Leading Edge: What is there to love about cricket?

Sunday Times - February 2, 2014

TELFORD VICE, Johannesburg

“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the cricket administrators,” were not the words that William Shakespeare put into Dick the Butcher’s mouth in Henry VI, Part 2. Dick lusted after spilling the blood of lawyers, not sport suits.

But, had he been interested in cricket circa 2014, lawyers would have featured less prominently in his diabolical dream than those who, in the name of serving the game, fiddle their travel expenses, take dodgy bonuses, fall asleep during meetings, and put money, power and privilege before duty, decency and doing the right thing.

That skill set would seem to have been sucked into the vacuum where cricket administrators’ souls should be. They would get Dick’s vote for violence, and it would take a brave opponent of the death penalty to argue against him.

Billowed with bile though those assertions are, they will not be disputed after a week in which all pretence that cricket is a game framed by honour and respect, informed by a rich history and heading for a future so bright we should all be slathered in sunblock was exposed as a cheap mission statement.

Here’s the truth: cricket is a pitifully small, stupidly exclusive, arrogantly conservative game that wants to be become even smaller and more exclusive and conservative.

There are people who say they love cricket. What, exactly, is there to love?

Five days of something that takes itself so absurdly seriously it deserves its own Monty Python sketch? Fifty overs of something as featureless as a painting of a polar bear in a snowstorm and not nearly as arresting? Twenty overs of something that resembles nothing so much as an electric kool aid acid test gone ridiculously wrong?

Perhaps it’s match-fixing that makes cricket attractive. Rain delays? Rampant misogyny? Serial racism?

Who the hell does cricket think it is fooling? It is lucky to be alive, and it is not dead - or as close to dead as a sport that styles itself as a global game can dare to venture - because of one country.

Without India, cricket would blip much closer to croquet and crocheting on the scale of esoteric pastimes.

The Board of control for Cricket in India know this. All of cricket knows it, too, and has done for years. Among the few relevant questions about the meltdown the suits presided over in Dubai this week is why it has taken so long to happen. Cricket allowed India to get this big and was happy to bask in the reflected profits. Now, cricket is getting what it deserves.

Yet, after all that, there is much to love about this damn fool game.

It moves at a pace that allows observers to creep into the hearts and minds of the players and know - or feel as if they know - what they are about. Its violence is raw and visceral and irresistible. Cricketers, unlike rugby players or sumo wrestlers, look like human beings.

Even the game’s biggest stars, unlike footballers or racing drivers, are not paid enough to be allowed to behave as if they are higher forms of life. No, not even in India.

Almost anyone, no matter how inept or clumsy or fat or uncoordinated or unfit or dim or intelligent can play cricket to some level. It is the prince and the pauper of sport.

At least, it was when we could recognise it as a game by the people, for the people and of the people.

If cricket be the food of love, play on. Alas, money has become the food of cricket. Game (almost) over.