Wither, Cricket?

You don’t need to believe in karma to observe that some good will come of a thing if it’s done for the right reasons. Back in 1970-1, when that first international limited-overs cricket match was organised on the scheduled final day of the rain-ruined Melbourne Test, it was done to please TV viewers and the live crowd, who’d paid good money to be entertained. That was revolutionary; a fiddling with the rigid codes (many unwritten) of a game that had mostly been played one way.

That dalliance with the truth about why sport actually exists spawned a little hybrid that would grow to take over the game, mostly because of its novelty. It was a complete deviation from the belief that you simply weren’t a worthy audience unless you were able to show your appreciation for unapologetic boringness with polite ripples of applause. Such beliefs were bound to be given scant regard by a new, questioning generation of Australians. I recall my outrage, as a kid, at an eminent English commentator. At lunch on day one, he became positively smug at the possibility of England batting for a draw against the touring Australians. I nearly smashed my radio.

Limited-overs cricket was an accident waiting to happen. To young, aspiring fans in the colonies, cricket watching had been a mysterious pastime. It had to be endured before you could gain enough clues to find the iron door of cricket’s inner sanctum, which was protected by riddles that were unfathomable unless some plummy tweed-clad Pommy commentator saw it as his duty to enlighten you – which he didn’t. To teach yourself seemed impossible, even when you wanted to know more because you were excited by the new breed of Aussie cricketer. Cricket, with its googlies, boseys, chinamen, silly legs, byes, sundries - the whole argot - was incomprehensible without deep explanation.

And you suspected an odd British sado-masochism about it all, hinting at strange sorts of rituals for the Indeed Very Privileged, perhaps involving a goat and requiring one to bang one’s genitals in a door whilst shouting out the names of British monarchs. Eventually you got it: you enjoyed Test cricket only when you understood first that you weren’t supposed to enjoy it.

Until that 1970-1 tour, which was also, thankfully, the genesis of the “Chappell era” team (which led to the innovations of World Series Cricket), cricket’s world was predominantly middle-to-upper class and Masonic. And white. And it was expected to remain that hue, even in places like the cricket-mad sub-Continent. Test cricket was not so much a colonial curtsy to the Mother Country as a cringe. The Empire’s proprietary attitude was best summed up in the motto of our own Sydney University: sidere mens eadem mutato, loosely translated as “the same mind under different skies.”

Five years later the limited-overs game had its first world cup. It was an uneven affair, the great disparity between the best and the rest symbolised by the sight of disbelieving Sri Lankan batsmen having their toes crushed by Thommo’s yorkers or running from the field to meet the stretcher and lay down on it before they were actually hurt, believing injury to pride infinitely preferable to its physical counterpart.

But it was a success. The pulsating 1975 final had all the ingredients we’d like to believe make one-day cricket an exciting spectacle. Its most compelling feature was unique to its time: Australia were the heavyweight champions of Test cricket, and the West Indies were the talented number one contender. A nation’s Test-match standing mattered more than it does today, and the World Cup’s glory was therefore somewhat reflected glory.

Today, the limited-overs World Cup stands alone as the game’s undisputed showpiece, with the appeal of instant heroism. Gary Gilmour’s bowling in 1975 (11 wickets in two matches) is still the greatest the tournament has seen. In the second World Cup (1979) Viv Richards swaggered through the competition with that born-to-rule air, culminating his tournament in a majestic 138 in the final.

1983 saw the Indians express themselves with teamwork and spin, and on the back of Herculean batting and bowling from Kapil Dev, they thieved the Calypso Kings’ crown. In 1987, the Australians began their resurgence, with Border and one S. Waugh getting the late wickets to give the Aussies a slender seven-run win. 1992 witnessed the rise of the South Africans and the eccentric brilliance of the Pakistanis, especially Akram and Miandad. 1996 was Sri Lanka’s, as two unpronounceable openers took the game by the scruff of the neck and showed that even the greatest teams could be brought to their knees in the first 15 overs. In 1999, Steve Waugh stamped his immense will on the entire tournament and turned around his own fortunes and those of his team.

While some traditionalists resent the rude bursting of this corporate blight upon cricket’s pastoral serenity, the general consensus seems to be that limited-overs cricket saved the game from that morbid condition of self-indulgence that precedes self-consumption and decay.

The real triumph of the truncated game, especially the World Cup, has not been to supplant the traditional form, but to open up new ways of thinking and playing. Fielding and running between wickets are sharper than ever. Batting’s more aggressive, even if technique has sometimes gone the way of caution. The old Industrial Revolution mindsets of capital (run) accumulation, honest, uncomplaining toilers (bowlers) and fatalistic acceptance of the obstructionist whims of distant, unsympathetic bureaucracies no longer go unchallenged. One-day cricket has forced administrators’ hands in such matters as the mandatory use of lights where they are available.

But the short game needs reformation. After 30 years, the one-dimensional idea of one team batting and the other chasing has become threadbare. The game has tightened bowling, but is ludicrously biased toward batting, and, in its present form, can only ever be so. Because wickets are nowhere near as important as runs, one of the two pillars upon which cricket is built (the ability to bowl a side out) is temporarily removed for the one-day game, then reinstalled like a drop-in pitch for Test matches. This drives a wedge between the two forms of the game..

The way the first-class game is structured cannot take sole blame for the low standard of bowling in England. The proliferation of limited-overs cricket, with its approach to bowling that has little to do with getting a side out, is also responsible. It’s not just England’s problem. There are too many meaningless limited-overs events to name, and it’s a shame to see crack cricketers in gimcrack tournaments.

After the first 15 overs of a game, when the field spreads outside the 25-yard circle, and accumulation via the old tip-and-run technique becomes the mode, one-day cricket settles into predictable patterns. While close finishes are frequent, this prospect alone doesn’t generate excitement.

Still, limited-overs cricket, or more specifically, the World Cup, has allowed fledgling sides to come of age by providing them a rite de passage that Test cricket never could. The addition of Zimbabwe, Bangladesh and other nations will continue to enhance cricket’s flavour, as happened when Sri Lanka’s Jayasuriya and Kalawitharana, at the urging of their captain, the rotund red rag waver, Ranatunga, became first-round kayo artists, and then the current Australians took this tactic to a new level.
If the survival of cricket is now highly dependent on revenue raised from the World Cup, cricket is at the brink. The Test match must be instated as the meat of the game, or at least enjoy an equal share of power with international limited-overs cricket. But it requires imagination, diplomacy and commitment from the ICC and home boards around the world; new ways of thinking, and the right reasons.