“I don’t think world cricket wants three nations competing against each other [almost exclusively] in 10 years’ time. How does that benefit the game? It doesn’t.” - Graeme Smith
Telford Vice | Cape Town
INDIANS’ best cricket friends aren’t all English and Australian. The English’s best friends aren’t all Indian and Australian. Australians’ best friends aren’t all English and Indian. But, given the way England and Australia are locked in orbit around India, we would be forgiven for thinking they were all of the above.
India and England are in Chennai playing the second of four Tests. The teams will then contest eight white-ball games. In August and September, India will be in England for five Tests. Australia played six white-ball matches in England last September, then went home to face India for six more and four Tests. That’s 33 games involving only the big three from last September to the next.
During the same period, New Zealand will have played five matches in the format against England and India — who are also their opponents in six white-ball games — and five T20Is against Australia. Add another game if India, England or Australia reach the World Test Championship final, as New Zealand have done, and the Kiwis get to 17 matches against India, England and Australia.
New Zealand are the No. 1-ranked Test team and they have been finalists in the last two World Cups. They should be cricket’s hottest property. But it’s money, not merit, that decides the pecking order of the game’s teams. India raise most of cricket’s revenue so they get to call the shots. And they want to play England and Australia — the game’s other bigger markets, though lesser than India — more often than other teams.
But, compared to England or Australia, India also offer other teams more opportunities. Between the end of the 2021 T20 World Cup in November and the 2023 World Cup, the current version of the ICC’s future tours programme (FTP) says India will play sides who are not England or Australia 45 times. Australia will take on teams who are not India or England in 38 games. England? On that score, 19 matches. That’s not to cast the Indians as altruistic: they will host both of those tournaments, and make vast amounts of money in the process.
And there’s no arguing with their right to do so, considering the way the game is structured. In terms of cricket’s following and thus its financial reality, India is the sun at the centre of international cricket’s solar system. England and Australia are moons that circulate the star and exert significant gravitational pull on the minor planets scattered beyond. The ICC — at board level, not in its valuable, hardworking operations arm — is the vacuum of outer space all around, apparently connecting disparate bodies but in effect ensuring the status quo is maintained. Everyone in the system knows proximity to India is vital for survival, but also that no sunblock is strong enough to ward off the deadly damage this sun could do if it so chose. T20 leagues are black holes that suck talent and resources away from the game’s more conventional centres, sometimes never to be seen again.
What if the ICC was the sun, and made the planets orbit it identically so each received the same amount of life-giving warmth? And ring-fenced the black holes, where entrance and exit would be tightly controlled? Or was cricket better served by one giant star keeping everything else alive, and sometimes flaring with bursts of greed?
“The game needs leadership right now,” Graeme Smith, CSA’s director of cricket, told an online press conference on Monday. “It needs to understand the complexities. I don’t think world cricket wants three nations competing against each other [almost exclusively] in 10 years’ time. How does that benefit the game? It doesn’t. I think that will then amplify the [T20] leagues, and the leagues will just get bigger and bigger and bigger. And probably the rest of the member nations will have little to no content. If the leadership at the ICC don’t address these things now … it’s been fast-tracked because of Covid. These issues are becoming more and more relevant and amplified. I think the ICC was caught a little off guard because of some of these issues.”
Covid-19 is changing everything. Not only in cricket’s solar system, but in galaxies far, far away. The universe will never be the same. Among the casualties is Australia’s Test series in South Africa, which was to have been played next month but was postponed after CA balked at sending a team to a country where the virus is exponentially more prevalent than in theirs — but not before making CSA go far above and beyond what they would have done, even considering the pandemic, to try and secure an agreement for the tour to go ahead. CA’s decision precipitated an ongoing meteor shower.
“The relationship [between CSA and CA] is definitely strained at this stage,” Smith said. “There’s an effort, certainly from our side, to engage and to set up a meeting; more at board level now. I believe that Covid is even amplifying the haves and the have-nots, the relationships across the board and how cricket’s future landscape is going to be handled. The FTP is going to be a hugely challenging thing with potentially eight ICC tournaments in eight years, an extended IPL and a lot of the calendar dominated by India, England and Australia. It makes it extremely challenging for the rest of the member nations. And when things happen, like they’ve just happened, it amplifies that stress on nations like us and the other members that are looking for good content. Certainly, engagement needs to happen to improve things between South Africa and Australia.”
Smith was the epitome of certainty as a player. You knew he would bat with guts and grit, come hell, high water or a broken hand, as sure as you knew the sun would rise. But, now that he’s joined the ranks of the suits, certainty is almost as unknown as life on Mars.
For instance, South Africa’s seven-match white-ball home series against Pakistan in April seems set to clash with the start of the IPL. Will CSA insist that their players who are involved in the tournament stay on in South Africa and respect what is, ostensibly, the higher priority? “We need to invest in South African cricket and it needs to come first, but it’s more complex than that,” Smith said. “We also have made a commitment to release our players over the years to the IPL. There’s been a window that we’ve committed to as CSA. It’s been in the calendar. It is something we’ll need to robustly debate and make a decision in the coming days.”
Sundar Raman, the IPL’s former chief operating officer, estimated in a report released in May last year that India generated 45% of cricket’s global revenue. Of that, 75% was earned by the IPL. Mess with the tournament and you’re asking for an audience with Darth Vader himself, regardless of whether you come in peace.
The FTP says South Africa will host India in December and next January, which would pump much-needed funds into CSA’s depleted coffers. Might that venture, and the commitments other teams have made, come to fruition? “Final sign-off on all those things is in the process, but those little details take a bit more time,” Smith said. “Especially now with every nation trying to fill the gaps that were caused by Covid. It’s a bit of a bunfight out there.”
“I feel like I’ve become a doctor over the last six months with the amount of knowledge I’ve gained on Covid and dealing with it. If anyone had a choice it would be to get back to normal. Let’s get crowds in, let’s get cricket played, let’s go back to the way it was. But we don’t know when that’s going to be a reality.”
It is unlikely that the coronavirus will be allowed to spark a supernova that extinguishes India’s dominance. Not least because cricket knows that without India it would be a far darker, colder, more lifeless place. But there is no doubting that the pandemic is the big bang that is realigning the game’s planets. Into what order has yet to be revealed.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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