Leading Edge: Cricket deserves Preity Zinta and her ilk

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

PREITY Zinta doesn’t want you watch the news. Or anything else. Except T20 cricket.

“Part of our campaign when we were building the IPL [Indian Premier League] brand was that we didn’t want the remote control to be shared in the house,” Zinta said in Paarl last week.

“We don’t want the mother to say, ‘Hey — I want to see my show’. We don’t want the grandfather to say, ‘Put on the cricket’. We don’t want somebody else to say, ‘I want to watch the news’.”

No-one in the cast of dozens who had gathered to herald Zinta assume ownership of the Stellenbosch franchise in the T20 Global League seemed to take exception to this plot to turn us all into T20-binging zombies.

We shouldn’t be interested in other programmes on television. We shouldn’t be interested in fuddier-duddier forms of cricket. We shouldn’t be interested in what was going on in the wider world.

Jacob Zuma has been arrested? Who cares. How are the Bishopscourt Billionaires doing?

Nobody thought to call the police when Zinta made her startling admission to aiding and abetting the dumbing down of billions of people around the world.

There was no shock. There was no horror. There wasn’t even embarrassment. Haroon Lorgat himself sat smug and satisfied to Zinta’s left, apparently as dazzled as everyone else.

We could dismiss her as an annoying klaxon, a vessel empty of everything except pathetic delusions of relevance.

Except that Zinta and her ilk are more relevant than anybody in the hellish pit into which cricket has descended. Simply, they have bought a game that has whored itself and they’ll be damned if they aren’t going to get all the bang for their buck.

“Content has become hand-held,” Zinta said. “People have the appetite to watch a T20 game because it’s three hours, it’s a lot of action, it’s beyond athletic.

“In India you would go to matches and sit there and say, ‘OK …’. But now there’s so much more fun.”

Remember cricket? It used to be a game. Now it’s clickbait.

And that is all that will save it from disappearing down the rabbit hole of history as something we used to play, watch and think about.

Cricket has refused to countenance modernity for so long that, like Mikhail Gorbachev, FW de Klerk and King Canute, it’s on the cusp of being swamped by the real world.

Had the suits paid players at all levels properly, or realised that women’s cricket was a vital avenue of growth, or not barred teams other than the unfairly chosen few from playing tests, the game’s soul might have been saved. Instead deals have been made with the Daredevils.

Eric Simons straddles cricket old and new. He can take only remnants of the game he played when he made his first-class debut almost 35 years ago into his burgeoning career as a coach — not least in T20 leagues.

“I think that if T20 does take over, it should be through a process that is managed rather than by accident,” he said.

“If ICC decide that’s where the game goes then they must take it there and not allow the game to go there because it just does. It must be a strategic decision rather than, ‘Oh, look what happened’.”

Don’t look now, even if people like Zinta want you to: it’s happened.