WORLD CUP 2007

Runneth Over

Cricket’s World Cup is a collection of anti-stories. Its coverage has concerned all the stuff not happening: the scintillating world-class cricket not taking place, not being witnessed by crowds that have not shown up to occupy arenas that are not finished. Plus, of course, the apparent murder that has not been solved.

The revelatory form, meanwhile, has been shown by two teams not making it through to the tournament’s Super Eight stage – actually ‘stage’ seems a trifling word to describe what has lasted so long it feels like an era. Pakistan and India, who won a match each, against Zimbabwe and Bermuda respectively, have returned home to the usual resignations and recriminations; the official effigy supplier to the World Cup – and there is bound to be one – will have done a roaring trade.

In days of yore, these rituals used to be regarded as quaint eastern exotica – my word, they are passionate out there, aren’t they? If vestiges of this attitude persist, they should be put to flight at once. India is cricket’s financial hub, providing seventy per cent of its global income; its most lucrative franchise is its rivalry with Pakistan. Over the last five to seven years, under Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid, India has achieved on-field success to complement its off-field stature: it has been worth playing India in a cricket sense as well as a financial one. But what are the implications if the world’s richest cricket nation and its competitor of choice should rank among its poorer teams?

The gravitational pull of Indian money is now keenly felt in Australia. In 2006–07, Cricket Australia had apparently the best possible summer. Its Ashes series was a sell-out in advance; it obtained handsome sums from domestic and international broadcasting rights; it can expect a fat distribution from the ICC after the World Cup. Yet Cricket Australia will still make less money in 2006–07 than it anticipates in 2007–08 from hosting India for four Tests, when its arenas will be bedecked in advertisements for Indian products, and thronged with Bollywood stars.

The modus operandi of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is an unruly blend of hypercapitalism and feudalism, mixed with the entrepreneurial ebullience of Don King. It has just booted Australia from a one-day round robin in Ireland, and demanded a restructuring of the Australian summer to accommodate its plans for yet another series with Pakistan. On present indications, however, Australia’s games against India will make the recent Ashes series look like the closest-run thing since Waterloo.

And if the jet-propelled bullock cart of Indian cricket remains incapable of producing a team worth the country’s cumulative talent, what then? What seems to happen when a superpower is checked and thwarted is that it seeks to remake the world along more congenial lines – lines that show it to best advantage. It is no longer bad news for India, for instance, if it is uncompetitive in Test cricket; it is bad news for Test cricket itself.

In fact, if the World Cup has illuminated anything about international cricket, it is the difference between getting and spending. The game has never been richer, and never felt flatter. India, with its byzantine politics, opaque finances, antique infrastructure and risible domestic competition, is merely the most extreme example of a cricket governance system through which money pours to little visible effect. Nor is it alone. As Matthew Engel put it in Wisden a couple of years ago, one of the reasons for cricket’s complaisance where Zimbabwe is concerned is a fear that action might reveal the double and triple standards elsewhere: ‘Pick on them for maladministration and where do you stop?’ Heavens, someone might even look at the ICC itself.

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ICC member countries wore big fat grins last year when they sold the broadcasting rights to their next suite of events for something in the region of US$1 billion. Here are some of the gloating quotes. India’s I. S. Bindra: ‘Much of the money that comes from this deal can be ploughed back into the development of the game, and that will strengthen cricket even more.’ The West Indies’ Ken Gordon: ‘This agreement ... will put the ICC in an extremely strong financial position and allow us all to develop cricket on a much wider front.’ HRH Tunku Imran, President of the Malaysian Cricket Association: ‘The revenue received by the ICC can be used for a new era of development, as it will have an impact on all of our eighty-seven members below Test level.’

But how much ‘ploughing back’ is there really? What width ‘wider front’ are we talking? How much should junior countries be benefiting anyway when only India, Australia and England among the Test nations operate profitably? And how much bang is being obtained from the development buck? Whither the quadrennially-remembered Kenya and the Netherlands, fleeting and faded presences at the World Cup, and the USA, not only absent but suspended from the ICC for a governance implosion almost as bad as Zimbabwe’s? The ICC gives a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘glorious uncertainty’.

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A major sporting event can seldom have worn a more ironic name than Super 8, the Cup’s interminable interim stage. Who uses Super 8 any more? It might as well have been called the Betamax round. You’d have thought the ICC would have learned their lesson from the Super Series that wasn’t, and the Super Sub that never did.

Perhaps it is time for a worldwide moratorium on the use of the word ‘super’ in a sporting context. The Superbowl demands respect. But after watching Superbikes duke it out for Superpole in the Supersports competition, even rugby Super 14s seems rather prosaic, endurable only with the aid of Superbeer and Supercigarettes. It is surprising that football, scarcely prudish where hyperbole is concerned, has so far eschewed going Super. When it does, watch out.

The Guardian April 2007