I’m in Antigua in the Caribbean inhaling limitless beauty and enjoying the unstudied benevolence of the people who live here. Fred, a friendly bloke who works at the hotel and laughs at me or with me – I hope it’s the latter, it doesn’t do to be presumptuous – took me and my young consort to watch the Caribbean Twenty20 cricket tournament currently in full swing on the island. Cricket is obviously very popular here and this new variation on the formula has taken the West Indies by storm.
I don’t know much about cricket; my knowledge was mostly gleaned from a BBC drama called Bodyline, which recounted the Douglas Jardine versus Donald Bradman Ashes series, which must’ve been in the early 30s. Good it was. The trick was to throw the ball at the batsman instead of the wicket, which really spiced things up and I think it ought be reinstated nowadays or perhaps bowlers should be given pistols and shoot batsmen as soon as the match starts making the game even shorter, which I think would be a blessing.
‘They want to make as much money as possible whilst not actually appearing to be living incarnations of Satan’
The other thing I know about cricket is from them adverts where Ian Botham and Allan Lamb advertise chops because both their names have ‘meat’ connotations – Beefy Botham and, well, lamb. The whole silly business made my vegetarianism seem all the more brilliant. The two of ‘em scoffing down lumps of flesh, fat and rind between their gnashers going all rancid made me think meat is not only murder – it’s also halitosis.
This Twenty20 caper was a pleasant enough evening mostly because of the jubilant carnival conducted throughout the match (Dominica versus Barbados) – often the celebrations were entirely divorced from the on-pitch action. I saw one group of women gleefully gyrate and high-five when Barbados got ‘a four’ and then repeat the ecstatic ritual when the same batsman was bowled out minutes later.
This tournament was devised by a Texan businessman who himself had little knowledge of cricket. He owns the stadium and the TV rights as well as having a lot of other commercial interests on the island. Clearly this man had motivations outside of altruism, business people always do. It’s how they define themselves – ‘Hello, I’m a businessman.’ They say.
This globe-trotting soccer circus proposed by Richard Scudamore (I’m suggesting Lucre-more, if anyone wants it, they must credit me) damned by Harry Redknapp as ‘unnatural’ and Gareth Southgate as an ‘April fool’ is another decision by the Premier League that does not have the interest of fans at heart. This is not surprising though is it? They are, once more, business people. They want to make as much money as possible whilst not actually appearing to be living incarnations of Satan. It must be a constant exercise in brinkmanship.
The idea of introducing 10 more games decided at random, with the exception that five top seeds will avoid each other, as Lucre-more points out ‘imbalances symmetry’ as if he’s a graphic designer and the fixture list is a logo for a firm of masseuses who specialise in oily hand-jobs.
It’s not that the idea is inherently evil, people in Beijing or Sydney or whatever would get the thrill of live English football, which is nice for them. I suppose what is offensive is that this idea exposes the naked commercialism that drives ‘our’ national game. Which may soon not be exclusively ‘our’ national game because Reading versus Bolton will be held on the seabed of the Cape of Good Hope.
Ultimately, though, this is not football’s problem; we live in a consumer capitalist society, look out your window – that’s consumer capitalism out there, as far as the eye can see. If it annoys you then we’ll have to have a revolution, which I’m well up for. It doesn’t matter if Hillary wins or Obama or McCain so let’s stop getting excited about people’s genitals, pigmentation and age; they are all tools of the consumer capitalist system that we tolerate and endorse with our apathy.
It will only get worse, they will always want more money, it’s the nature of the beast, except it’s not a beast, it’s a machine, a machine designed to take our money and shut our mouths. The other day I was offered a million quid to do a car commercial, I turned it down because I know that once you take that money they own you.
One could argue that by working for this paper or British TV or companies like Universal I’m already compromised and that’s indubitably true. But this is the context we all live in and presently fundamentalism is beyond me. The possibility for change however is perpetual; they can change the Premier League but we can change the world. As long as corporately owned sports are elevated to carnivals by the people that attend them we have hope.