Cricket, test cricket, that is, is a game
that engenders speculation and philosophy. It takes five days, has lunch and
tea breaks and most of the action takes place a long way from you sitting on
the boundary. Even if you’re playing, standing in the field gives you time to
think. It’s a game of nuance: a bowler manages a maiden over, and the advantage
has passed to the bowling team. By the same token, a batsman surviving such an
over may have given the advantage to his team. And as such, it also engenders,
for mine, the finest sport writing. Not that boxing, football and other faster
paced sports haven’t resulted in good writing, but a good cricket book is
something special. My favourite contemporary cricket writer is Melbourne-based
journalist Gideon Haigh. His books are witty, informed, and driven by a love of
the game.
Sphere of influence: writings on cricket and its discontents is a 2010 collection of essays, speeches, and articles Haigh has
written for such sources as Cricinfo, The Monthly, The Spectator, Sports
Illustrated India and The Age. The major theme of these articles is the rise of
the India to the economic centre of international cricket, the ineffectualness
of the ICC, and Twenty20 and its effect on the sport. These are all entwined
issues.
Twenty20 is a great money-maker for the
game, particularly India, where an entrepreneur took an English concept and
made it into an Indian powerhouse. Other nations have followed suit, with less
success. Twenty20 may yet be a dazzling flash in the pan, but India has bet its
future on it, eschewing test cricket which is the ultimate test of a player’s
talents and strengths. India has been the No 1 test nation in the world
(although the method of determining that, as Haigh says, is obscure and
complicated at best) but in its last tour of Australia was an example of
diminishing returns.
The other problem with the tidal wave of
money now engulfing cricketers is its almost inevitable handmaiden, corruption.
Match-fixing was a blight on the game in the 1990s. Now we have spot fixing,
no-balls at particular time and so on. Pakistan players were guilty in this
instance. Poorly paid, other countries unwilling to tour their troubled
country, banned from the riches of the IPL by India, is it any wonder that some
of them were happy to take money wherever they could get it? Dodgy administrators
and administrations, a powerless and petty ICC, ruthless and powerful gambling
interests; is it any wonder the Haigh senses an approaching crisis? He poses a
very pertinent question: does cricket make money in order to exist, or does it
exist in order to make money? He thinks it should be the former, he fears too
interested parties are starting to think the latter. And the consequences of
that for those who love the game are worrying indeed.
And I see in my own profession signs that
there are those who are moving the bottom line from an important consideration
to the main consideration. One theatre director, convinced that ‘bums on seats’
should be the major driver, programmed ‘popular’ shows and almost took his
theatre company to the wall. A university changed the Department of Arts to the
Department of Creative Industries. It said it was a hard-nosed recognition of
the nature of arts and the importance of knowing how to make money with it.
Somehow, departments of Medicine, Science, Engineering, Law and Architecture, have
never considered how to make money using their knowledge, nor recognised that
at some point they would need to. To me it was a buzzword approach that
signified the ultimate surrender of Art to Money.
If cricket and theatre are simply tools to
make money, then we play and watch cricket for the same reason we play and
watch theatre. And having done both, to lesser and greater effect, I can tell
you we don’t. The play, and the day’s play, still need to remain the thing.
