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Thursday, November 06, 2008
From Asif Iqbal
Former Pakistan and Kent cricket captain
LONDON: It was strange to hear of Lord’s, the home of cricket, hosting the landing of a helicopter — that too carrying a business magnate with crates full of dollar bills. But it was only a precursor of the farce to follow, a farce that has made utter nonsense of all the ICC’s and ECB’s protestations that they are doing their utmost to ensure the survival of Test cricket, the purest form of the game, and their loud expressions of belief that this form of the game has a long and secure future.
If Allan Stanford’s Twenty20 extravaganza is to give us a taste of things to come, the future of Test cricket is gloomy and by all accounts, the ICC and ECB could not care less as long as the dollars keep rolling in.
In the case of the Stanford game, even that did not happen. England lost to a collection of West Indian players described as the Stanford Superstars and thus the ECB came out with nothing to show for its efforts at accommodating Mr Stanford. On the debit side, cricket lost a great deal.
It lost firstly its image of a serious sport and to me appeared to be the first step down the road that wrestling has gone. One man with an oversized ego — as most rich men have — took the game into his pocket and was allowed to do so because the price was right. He was allowed to violate the sanctity of the dressing room, the pitch, and even allowed to play around with some cricketers’ spouses.
He had his games played as he saw fit, not even bothering to stick to the rules of the game as set out by the ICC; thus it was that even as early as the third over, the fielding side was allowed to do away with anyone in a catching position.
It was said that the main motive why the England Cricket Board got into bed with Sandford was because it wanted to help West Indies cricket financially. Yet, this very altruistic motive could only be realised because the Stanford Superstars won. Under the terms of the competition, the winner takes all and therefore if the ECB intends to keep on helping the West Indies Board, it would have to make sure that England go on losing. That surely cannot be the idea.
England’s defeat was humiliating, perhaps more so because the team they went down was not even an official West Indies side. Under the circumstances therefore it is difficult to understand why the ECB agreed to field an official England side against the non-official side chosen by people appointed by a private entrepreneur and bearing his own name. I can see what it would do to the said entrepreneur’s ego; I can’t see what it did for the ECB.
In fact, England’s defeat meant that it did nothing at all for any of the players or the ECB. England captain Kevin Pietersen said after the match that there had been a lot of nonsense going on around as a result of which the players were not quite able to concentrate as they would have liked to do and that the next time around they would have to ‘buy into it’.
Although as professionals they should have been able to acclimatise themselves to whatever the surroundings, Pietersen’s remarks are interesting because what he probably meant was that not only had the format of the game changed but other things too which all seemed to be revolving around the one man who was footing the bill. If that man only wanted his own ‘Superstars’ at the post match presentation ceremony, then that is what happened. That is not the atmosphere in which international cricket is usually played.
The complete abandoning of all norms and even rules for this extravaganza makes a mockery of all the high moral complaints cricket administrators had against Kerry Packer and what was disdainfully described as ‘his circus’. If that was a circus, this was a trapeze act, for whatever Packer may or may not have done, he stuck to the rules of the game and never did anything to harm the formal structure of the sport.
But tournaments like this one will harm the sport’s formal structure in the long run, by making the traditional form of the sport, specially Test cricket, so much less attractive for both players and spectators simply because the money involved will, by comparison, be laughable.
Already the ECB has cancelled a Test tour by Sri Lanka under the Future Tours Programme simply because some of the Sri Lankan players will not be available due to their commitments with the Indian Premier League. Is this the way to safeguard the future of Test cricket? The message I get from that is that when it comes to the increased pecuniary benefits of Twenty20 cricket, Test cricket as a priority is way back in the queue.
It is possible that the ECB felt that if it refused Stanford’s offer, it might have had a players’ revolt on its hands. One also understands the economic argument that Test cricket has to find its own place in the cricket market place and there has to stand on its own two feet. Perhaps it might have had a fairer chance of doing so if Stanford had been asked to divide his prize money over a Twenty20 game, a fifty-over ODI and a Test match and if he could be persuaded to suspend his ego in favour of an official West Indies side.
Commercialism will come into the sport and perhaps that is no bad thing. But the administrators of the sport should not jump head first into such ventures without consideration for the past or the future and should refrain from the temptation of selling it to the highest bidder. This way, the greatest of all games could be in serious danger of being reduced to a fun thing for eight year olds on the idiot box on Sunday mornings.
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ISSN 1563-9479 
