CB Series

IS IT BORING?

In a series of advertisements five years ago promoting Cricket Australia’s sponsorship by the Commonwealth Bank, the Australian cricket team appeared as themselves, being presented to by two shiny spivs from an ‘American ad agency’ called Luke & Luke.

‘Cricket,’ said one of the Lukes, rolling the word round in his mouth as he looked at Mike Hussey. ‘Mr Cricket.’ He carried on musing: ‘Is it boring? Do we need to add something to it?’

Hussey and his teammates sat stiff and stony-faced as the ad man’s questions continued: ‘Sweaters. What’s going on with the sweaters?’ The advertisement closed with the volunteering of a new slogan: ‘Cricket: watch us stand.’

We were meant to laugh at this – and actually, as cricket ads go, they weren’t the worst. Americans, eh? So dumb. So crass. They would never understand that cricket was complete in itself, needed no help from imported wisenheimers.

Ah, but that was then. This last month it’s been hard to miss the Cricket Australia’s advertising campaign promoting the Commonwealth Bank Series as ‘Summer’s Biggest Dress-Up Party’. To quote from CA’s own press release, it ‘captures the notion that the Commonwealth Bank Series is like one big summer-house party’ with ‘people wearing colourful costumes from all walks of life’.

This summer’s ODIs, the release explains, will feature appearances from Basement Jaxx plus Sneaky Sound System, Zoe Badwi and Sarah De Bono: ‘The game provides the perfect backdrop for a summer party in a festival atmosphere with thousands of fans dressed in outrageous costumes and DJ’s[sic] playing party tunes.’

Apart from being composed by someone with a rather insecure grasp of apostrophes, the release is strangely fascinating. The ‘Summer’s Biggest Dress-Up Party’ campaign is designed by GPY&R, part of the multinational WPP, but it might as well have come straight from the drawing boards of Luke & Luke. ‘Cricket. Is it boring? Do we need to add something to it?’

I would not wish to be misunderstood here. I actually enjoy the dressing up that has become part of cricket’s summer pageant in the ranks of Richie Benauds and others. A cherished personal memory is walking round the back of the Wyatt Stand at Edgbaston after the Test of 2005 and coming upon a vigorous game of cricket with Queen Victoria facing Sherlock Holmes with Lord Nelson wicketkeeping to a field of Beefeaters.

But what’s pleasing has been the custom’s spontaneity. It arose without official sanction; it even courted official disapproval. Now it’s a scheme for rounding up those all-important ‘cricket consumers’. Thirty years ago, the New Yorker’s baseball writer Roger Angell observed that Americans had evolved a way to turn ‘the smallest flutter of a spontaneous incident in sports . . . into a mass-produced imitation or a slogan or an advertising gimmick’. We’re all Americans now.

Frankly, too, anyone with a love for cricket should be concerned when those charged with promoting it describe it as a ‘backdrop’. Because nobody can love a backdrop: they are inherently interchangeable and substitutable. There is a slope here and it is a slippery one, culminating perhaps with the crowd replying: ‘Hey, can you keep that cricket down out there? We’re trying to enjoy our summer party!’

Between times, there cannot help but be a confusion of messages. One-day cricket has a great many doomsayers. Shane Warne reckons it is redundant. Adam Gilchrist says it will be ‘pretty much gone’ within three years. Yet whenever such comments are aired, Cricket Australia noisily proclaims that fifty-over cricket is alive and well, as popular as ever.

They have to say this, of course: one-day cricket is the chief means by which we determine who leads the world, and by which the game in general is bankrolled. It is the cricket format played in the World Cup, which Australia is due to host in 2014–15, the rights for which, distributed by the International Cricket Council, keep many cricket countries alive.

In this instance, though, CA are right. The head-to-head format worked well in 2010–11; the 2011–12 tri-series was competitive and exciting all the way through. India’s win over Australia and tie with Sri Lanka in Adelaide were arguably the best cricket they played last summer; I’d sooner have watched Sri Lanka’s scintillating chase in the second final at the same ground than many a grim Test match.

So where exactly does one-day cricket stand? Is it in a process of managed decline, steadily being reduced to the level of house party backdrop, or of abiding popularity and ongoing rebirth? For how can CA first spruik fifty-over international cricket as ‘a fantastic way to spend a glorious summer’s day with friends’, which makes it sound like a lazy lunch in a beer garden, then rebuild it for an event comparable with soccer’s World Cup or the Olympics, which cricket likes to see itself as a peer with. It may be a mistake to expect any kind of logical coherence in marketing, but once you let Luke & Luke in, they cannot help but leave their watermark.

The predicament for one-day cricket is that it used to be the opposite of Test cricket and now it isn’t: that role has been appropriated by T20. ODIs are no longer seen as short-form Test matches, but drawn-out T20s, and usually played when players are knackered, bored and indifferent.

As Graeme Swann observed in his recent autobiography, the best time to play another team in ODIs is when they have just pulped you in a Test series, because they slacken off and you have nothing to lose: which may, by the way, provide a logical underpinning for the selection of a fresh Australian squad at the weekend, as noisily peevish as Channel Nine is about it.

One-day cricket’s records mean next to nothing. Who knows how many ODI hundreds Michael Clarke has scored? And who, really, cares? The rankings in the ICC’s World Test Championship have actually started to mean something; the rankings in the ICC’s World One-Day Championship still mean damn all.

All of which suggests that an advertising campaign that subtly derogates the actual cricket of the Commonwealth Bank Series is the very opposite of what CA should be signing off on, because it subtly derogates the cricketers also, and they deserve better. George Bailey deserves to be taken seriously as his country’s captain on Friday, not dressed up in paisley on Twitter as the host of summer’s biggest dress-up party.

So here’s a modest, counterintuitive proposal, not because anyone in authority will take a blind bit of notice, but simply as a conversation starter. How about promoting and redesigning one-day cricket to appeal to Test match fans? After all it is traditional cricket fans who will provide the greatest support for the World Cup, not the house partygoers. Let’s get Luke & Luke in, and try to explain to them what’s really going on with those sweaters.

The Australian, January 2013