Cricket's future is football

“You’ll still have attention on World Cups. But, 20 or 30 years from now, cricket is going to look more league-based than international-based.” - Faf du Plessis

Telford Vice | Cape Town

FAF du Plessis has seen cricket’s future. It’s short, sharp, and here. It’s more about loyalty, less about nationalism, heady with happiness, and thin on predictable victories or, worse, somnambulating stalemates. It’s made for television and modern life. It shimmers with innovation and dazzle, and it finds its most vivid expression in the extravaganza that stops the game in the rest world for two months of every year. You’re not stupid: it’s the T20 phenomenon as epitomised by the IPL.

“T20 has become the force that’s going to sustain cricket for generations way into the future,” Du Plessis told Cricbuzz from his hotel room in Mumbai, where the Chennai Super Kings were stationed for their first two matches of the IPL. “It’s the format that kids want to play. Test cricket is a completely different scenario, but in order for the game to grow and be healthy, and to get more people playing, it’s about T20. The leagues are a way of doing that.

“If you use soccer as an example, guys play for big clubs all year round and then there’s international fixtures inbetween with World Cups every few years. You’ll still have that attention on winning World Cups. But, 20 or 30 years from now, cricket is going to look more league-based than international-based. If you’re talking about white-ball cricket, that’s the way it’s going. Test cricket has different criteria. It is still the purest form of the game. A Test match will never be a friendly.”

Big cricket, as the product of an industry and a presence in a competitive media landscape, is moving away from the Test format. And it should. As the ICC discovered in the findings of its global survey, which were released in June 2018, 92% of the game’s 1-billion followers are primarily interested in T20 cricket, 88% in ODIs, and 70% in Tests. Currently, country comes before club regardless of format. But that will change. Players enjoy themselves more turning out for clubs — and thus deliver more watchable cricket — than in internationals, with their cloying misplaced patriotism.

“Because international cricket comes with a lot of pressure and pride to perform for your country, when you move away from it there’s less of a feeling that you want to win every game. This is you just playing a game of cricket. There’s not that bigger cause. You can’t feel so ridiculously connected to every team that you play for like you do when you’re playing for your country. It’s not possible. You can only love one wife. You can’t love 10 wives. Your country is your passion, and playing for these clubs is about having fun. So it looks different from the outside.”

But that too is changing, and the IPL, cricket’s foremost engine of progress, is at the forefront of what amounts to a moneyball revolution. “When the IPL started T20 cricket was very new, and everyone thought the format was just going to be this party vibe; it was never going to be real cricket. I wasn’t involved for the first three years but the talk around the IPL was that it was a little bit about cricket but more about having fun — lots of parties, lots of glitz and glamour. It was entertainment more than cricket.

“But then, naturally with professional sportsmen, it started to be about performance. It evolved into this machine that has become more and more professional every year. It became about figuring out how we could win tournaments. You could see the teams getting more clever in the way that they bought players. The first three years was about names. Great Test players were being picked because it was all about all the big names in the world playing. Fast forward 13 years and picking teams and buying players has become almost a formula of exactly what teams need; from specific roles in the team to specific players.”

So the footballification of white-ball cricket, driven by the IPL, is inevitable. When the process is complete and the game has settled on a set of major clubs, the age of jobbing cricketers like Chris Gayle, who has played for 25 T20 teams who are neither Jamaica nor West Indies, will end. As impossible as it is to think about Lionel Messi without also thinking about Barcelona — rather than Argentina — it’s going to be difficult to consider the Du Plessises of the future without their concomitant CSKs.

“When you start settling into one place it becomes your home. I’ve been with Chennai since the beginning of my involvement with the IPL. You form a connection with the fans because you see that you mean something to them. Then it starts becoming more. But if you’re playing for four, five, six T20 teams in a year it’s difficult to have that association with all of them. It’s like in soccer, where you only play for one big club, and it’s the only team you play for the whole year.”

Much of the above will appall the kind of cricket person who is convinced the IPL is the black hole at the centre of a galaxy in which India hogs the gravity. Du Plessis is not among them: “The BCCI generates so much money for the game, so every country wants to play against India. The spin-off is that the IPL has this block of two months in all the international schedules. To play in the IPL is how we help oil this machine that creates our income.”

And how modern players earn sums never dreamt of by those who retired just a few years ago. “It’s been an absolute game changer for all cricketers from countries that are not Australia, England and India, who earn a hell of a lot more money than players in the rest of the world. [Because of the IPL] guys can earn extreme amounts of money. One year can be enough to set you up for life, but that’s in unusual cases. It’s given the rest of us the opportunity to make decent money so that we can set ourselves up for life after sport.

“Some great names in South African cricket would have been incredible IPL players, guys like Lance Klusener, Shaun Pollock, Allan Donald, Herschelle Gibbs. Because we are this generation it’s given us the opportunity [to establish] our lives after sport, which is a challenge for a lot of players.”

Gibbs and Pollock did feature in the IPL, but only in 49 games between them. Du Plessis has played 89 matches for CSK — 39 more than he has for South Africa in the format. Klusener was part of the Indian Cricket League (ICL) along with compatriots Andrew Hall, Dale Benkenstein, Nicky Bojé, Mornantau Hayward, Johan van der Wath, Nic Pothas and Justin Kemp. Of them only Van der Wath and Kemp went on to play in the IPL.

The ICL, which lasted from 2007 until 2009, was instantly declared a rebel operation, not least because it wasn’t created by the BCCI — which like all national boards thinks it owns the game. It featured teams called the Kolkata Tigers, the Delhi Jets — who became the Delhi Giants — the Chandigarh Lions, the Chennai Superstars, the Hyderabad Heroes, the Mumbai Champs, the Lahore Badshahs, and the Ahmedabad Rockets. Those names hang in the air like relics, a throwback to a time when the IPL wasn’t what it is now. And nothing like the juggernaut it could yet become.

First published by Cricbuzz.