Gentlemen do not prefer cricket

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE, Port Elizabeth

CRICKET is not a gentleman’s game. Never has been, never will be. For one thing, women, girls and boys play it as passionately as men. For another, little of what is said and done between opponents on the field is gentlemanly. For still another, gentlemanliness is bound up with the unfairly lofty status the privileged award themselves at the expense of others.

Yet cricket has clung to the notion that it is not just a gentleman’s game but “the gentleman’s game”. Helpfully for all concerned the myth was exploded this year when India seized the sport by the balls - that is, its bank balance - and refused to let go.

England and Australia fancy themselves as members of a big three, but that is as true as cricket and rugby considering themselves to be in the same league of world sport as football. In a word, nonsense. India’s suits are the only ones who matter.

Among them, Narayanaswami Srinivasan is the only man who matters. Cricket outside of India knows this and hates it, but there is nothing it can do about it. Even England and Australia know it. They also know that the reason they have not been relegated to the ranks of the rest of the 106 countries who play the game to at least a decent level has nothing to do with prestige or history or quality.

Instead, it has to do with money - their markets for cricket are strong enough to help India make more of the stuff. India is thus correctly recognised as the godfather of the game, in the Marlon Brando sense.

Which only ends a century and more of pretence that all was fair in love, war and cricket. Previously the bullies were England and Australia, who carefully vetted prospective members of their club. They did not see the problem with all of West Indies’ captains being white, with SA not playing against teams of colour - much less picking black players - and with making the process of becoming a test-playing country about as difficult as winning at love or war, minus the shooting.

So, as much as cricket has changed it has remained the same - it is comprised of the bullies and the bullied. Names and places have been changed to protect the guilty.

But now that we have had a few months of this not so brave, certainly not new world, is it all that bad? It has been confirmed, for instance, that SA will host England for four tests next season despite the Indians having shown their displeasure at Cricket SA’s (CSA) appointment of Haroon Lorgat as their chief executive by hacking seven of their proposed dozen matches out of the schedule for their tour here last summer.

That India had no right to object to who runs CSA is as correct as it is irrelevant because the Indians can do as they please. It is also likely that giving Lorgat the job cost CSA a place in what might have been a big four.

And so what? The England series is only one of 11 four-test series SA are due to play against India, England and Australia over the course of the next eight years. All the fuss over the bad blood between Srinivasan and Lorgat should come to nothing except a decent chunk of revenue earned by SA playing test series against other prestigious teams. Or, as CSA president Chris Nenzani said, “The sky has not fallen.”

However, the glass of former West Indies fast bowler Ian Bishop was not as half-full as Nenzani’s: “I think there will be long-term ramifications - all sorts of plusses and minuses. But we have to wait and see. It’s difficult to pass judgement on the basis of a few months.”

Daren Ganga is a generation - and a perspective - removed from Bishop as a West Indian player. “The landscape of the game has changed, and mostly because of T20 cricket,” Ganga said. “Players who did not have the opportunity to play and earn money outside of their own countries can now do so, and that is a healthy thing.

“The challenge is finding the balance between what players earn playing outside their own countries and what they earn from being loyal to their national brands.”

Bishop and Ganga know a cricket culture in which trust between players and administrators is too often fractured, a place where gentlemanliness is not often seen or heard but pay disputes are many.

For now, SA does not have that problem. CSA and the players they represent have, largely through the efforts of the SA Cricketers’ Association, built a strong and lasting relationship. As long as that is the case and cricket in this country looks after its own and treads carefully around Srinivasan and his English and Australian henchman, the game will survive in SA as something smaller but more honestly formed.

Perhaps there is room for gentlemen - and women - after all.