CRICKET, THY NAME TODAY IS COMMERCE

CRICKET, THY NAME TODAY IS COMMERCE

The greed of Indian cricketers, as I have been pointing out to the displeasure of some of my Facebook friends, has now finished off the England-India Test series with the fifth Test match having been called off owing to a COVID breakout. Ravi Shastri's book launch in a crowded room put paid to a whole nation's hopes of pulling off a fine series win. It suits us as a nation right. We have sold ourselves to commerce more than decency makes allowance for. And the result is right there for us to see.

There was a time when aristocrats and their associates played this game and they were called 'gentlemen' or 'amateurs' as opposed to some of the players from the lower socioeconomic strata who were called 'professionals' or simply 'players'. The captain was always an amateur and to take money for playing was in social terms looked down upon in the game. The ethics of the game as well were those what decency demanded and cricket despite the occasional aberration was the gentleman's game so much so that to do something improper came to be considered 'not quite cricket'. The game stood for fairplay and its name entered the lexicon thus.

As the feudal system on England gradually gave way increasingly to the capitalistic order, County Cricket evolved along similar lines to invite professionalism to the fore. Cricket thereon became a living for vast numbers of men till the amateurs were to be found no more. Colin Cowdrey was one of the last of the game's gentlemen and the game has moved on from the days of yore of languid, leisurely pastures on the green to that of fierce competition where it is not merely played for club or country's pride but for sheer survival in a tough commercial world. Cricketing leisure gave way to the cricketer's livelihood's dire necessities and now it is cut-throat commerce inducing rampant greed into the system.

In between came Kerry Packer. When the Australian television tycoon asked for sole televising rights of Australian cricket, the Australian Board rejected him. The result? Packer bought up the world of cricketing greats playing the game and reduced ICC to rubble. Tony Greig, South African born English cricketer, was hired to hire the rest of the world's top players for Packer's prospective cricket circus. How uncannily identical was the name as in the Bodyline series Don Bradman's employer was one Mr. Packer who had then sacrificed his commercial interests to save an intransigent Australian Cricket Control Board from the predicament of facing Jardine's formidable team sans Bradman. But though history repeated itself four decades later in an exact name resurfacing, it did so in an opposite manner in consequential terms. This Packer with Kerry first name was not so kind and relentlessly pressed on with his objective of total beaming control irrespective of what it entailed on the Cricket Board to suffer.

The Packer circus termed World Series Cricket began and thus was cricket hurtled onto the modern commercial stage with a vehemence. Coloured clothing appeared, floodlights, night cricket, white balls, huge prizes and player's incentives and what not. It was cricket of the highest standard being played between the best players of the world packed into three top class sides, the West Indies, Australia and the Rest of the World XI. But purists would say it was just not cricket. 

However, Packer packed cricket into a marketable commodity en masse for the first time and changed for good not just the face of cricket but its very core as well. The boredom of English County Cricket and Len Hutton's dour approach to Test cricket in the 1950s which had almost finished spectator interest in the game, causing Sir Donald Bradman to confer with Richie Benaud and Frank Worrell and request them to rescue the game with entertaining cricket, and which had induced the MCC to introduce One-Day Cricket in England whose culmination was in the Prudential World Cup in 1975, had now reached new heights in uninhibited display of spectator-friendly cricket on Packer's playgrounds. Today's T20 cricket and the IPL have their predecessor in the Packer circus. Kerry Packer was way ahead of his times and heralded the advent of the commercial ventures in world cricket a decade or two before their actual global impact helped and hindered the cricketing cause.

One day cricket was a step ahead of and a step down from Test cricket. The skills of a cricketer are tested best in Test cricket, hence the name. But cricket must be sustained and that is possible only if spectators flock the grounds. However, everything has its flip side and so has it been with cricket. While commercial deals have bolstered Boards by raising revenue for them and in turn enhanced the pay-package for players, they have corroded values and brought in corruption within the ranks of administrators and cricketers whose ugliest face has been match-fixing, spot-fixing and betting scandals centring cricket. Cricket has been compromised to commerce and that is just not cricket.

The advent of commerce in the game has catapulted India to becoming the major powerhouse in the cricketing fraternity with its good and ill effects following in its wake. For instance, match-fixing is an Indian subcontimental gift to the world of cricket with the maximum number of bookies coming from this part of the world.  On the brighter side, though, Indian business advertisements carry the course of much of the revenue-earning for Cricket Boards round the globe. The ICC has enormously benefitted from such financial support provided by Indian industry and the game has been globalised with such assistance. Cricket has spread its wings but is it cricket anymore?

Written by Sugata Bose