Cricket and the media … the topic has haunted me since Boria Majumdar suggested it, for all sorts of reasons, but chiefly this—that it’s often hard to think of one without the other. Unless we happen to play cricket at the very highest level, the bulk of the cricket we experience will be mediated, accompanied with a ready-made expert narrative; we will recollect it in terms of the voices of the commentators, the words of the writers, the immediate explications of the replays, the lasting imagery of photography, and more recently the competing, clamouring voices of the chat room, the blog and Twitter, each informing and influencing the other. Our conversations about the game are composites of abiding views, received opinions, instant impressions, borrowed prejudices—all of which, nonetheless, have a capacity to endure.
The best example of that endurance is on show this English summer of 2009, the Ashes originating in a jeu d’esprit of the Sporting Times 127 years ago. Technology has played its part from the first, too. The first great five-Test series, 1894–95, was partly so because of the Pall Mall Gazette’s decision to take advantage of the new telegraphic cable from Australia, allowing the English public to partake of events within a day of their occurring—an extraordinary novelty. Of course, it was originally words that had power. It was on the basis of words that Englishmen dug in to defend Bodyline seventy-seven years ago, on the basis of words that Australians complained of their team being dudded at Old Trafford in 1956. Now it is images that matter, and television’s economics have become cricket’s—cricket must be sold in order to be played.
That changing relationship between cricket and the media, indeed, now puts me in mind of two theatrical images. Once the relationship was that between a ham and his dresser, cricket being costumed and made up for the stage by a media that maintained fairly obsequious and deferential relations in return for a privileged acquaintance. Now cricket and the media seem more like the front and back halves of a pantomime horse—one, furthermore, where the actual division of responsibilities is unclear: that is, which of cricket and the media is the half that gets to stand up straight and peer out, and which half has to spend its time bent over with its nose in its partner’s backside. Whatever the case, it’s a relationship of some delicacy and mutual dependence.
The relationships between the different parts of the media are also evolving. When I began writing about cricket about twenty years ago, I recall the very decided demarcation between the print and electronic spheres. Ink-stained wretches were crammed together like steerage passengers on the Titanic; the radio and television boys, meanwhile, dressed for dinner in the first-class saloon. There’s now a bloody great tear along the waterline, and everyone is flooding into one another’s areas. Cricket can be watched on free-to-air television, cable, the internet, the phone. Newspaper and agency websites are running video; cable has invested in the Web. Television entrepreneurs have taken to promoting their own independent cricket enterprises; national cricket boards are producing their own online content. Bloggers link to YouTube; intellectual property lawyers run after everyone with a big litigation stick. There’s an air of excitement, leavened with Titanic-style panic, because of a feeling, particularly among my print colleagues, that there may not be quite enough lifeboats.
Media, moreover, spends only part of the time with its eye on the cricket. Much of its exertion is expended reporting on what has already been reported, which way the journalistic herd is stampeding, whether it is to a press conference announcing a sudden outbreak of unity in the Indian team, or to decrypting the enciphered utterances of Fake IPL Player. Lately, too, the commentary box has been swept up directly in the sales and marketing tsunami, with DLF Maximums and Citi Moments of Success bound to lead on to the Google googly, the PlayStation Play-and-Miss, the Dillards Dilscoop and the Three 3.
I could discuss many aspects of this, but it’s this increasing coalescence of cricket and media that intrigues me—the sense that, as Eric Morecambe used to say of Ernie Wise’s toupee, ‘You can’t see the join’. That is, the tendency over time for those involved in the description and interpretation of the game to become simply the handmaidens of corporate interests.
This is not, of course, a new challenge. Perhaps you can date it to 1977, when Kerry Packer launched his World Series Cricket venture. At the time of Packer’s irruption, of course, the coverage of cricket was generally the preserve of public broadcasters—the BBC, ABC, Doordarshan and others—watching cricket from a suitably discreet distance and stationary aspect. Packer’s broadcasting package was unprecedentedly lavish and spectacular: it involved both the coverage of the game and its promotion. It made ordinary players into stars, and stars into gods, so the limelight they reflected might also impart a shimmer to the goods and services being advertised between overs.
Commentators went from being impartial imparters of cricket’s eternal verities to commercial courtiers of an entrepreneur promoting the game as a media property. But the key figure in that change was the one who belied that there was a change taking place at all. Richie Benaud was the face of cricket at the BBC, primus inter pares among public broadcasters; to what might at Channel Nine have been a crass and raucous affair, he brought a deft and discriminating touch, an air of rectitude, a sense of being above it all.
Historians have been apt to celebrate the contributions to Packer’s progress of Ian Chappell and Tony Greig, or Austin Robertson and John Cornell, but Richie Benaud is the man who really made it credible. You bought what he was selling almost before you knew it was for sale; and, as with the best salesmen, the transaction left you feeling enriched.
Benaud had played cricket, we all of us knew, yet his commentary seldom betrayed this directly. The general but unspecific cognisance of his playing career acted instead as a form of quality certification: his was a warming but weightless past. Instead of banging on about how things were better in his day, he endorsed the present and blessed the future; he was the Pangloss of the pitch, who assured us, over and over again, that all was for the best in this best of possible cricket worlds.
Over time, of course, cricket lurched from disaster to disaster: rebel tours, illegal actions, ball tampering, match-fixing, racial squabbles, aggression that trembled on the brink of cheating, commercial chicanery that skirted the bounds of legality. Yet nothing threatened the serene majesty of Benaud’s commentary, as interested and engaged by his hundredth one-day international as by his first. Over the years, one waited for Benaud to take a firm position on any of the game’s major issues, while knowing also that nothing would ever endanger that stance of magisterial disinterest, and that unstated but unswerving commitment to the product.
Benaud still commentates—what purports to be his last summer lies ahead in Australia later this year. But we’re starting to see the strains underlying his position that Benaud’s silky skills so successfully disguised—strains laid entirely bare during the IPL in South Africa, where commentary was reduced to the level of infomercial.
The subtle thrall exerted by the commentary voice, in fact, has been integral to the diffusion of Twenty20. Because so much money rides on its success, there has been a competition in who can praise it and its participants more lavishly—every game is thrilling, every player a star, the whole concept the most exciting innovation since the incandescent lightbulb, and, of course, Lalit Modi a modern-day Moses, to the extent that the commentators have almost drowned themselves out, becoming indistinguishable from the advertisements between overs. But great rewards and honours await those who can endear themselves to the right people.
One of my most vivid recollections of the Twenty20 revolution is the game in Melbourne in February 2008 between Australia and India—quite possibly the worst international cricket match I have ever seen, over in two hours and twenty-eight overs, India capitulating for 74. Yet afterwards, Channel Nine’s finest prowled the outfield for almost as long as Australia batted, interviewing players about the non-stop excitement that nobody had just seen. It was as credible as a Chinese government press release that the tanks in Tiananmen Square were simply participating in a segment of Top Gear. Who did these commentators think they were fooling?
The print media has always occupied a subtly different niche to the electronic. The television is there because cricket is entertainment on the basis of money spent on acquiring rights; newspapers are there because cricket is regarded as news, and enjoy access on a grace and favour basis, while the roles of those who straddle both forms are confused and confusing, like Ian Botham, an aura-for-hire, whether by Sky, the Mirror or Allen Stanford. But, as I said earlier, the fissuring boundaries between technologies are further collapsing news into entertainment and vice versa, with inevitable implications for what we say in the print media and how freely we can say it.
My trade has always been a mixture of the superficially sensational and squalid and the thoroughly tame and incurious. ‘We do not need censorship of the press’, noted Chesterton. ‘We have censorship by the press.’ Yet how is it that, in a period of such convulsive change, change that will define the direction of the game for decades to come, there is such limited interest in the relevant institutions: the BCCI, ICC, ECB, Cricket Australia, Sony, ESPN? How was it, for example, that Stanford had to go broke before anyone sussed that he was a fraud? Why the rapt fascination with the prices paid for players at the IPL auction, and such indifference to whom else cricket is making hugely wealthier?
I wonder now if we are not, consciously and unconsciously, avoiding evidences of corruption in cricket, as indeed we did in the 1990s, so heavily implicated have we become in this sports– industrial complex. I’m not sure I can offer a definitive answer to that, and there will certainly always be exceptions. But I do know that a lot of the toughest, cleverest, funniest and best informed writing about cricket these days is to be found in the blogosphere, where the writers are without fear or favour, and also, of course, money. Avid viewers, curious readers, discriminating consumers—they are out there in vast numbers, and it is up to cricket and the media to deserve them.