English game will have make adjustments to keep up - and quickly, says Will Buckley
Sunday January 11, 2004 The Observer
In broad terms, it was Rupert Murdoch's decision to purchase the television rights to the Premiership that made Sky TV and provided the hot air for the football balloon. A delinquent game was gentrified. Football was so beloved by the middle classes that its working-class roots were quietly forgotten to such an extent that you are no more likely to hear a Sky analyst produce a pre-Premiership statistic than you are to hear a Surrey hypergamist refer to his or her humble beginnings. The injection of money led to the creation of wealth, which led to more money being pumped in, which...
But bubbles burst and Murdoch may have already spotted and tied up the rights to a sport that will make the revenues generated by the Premiership look like a grudging tip. This time his chosen target is not an unhinged adolescent but a geriatric widely assumed to be a cold winter away from death. Rather than fade away, though, Test cricket has made a miraculous comeback.
This is in part due to changes in the way in which the game is played. A change that Sky Sports commentator Bob Willis believes started in the 1990s. 'If you were going to cite one person as a catalyst, it would be Adam Gilchrist. The way he batted at the top of the order in one-day matches, he took as his approach in Test cricket. At the same time, Steve Waugh decided he didn't want to draw Test matches and backed his team to score quickly enough to give his four-man bowling attack time to bowl out the other side twice. And apart from the recent two series against India, the strategy has been remarkably successful. Although to make it work you have to have players at six, seven and eight who can really bat.'
As innovative and invigorating as the Australians have been, the main reason for Test cricket being restored to rude health is the rise of India. In Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Sourav Ganguly and VVS Laxman, they possess a middle order so talented that it may propel the team to being the best in the world. And such an ascent would have far-reaching consequences. Here are a few numbers. The population of India is in excess of one billion. When Tendulkar bats against Pakistan, the television audience in India alone exceeds the combined populations of Europe. In contrast, when England played Germany in Euro 2000, the combined audience of BBC1 and ITV was 17.9 million. The chief executive of Star TV (Sky's Asian wing) asked himself recently, what is sport in India? It's cricket.
The Indians are as fanatical about cricket as the English are about football - and they are far more numerous and their team is on the verge of being the best in the world. India's forthcoming series against Pakistan will attract a global TV audience that will dwarf the comparably parochial football European Championship. The fact that series is taking place is another reason to predict a boom. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the aftermath of the war in Afghanistan has led to a modicum of political stability. At the same time Asian economies have been booming to the extent that Asian central banks have foreign exchange reserves seven times the total reserves of the European Central Bank. The hundreds of millions of new and aspiring middle classes are on course to become the world economy's most avid consumers. For many of these people there is a symbolic link between India's emergence as a global economic force and their rise to becoming the world's pre-eminent cricket team. Think back to how excited the English became when their national team reached the quarter-finals of the 2002 World Cup (which makes England between the fifth- and eighth-best football team in the world) and ponder how much greater the reaction might be if India defeat Pakistan and Australia this year.
Should they do so, the epicentre of world cricket will shift, perhaps irrevocably, away from England and Australia and into Asia. The world's most populous continent will for the first time provide the powerhouse for a global game.
Such a change may well leave England lagging further behind. But it may also provide the impetus for the English to rid themselves of some of the antiquated notions that handicap any progress. In particular, the County Championship.
This certainly is the hope of Bob Willis and his Cricket Reform Group. 'It is vital we get people who play recreational cricket into first-class cricket,' he says. 'At the moment you have to commit to a first-class career at 17 or 19 years of age. This doesn't apply anywhere else in the world and it shouldn't do so here. 'We want the 38 counties turned into 18 new cricket associations based at the current first-class grounds.' The associations will be broken up into three leagues of six and play 10 first-class games a season from Friday to Monday.
'In other words,' says Willis, 'you will be able to use your 20 days' holiday allowance every year to ensure you are available. 'No one will be forced to make a final choice between cricket and another career until they have established in which direction their talents lie. The scaling-down of the Championship would allow the net to be cast wider without detriment.
'It is evident that the County Championship system does not produce England cricketers on a regular basis,' says Willis. 'Andy Flintoff, Simon Jones, Alex Tudor and James Anderson were all fast-tracked past the Championship system.'
Furthermore, the associations will each run a premier league of 10 teams to place club cricket on a more formal footing. In this way it is hoped there will be a logical progression from club to county to Test side. A development which, with luck, may see greater co-operation with the British-Asian community, which will be even keener on cricket following India's current success. It took India 39 years to record their first Test victory in England (The Oval, 1972, Bhagwat Chandrasekhar six for 38) but the way things are currently stacked, such victories could become the rule rather than the exception.
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