Test cricket’s world order in flux as the South Asian countries fade

Gideon Haigh, in The Weekend Australian, 28 Decmber 2012

IN a 10-team competition unfolding over years, you can neither fall nor rise all that far or all that fast. But you can also look around one day and find that a lot has changed almost by stealth.  Such is the case with the World Test Championship, which, for tracking fortunes in a game that is the epitome of subtle shifts and gradual advantages, has undergone a remarkable shift in the past two years.

A calamitous Boxing Day Test, concluded less than halfway through its allotted time, suggests that shift is ongoing. Thirty months ago, Test cricket looked very much an Asian game. India and Sri Lanka ranked numbers one and three respectively after a phase of prolonged success at home and defensible results abroad. While unable to host visiting teams, Pakistan was rebuilding, and had probably the world’s hottest pace attack; Bangladesh, a perennial underachiever, had nonetheless not long beaten the West Indies in the Caribbean.

Cricket in the Fast Lane

Vidya Subramanian, in Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XLVII No. 50, December 15, 2012 **

That the Indian Premier League (IPL) is about cricket cannot be disputed. But to say that it is a cricket tournament before anything else might be seen as embroidering the facts. From its very inception, the IPL was put together as an entertainment package, and within a few years it has also come to be seen as fertile ground for scams ­involving match-fixing, money laundering and corruption in general. Some ­loyalists maintain that such “evils” are extraneous to cricket, and it is possible to cleanse the sport of such influences. But the disturbing regularity with which such scandals emerge appears to suggest that the problem may be something ­other than merely cosmetic. Is it just the IPL that is the cause of such ­instabilities or is there something fundamental that has changed within cricket that makes it susceptible to such ende­mic disruption?

Atherton tweaks the the West Indians chasing moghuls in India … and elsewhere

Mike Atherton, in The Times and the Weekend Australian, 26 May 2009, with title “Swatting balls in Delhi doesn’t compare to facing up at Lord’s, it’s just Gaylic”

Pic by Getty Images

 

LET’S call it Gaylic, shall we, the language of the modern, supranational, jet-setting Twenty20 cricketer. It is almost universal now, cricket’s version of Esperanto if you like, and it doesn’t matter whether it is IPL, BPL, Big Bash or the original, the Friends Life t20, the language is the same – cash is the game – and the building blocks of this new language are taken from its founder, the biggest, baddest Twenty20 cricketer in town: Chris Gayle.

Gaylic was being played out over the loudspeakers with deafening effects during the first Test at Lord’s. While his fellow West Indians were fretting about swing, seam and the slope, and other variables that make batting at Lord’s in May such a difficult task, Gayle was freewheeling for the Royal Challengers Bangalore. Every shot he played echoed all the way to Lord’s.

Media restrictions and security measures surround the SL cricket team

Michael Roberts

Over the past decade the security screen and watchful eye surrounding cricketers and cricket officials have increased substantially. There are good reasons. With betting, spot-fixing and instances of corrupt cricketers been seduced into the betting game, the ICC keeps a weather eye on communications and, as far as I know, bans the use of mobile phones by players during matches. Again, in certain lands armed guards oversee the cricketers’ environment — with the attack on the Sri Lankan team and its official entourage in Lahore serving as the principal reason for this increase of concern.

I discovered the bureaucratic lengths to which the ICC and its local agencies proceed in this regard when the Test Match between Australia and India was played in Adelaide recently.  Kumar Dharmasena was umpiring and when I was at the match one day I went to the front-desk at the office of the South Australian Cricket Association (SACA) to ascertain which hotel he was staying in because Kumar is an acquaintance and I thought it would be good to indulge in some hospitality. The front desk was not permitted to divulge such information and gave me a number for a liaison officer to pursue further inquiries. That officer never answered his phone, so I gave up. Sachchitra Senanayake being escorted to pavilion

ICC told that corruption extends beyond the field

Michael Atherton, courtesy of The Times and The Weekend Australian 17-18 december 2011

GIVEN the scandals that have enveloped the game since the veil was lifted on the activities of several players during the 1990s, it is only natural that when the word “corruption” is uttered, attention falls on the cricketers themselves. Transparency International, an organisation committed to challenging corruption worldwide, made an important contribution to clearing up some of those misconceptions this week.

Cricket is not the kind of playing field that TI normally steps on to, but it was encouraged to do so partly by the wide-ranging nature of the consultation over the ICC’s governance review that closed last week. TI released a number of recommendations for the ICC to consider before the publication of the review, the most important of which was to remind people that on-field corruption is just a small part – albeit the most damaging part – of the temptations that envelop the game as a whole.

Hollow vision embodied in ‘cricketainment’

Gideon Haigh, in the Weekend Australian 17-18 December 2011

“KFC T20 Big Bash League is the most talked about event in the country. Fans love their teams and families and kids of all ages pack grounds around the country. Dressed in their team’s colours, they come every week to watch the best T20 players on earth.”  “The Vision” for the Big Bash League, Cricket Australia’s new-fashioned domestic T20 tournament which began at the SCG last night, reads like rather a lot to do with the BBL, as though composed in half a minute by someone carrying on two telephone conversations at the same time (“Mate, have you done that ‘Vision’ yet?” “Sorry mate, I’ve been flat out. I’ll bash some crap out now.”)

 

It does, though, encapsulate CA’s sky-high hopes for what in a cricket sense is really old fast food in a new wrapper: more or less the same players as in the old domestic T20 tournament spread a little more thinly among eight city-based rather than six state-based teams, albeit sprinkled, like Colonel Sanders’ herbs and spices, with New Improved Warnie.

ICC reveals spineless greed on issue of Test play-offs

Gideon Haigh, in  the Weekend Australian, 29-30 October 2011 with different title… Gideon Haigh is one of Australia’s best sports writers and has expertise in financial analysis as well. He has now joined the Weekend Australian’s columns and must be listened to avidly. Web Editor.

HYPOCRISY, the saying goes, is the homage that vice pays to virtue. In cricket, it is the homage administrators pay to Test matches. Time and again, administrators assure us of their continued regard for Test cricket as the game’s ultimate form. Then they pull sneaky little manoeuvres like winnowing Australia’s planned three-Test series against South Africa away to two, and England’s promised five-Test series against South Africa next year to three.

Their recent decision to welch on playoffs for the World Test Championship is perhaps their most destructive move yet. Destructive and also instructive: because it demonstrates how far the game’s welfare now falls behind self-interest and short-term financial expediency as a governance priority.

At their July annual meeting inHong Kong, the executive board of the International Cricket Council, on which Cricket Australia’s representative was its chairman Jack Clarke, agreed to advance plans for playoffs to the World Test Championship: semi-finals and a final among the top four ranked countries. It was welcomed as a much-needed innovation: a chance to contextualise the game’s most skilful and historic format, and enrich it with a finale worth the name.