The Cricket World Cup is a collection of anti-stories. Its coverage has concerned all the stuff that is not happening: the scintillating world-class cricket that hasn’t taken place, that isn’t being witnessed by crowds, that haven’t shown up to occupy arenas, that aren’t finished. Plus, of course, the apparent murder that hasn’t been solved.
The revelatory form, meanwhile, has been that of two teams not making it through to the tournament’s Super Eights 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 during the World Cup — and there is bound to be one — will have done a roaring trade.
These rituals were once 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 70% of the game’s global income; India’s most lucrative franchise is the rivalry with Pakistan.
Over the past five to seven years, under Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid, India have achieved on-field success to complement their 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 opposing team of choice rank among its poorer teams in performance?
The gravitational pull of Indian money is keenly felt in Australia. In 2006/07, Cricket Australia (CA) apparently had the best possible summer. Its Ashes series was a sell-out in advance, it obtained handsome sums from domestic and international broadcasting rights and it can expect a fat distribution from the ICC after the World Cup.
Yet CA will make less money in 2006/07 than it anticipates it will earn in 2007/08 from hosting India for three Tests, when its arenas will be bedecked in advertisements for Indian products and thronged with Bollywood stars.
The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), with its unruly blend of hyper-capitalism and feudalism, exhibits the entrepreneurial ebullience of Don King. It has just booted Australia out of a one-day-international round-robin tournament in Ireland and has 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 that is the BCCI 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 they are 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 it has never felt flatter.
The BCCI, 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. But it is not alone.
As Matthew Engel put it in Wisden a couple of years ago, one of the reasons for cricket’s complacency over Zimbabwe is that any action may reveal double and triple standards elsewhere: ”Pick on them for maladministration and where do you stop?”
Heavens, someone may even look at the ICC, an organisation that paints itself as operating on commercial principles yet has next to no influence on how the money it earns is allocated, and has no say over who sits on its board because it is elected by member countries and, at the moment, is incapable even of choosing its next chairperson, the recent vote having deadlocked between England’s David Morgan and India’s Sharad Pawar.
But in a tournament characterised by non-events, this looms as the biggest of all: that, as usual, no one will be held accountable. — Â