On 12 February, Melbourne will host what John Eren, the minister for tourism, sport and major events for the Australian state of Victoria, has promised will be a “once-in-a-generation” cultural and musical celebration to get the International Cricket Council Cricket World Cup 2015 “off to a great start.”
In the course of that celebration, the dignitaries of cricket, all honourable men, will take the stage to speak before the assembled cricketers of the participating nations. Leading the speech-makers will be the chairman of the ICC, holder of a post newly reconstituted to signal the organisation’s shift from being a banana republic with the sole purpose of wielding power and collecting the fruits thereof to a corporation with the goal of maximising revenues from its sole product.
For Narayanaswami Srinivasan, the ICC chairman, it will be an opportunity to bask in an unthreatening spotlight, albeit momentarily, after months of headlines announcing the Supreme Court of India’s serial strictures on his conduct. From May until November last year, when the Supreme Court began hearing a 2013 case alleging corruption in the Indian Premier League, the Board of Control for Cricket in India, which controls the league, stage-managed the fiction that Srinivasan, while remaining the body’s de facto president, had complied with the court’s order that he stand down to allow a fair probe. During this period, the BCCI twice postponed a scheduled annual election—not because of any court strictures or other roadblocks, but because Srinivasan could not contest, and the elections, though ostensibly free and fair, were widely understood to be a formality towards keeping him in office.
“Do you want to sit over the liquidation of the game in this country?” the Supreme Court Justice TS Thakur asked the BCCI in November, during a hearing. On 27 November, the justices, weighing in on matters relating to Srinivasan’s ownership of the Chennai franchise of the IPL and possible conflicts of interest, said, “The life of the BCCI board is over.”
The implications of that statement have escaped many observers. According to the provisions of its charter, the BCCI reconstitutes itself annually, with elections held each September to pick office-holders for the next twelve months. Those elections were not held in 2014; as a consequence, the officials presently in place have no constitutional standing to carry out the organisation’s functions. One of those functions is selecting teams to represent India in international competitions. The current national selection committee was constituted in 2012. Its term, as mandated by the BCCI’s constitution, is of two years; it therefore came to the end of its natural life in September 2014. Thus, when the committee met on 6 January 2015 to pick India’s World Cup squad, its members did so with no constitutional authority to pick even so much as their noses.
That is the situation in sum: Indian cricket is, at the time of writing, run by a board whose official life is over; that board’s president has been repeatedly censured by the Supreme Court for conflicts of interest, most seriously on 22 January this year, when he was barred from seeking reelection until those conflicts are resolved; and its selection committee had no right to choose the team that is about to defend the World Cup India won in 2011.
A farce on a grander, global scale will be enacted between 14 February and 25 March, when fourteen teams will play forty-two matches in the preliminary phase of the World Cup to arrive at a preordained conclusion: England, Australia, Sri Lanka and New Zealand will qualify for the quarterfinals from Pool A; and South Africa, India, Pakistan and the West Indies will make the grade from Pool B.
Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Scotland, Zimbabwe, Ireland and the United Arab Emirates, having fulfilled their ordained roles as stage props, will go home. Since no world-level competition can be marketed as entirely predictable, we will make much of the possibility that a West Indies team in disarray, fielded by a terminally dysfunctional board, may not survive the onslaught of Zimbabwe, Ireland and the UAE. Oh the suspense.
The ICC has long maintained that its mission is to spread cricket across the globe. As proof of this intent, it points to the presence at the World Cup of the best teams from among its ninety-six associate member states—this year, Afghanistan, Scotland, Ireland and the UAE.
Four years from now, at the 2019 edition of the tournament, the ICC will not even bother with that pretense. In June 2014, at its annual meeting in its Dubai headquarters, the body rubber-stamped a decision arrived at by the heads of the Indian, Australian and English boards that they would control the running of the global game. Their emphasis, the triumvirate announced, would be two-fold: on close bilateral ties between cricketing nations, and on promoting meritocracy.
But the ICC did not follow through on either of those intentions. Take, first, the promise of close bilateral ties. The newly constituted body’s first act was to cancel the well-meaning, if idiosyncratically managed, Future Tours Program—a rolling calendar to ensure that each of the ten Test-playing nations met all of the others at home and away at least once every four years. Going forward, the body said, with appropriate obfuscation to sugar-coat the bitterness of the message, tours would be planned to maximise revenue—that is to say India, England and Australia will play each other every year, and the other seven nations can take a number. You will, the have-nothings were told, benefit from the extra income these frequent high-profile tours will bring in. That these seven teams will play far fewer games against the top three was left unsaid.
And then there is meritocracy, in the spirit of which the ICC culled the token representatives of the associate states from the 2019 World Cup, reducing the tournament from a field of fourteen to ten—this at a time when other global sports look to increase participation. In November 2012, for instance, the International Hockey Federation announced that it would expand its world cup field from twelve teams to sixteen; in October 2013, the heads of football’s global and European governing bodies mooted opening the sport’s world cup to forty teams, over the thirty-two at the last championship. Cricket, alone, marching to the tune of its commercial drummer, is going the other way.
On the sidelines of the June meeting, Giles Clarke, the England Cricket Board chief, and Wally Edwards, his Australian counterpart, administered palliatives to the associate members. (Srinivasan was not able to attend.) Giles and Edwards told them they could now earn a place in the World Cup by beating the two lowest ranked Test nations—however, the ICC has not yet specified how the team rankings will be arrived at and the lowliest two determined. The bottom line, therefore, is that the ninety-six associate member nations are now effectively shut out of any meaningful competition against the top teams in the one-day format—the traditional bridge to qualifying for Test status.
The point, the triumvirate repeatedly emphasised during the June meeting in Dubai, was to maximise revenues for the benefit of all stakeholders. Then, the newly dominant powers promptly gutted the revenue to be paid out to the ICC’s junior members—from here on, eighty-five of the ninety-six associate nations will get approximately $200 million less per year than the $425 million allocated to them under earlier arrangements.
Regional cricket bodies will also be affected—and hardest hit among them will be the Asian Cricket Council, whose memorandum of understanding with the ICC expired on 31 December 2014 and has not been renewed. This means the ACC will no longer get its share of the ICC’s cricket development funding, and will therefore no longer be able to fund coaching, stadia, or multi-lateral tournaments.
And so we count down to the 2015 World Cup, where the ICC will showcase the progress it has made over the past four years. To wit: it has drastically reordered the cricket world into three haves, seven will-have-if-we-feel-like-its, and ninety-six have-nots. It has elected as chairman a man widely suspected of malfeasance in the leadership of his own country’s cricket board. (The Indian case is not unique: of the fourteen countries in this World Cup, at least three have seen major corruption and match-fixing scandals in the last four years.) It has trashed even the fiction of democratic functioning—even if we define democracy loosely, as a system where ten nations take all decisions on behalf of 106 participants—and installed at its top a triumvirate in which just one member, India, controls the purse, and thus wields real power. And it has reduced the field for future editions of the tournament.
But then, there is always the cricket cricket, such as it is—carefully choreographed to serve commercial interests. The financial calculus revolves around ad slots, and maximising returns means having as many games as possible. Thus the sequence of forty-two matches, carefully orchestrated to arrive at a predetermined set of quarter-finalists. For the same motives, we will also have clinically neutered pitches that pose no threat of bowlers running rampant, so that each match lasts for as many of the mandated hundred overs as possible.
Over time, the one-day international has gradually shed any pretense of contest—in cricketing terms, a duel between batsmen and bowlers—and recast itself as a glorified showcase of the bat-manufacturer’s craft, where second-rung players routinely found lacking in Test conditions can get away with edges and mishits. Any ball a batsman—even at his most arthritic—cannot hit with ease has been systematically outlawed (one bouncer per over by strict ration; nothing pitching outside leg stump; nothing wider than a foot of off stump, and so on).
And just to make doubly sure of pleasing the crowd—after all, each match needs a sufficiency of “Boundaries Brought To You By Sponsor X”—the ICC has, since the last edition of the World Cup, introduced another new rule: at all times, five fielders, not counting the bowler and wicketkeeper, have to be within thirty yards of the batsman. That is to say, on flat pitches and against bowlers rule-bound to cause batsmen as little discomfort as possible, a player only needs to beat four men patrolling the outfield of a ground typically between four hundred and 450 feet in diameter.
It is all going to be terribly exciting.