way through. What then? Why then the biggest (or at least the longest) format in the world of cricket will be that most entertaining spectacle: The Hong Kong Sixes. Or, more likely, The Mumbai Maximums! The most popular will be the “Super Over” format, except it won’t be preceded by 40 overs of frenetic (read tedious) cricket.
These formats will not be able to elicit the kind of fanatical devotion that current international formats do. Instead “Sixes” and “Super Over” tournaments will be watched (and betted on) by rabid punters in sweaty parlours, crumpled notes in hand, their eyes glued to the super HD flatscreens wedged in the corner up against plaster-flaked ceilings. Think of the stick-fighting scene at the beginning of Rambo 3, or Chris Walken’s Russian roulette sequence in the final act of The Deer Hunter.
All that the unfairly pilloried luminaries of the BCCI and their cronies have done is recognise this fact and cannily manoeuvre the situation to their own financial advantage. While the going is good. While there’s still life in the old dog (cricket that is – I would never refer to any one of Messrs Clarke, Srinivasan or Edwards in that way). For let’s face it, what is international and top level domestic cricket about these days? In a word, “money”.
Kumar Sangakkara, one of my favourite batsmen (and cricketer for that matter) recently opted out of the 2014 IPL auction stating, in so many words, that in this way he stood a better chance of getting a more lucrative contract in 2015. This is not international gun-for-hire Chris Gayle, nor the very fair and lovely Virat Kohli. This is the former captain of the last remaining gentlemen of cricket (their sorry antics in Sharjah recently notwithstanding). The man who delivered perhaps the most eloquent of all the Cowdrey Lectures delivered to date.
On the other hand, Firdoose Moonda, in a recent Cricinfo article, quotes Dr Ali Bacher as saying that each member of the 1967 South African cricket team which defeated Australia 3-1 in a test series received a bonus of 75 Rand. Now I don’t know how much that is in real money, but according to Bacher it was exactly one month’s rent for the flat he and his newly-wed wife were renting at the time. Just imagine, a bonus of a whole month’s rent! Those boys had it so good.
___________________________________________
(What the powers-that-would-be
are hoping will happen in short order)
___________________________________________
Now I don’t mean to gratuitously glorify those “pure” days when top cricketers played for love of the game alone. But my point stands. Without, if you’ll pardon the expression, shitloads of money being thrown at today’s cricketers, they won’t even put on their boxes. All that money comes from cunning manipulation of the commercial potential that cricket offers. Most of that potential resident in India.
Cricket is dying a natural death (I am genuinely heartbroken at the prospect). It is only natural, given the unashamedly rapacious, consumerist, commercial world we live in, that those in positions of power would want to extract every last penny from cricket’s fatted piggy bank.
And they will succeed. It’s a shrewd, canny lot which comprises this troika. They’ll bring everyone around, by crook or flat-batted hook. Just you see.
____________
*2nd to SA in Tests, Australia in ODIs, and Sri Lanka in T20Is
Feb 2, 2014
As of 1st February 2014 India is officially the Number Two team in all the world, across all three formats* according to the dubious system of ICC Rankings. This factoid provides me with the typically tenuous excuse I need to weigh in with my own two-and-a-bit bits worth. This time around on the Great Revamp Debate.
Many voices, articulate and otherwise, have campaigned for and inveighed against the proposed changes.
Those in favour cite the inherent right of India to retain a larger portion of the massive earnings that it generates, though even these supporters are unable to come up with convincing arguments for why India’s two fawning sidekicks should be allowed to dig their fingers deeper into the pie.
Those against are fired with righteous indignation. They decry the hijacking of the noble game by rapacious pirates, and the dangers inherent in reverting to the “dark days” of the Imperial Cricket Conference and the reviled veto of the time. “An evil money-grubbing plutocracy in the making!” is the most commonly heard slogan in the protest camp.
Phew! All that rhetoric...
The truth is that cricket – at least as we know it – has one foot in the grave. Let’s be honest. Much as it pains me to say this about the game I love, the sport I grew up playing, following and obsessing about, cricket is an anachronism in this 21st Century world of ours in the way that the phonograph is a relic of the past.
Like cricket, the phonograph gained acceptance in the 19th Century. It flourished in the 20th, when there were few alternative forms of entertainment. While it is now considered by purists and audiophiles to provide the most authentic sound reproduction of any form of recorded music – analogue or digital – its use is now restricted to said purists and audiophiles. The rest of us make do with CD, MP3 and Youtube streaming, our ears having adjusted to the compressed, lifeless sound these digital formats produce.
Entertainment options available to today’s youth are multiplying rapidly. Smartphones do everything but trim your sideburns. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat seem to occupy a young person’s every waking moment (and the odd sleeping one too!). 21st Century attention spans have been compressed by the ubiquitous microchip from hours and minutes to mere seconds.
What will be the attention span of a generation of children who have been thrust into cyberspace, literally at birth, by parents who Snapchat and Instagram a wee newborn’s images from the moment it pops its li’l head out of mommy’s glabrous pudendum? Certainly not long enough to sit through a 5-day test match. In fact, I predict that within 20 years a T20 match, at merely 3½ hours from start to finish, will be considered too long and tedious to follow all the way through. What then? Why then the biggest (or at least the longest) format in the world of cricket will be that most entertaining spectacle: The Hong Kong Sixes. Or, more likely, The Mumbai Maximums! The most popular will be the “Super Over” format, except it won’t be preceded by 40 overs of frenetic (read tedious) cricket.
These formats will not be able to elicit the kind of fanatical devotion that current international formats do. Instead “Sixes” and “Super Over” tournaments will be watched (and betted on) by rabid punters in sweaty parlours, crumpled notes in hand, their eyes glued to the super HD flatscreens wedged in the corner up against plaster-flaked ceilings. Think of the stick-fighting scene at the beginning of Rambo 3, or Chris Walken’s Russian roulette sequence in the final act of The Deer Hunter.
All that the unfairly pilloried luminaries of the BCCI and their cronies have done is recognise this fact and cannily manoeuvre the situation to their own financial advantage. While the going is good. While there’s still life in the old dog (cricket that is – I would never refer to any one of Messrs Clarke, Srinivasan or Edwards in that way). For let’s face it, what is international and top level domestic cricket about these days? In a word, “money”.
Kumar Sangakkara, one of my favourite batsmen (and cricketer for that matter) recently opted out of the 2014 IPL auction stating, in so many words, that in this way he stood a better chance of getting a more lucrative contract in 2015. This is not international gun-for-hire Chris Gayle, nor the very fair and lovely Virat Kohli. This is the former captain of the last remaining gentlemen of cricket (their sorry antics in Sharjah recently notwithstanding). The man who delivered perhaps the most eloquent of all the Cowdrey Lectures delivered to date.
On the other hand, Firdoose Moonda, in a recent Cricinfo article, quotes Dr Ali Bacher as saying that each member of the 1967 South African cricket team which defeated Australia 3-1 in a test series received a bonus of 75 Rand. Now I don’t know how much that is in real money, but according to Bacher it was exactly one month’s rent for the flat he and his newly-wed wife were renting at the time. Just imagine, a bonus of a whole month’s rent! Those boys had it so good.
Now I don’t mean to gratuitously glorify those “pure” days when top cricketers played for love of the game alone. But my point stands. Without, if you’ll pardon the expression, shitloads of money being thrown at today’s cricketers, they won’t even put on their boxes. All that money comes from cunning manipulation of the commercial potential that cricket offers. Most of that potential resident in India.
Cricket is dying a natural death (I am genuinely heartbroken at the prospect). It is only natural, given the unashamedly rapacious, consumerist, commercial world we live in, that those in positions of power would want to extract every last penny from cricket’s fatted piggy bank.
And they will succeed. It’s a shrewd, canny lot which comprises this troika. They’ll bring everyone around, by crook or flat-batted hook. Just you see.
____________
*2nd to SA in Tests, Australia in ODIs, and Sri Lanka in T20Is
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