Published in Sportstar, 19 April 2008
By Gulu Ezekiel
The French have a phrase ‘plus ca change…’ which roughly translated means ‘the more things change, the more they remain the same.’
The French are not big cricket buffs, but the phrase keeps cropping up in my mind whenever cricket hits a new crisis or controversy.
Controversy there has been plenty already. But crisis?
To explain, one must go back over 250 years to the very beginnings of organised cricket.
Coloured clothing? The first professional teams riding horseback and by stagecoach through the length and breadth of England from the mid-18th to early 19th centuries wore coloured shirts to help identify their clubs.
Those professionals would receive challenges from clubs and villages around England and would be paid handsomely for their skills. There were thus plenty of historical precursors to Kerry Packer and his traveling circus of pros including William Clarke (of the 1840s) and Thomas Lord (the founder of Lord’s cricket ground) a century earlier.
The first recorded match in which prize money (10 Pounds Sterling) was on offer was played in 1700. Just 50 years later the first and most famous professional cricket club was formed at Hambledon, Hampshire (referred to as ‘the cradle of cricket’).
By the 1830s the railways were opening up new avenues and trains began to replace the horseback pro, leading to the wider spread of cricket.
Bookies and match-fixing? You better believe it. Cricket faced its first major crisis when the cover was blown on these professional cricketers indulging in widespread betting and fixing as well as violence and rampant alcoholism.
This was when the amateurs emerging from the elite schools of England such as Eton and Harrow and colleges like Oxford and Cambridge took control of the game and began establishing the county championship in the 1850s, though 1873 is generally regarded as the first year of the championship. This brought to an end the era of the traveling professional circus.
The Marleybone Cricket Club (MCC) was established as the guardian of the game and it’s rules and spirit with Lord’s as its headquarters.
The division between amateurs (known as ‘gentlemen’) and professionals (aka ‘players’) remained in English cricket till it was formally abolished after the 1963 season.
There are uncanny resemblances between those horseback professionals of 250-plus years ago and the modern day cricketer. And a conflict is brewing as more and more super-rich businessmen with giant egos and fortunes to match crop up to up the ante and attract the top players to their fold.
Thus more than a century after the establishment of the county championship in England spelled the end of the traveling professional, history is about to be neatly reversed.
The first of these cricket-oriented businessmen in the modern era was of course Packer and his two-year World Series Cricket that was launched in Australia in the 1977-78 season (and wound up a season later) and was the biggest force for change in cricket in the 20th century.
Since then the late Packer has had clones springing up all over the cricket world.
Sheikh Abdul Rahman Bukhatir was the first to follow in Packer’s footsteps. He launched cricket in the Sharjah desert with exhibition matches between India and Pakistan in 1981.
Two years later, having learned an expensive lesson at the hands of the Australian media tycoon who sued and won, the respective national bodies decided to co-operate with Bukhatir and his right-hand man, former Pakistan captain Asif Iqbal and the Cricketers’ Benefit Fund Series (CBFS) was born.
The matches received official sanction and the tournaments were a huge success whenever India and Pakistan faced off.
But the emergence of the crime underworld attracted the attention of the Indian government and once the Indian board withdrew their team in 2000, the curtains came down on the show.
There is now the spectre of the betting mafia once again descending on world cricket. 20/20 cricket is an ideal format for illegal betting (and its evil off-shoot, match-fixing) and herein lies the danger of this new format and its many avatars.
The IPL was launched by the BCCI to counter the Indian Cricket League (ICL), the brainchild of Essel chairman Subhash Chandra who like Packer 30 years earlier was thwarted in his bid to get the exclusive cricket telecast rights for his own Zee TV network.
The sporting world was stunned by the auction of nearly 80 international cricketers in Mumbai with the fat cats of Indian business combining with Bollywood’s glamour boys and girls. The eight franchise teams floated by the IPL had earlier attracted massive price tags and now it was the cricketers who for the first time found themselves on the auction block.
It was India’s ODI and 20/20 captain MS Dhoni who attracted the biggest price tag of $1.5 million followed closely by Australian all-rounder Andrew Symonds.
But just as Bukhatir offered more riches than Packer and the IPL has gone one up on the ICL in the financial stakes, now comes the news that the IPL too is being put in the shade by Texas oil billionaire Sir Allen Stanford.
Stanford has made Antigua his home and has completed a stunningly successful second year of his Stanford 20/20 tournament involving 20 island nations of the Caribbean (Cuba will join next year), all playing at his own Stanford cricket ground in Antigua. This is the home of Sir Viv Richards who heads his ‘legends’ band of consultants made up of the greatest living cricketers from the West Indies.
Initially opposed to this private cricket event, the West Indies Cricket Board had no option but to dance to Stanford’s tune considering they are one of the most impoverished cricket boards in the world.
In 2006 Stanford offered $5 million for a one-off match between South Africa and his West Indies ‘All Stars’, the cream of the crop chosen from his own tournament. That never came off due to official opposition from both boards.
Last year after India won the inaugural T-20 World Cup in South Africa, Stanford upped the stakes, this time putting up $10 million for a match between the world champs and the West Indies.
The response? “They [the BCCI] said, 'no, we don't want to do that because it would be endorsing a privately funded programme,’" according to Stanford. “And look what they've done. They've set up their own privately funded programme. This is all about business, and it's big time business.”
He calls those who have signed up with the IPL as “mercenaries” which is a bit hard to swallow.
Clearly miffed, Stanford has now doubled the prize money and Australia have been invited. “$20 million for 20/20 cricket” he is calling it and who can resist? Certainly not the cricketers.
Yes, believe it or not, a winner-takes-it-all one-off match between the West Indies and Australia for $20 million!
Suddenly Dhoni’s price tag for the one IPL season is beginning to look like peanuts. Imagine being in a position to earn that kind of money for a game lasting barely three hours.
So what is to stop some other billionaire from some other part of the world doubling that amount? Say for argument’s sake, the Sultan of Brunei who has a passion for cricket and once employed Sir Viv to personally coach his son?
"Maybe another millionaire will come in with a different competition. Hopefully, it won't be too long," West Indies star batsman Chris Gayle (IPL price tag $800,000) was quoted after his side Jamaica lost in the final of the Stanford 20/20 to Trinidad.
So instead of riding on horseback to play in challenge matches around England as professional cricketers did 250 years ago, we may soon witness the spectacle of the modern-day pro flying around the globe from one private league to another to line his pockets.
The ICC will be just a mute spectator and probably killed off, as banning players will only bring in the restraint of trade law as Packer’s men did successfully 30 years ago.
It was respected Australian cricket author and journalist Gideon Haigh who wrote a few years back that it was the winner-takes-it-all concept of prize money first introduced in the modern era (it was the same in the 18th and 19th century) by Packer that laid the seeds for match-fixing in the last years of the 20th century.
If some of the captains of that time could sell their national pride for financial gain from illegal bookies, can one expect today’s cricketers to feel even a shred of loyalty while playing 20/20 matches, that too for franchises?
Further, the ICC has deemed the IPL a domestic event and will not be deploying its Anti-Corruption Unit (nor its drug-testing labs) at either the IPL or at Stanford’s events. And the ‘rebel’ ICL is beyond their purview.
Already the ICC and the Federation of International Cricketers’ Association (FICA) have expressed grave concerns over the threat of match-fixing in these new leagues.
The conflict with the traditional Test and ODI calendar is already obvious while a spate of international cricketers have been announcing their retirements in order to concentrate on these lucrative leagues. National bodies around the cricket world are running for cover, unable to stanch the outflow of their players.
20/20 cricket it appears has opened a Pandora’s Box.
--Gulu Ezekiel is a freelance cricket journalist and author based in New Delhi.
Published in Sportstar, 19 April 2008
By Gulu Ezekiel
The French have a phrase ‘plus ca change…’ which roughly translated means ‘the more things change, the more they remain the same.’
The French are not big cricket buffs, but the phrase keeps cropping up in my mind whenever cricket hits a new crisis or controversy.
Controversy there has been plenty already. But crisis?
To explain, one must go back over 250 years to the very beginnings of organised cricket.
Coloured clothing? The first professional teams riding horseback and by stagecoach through the length and breadth of England from the mid-18th to early 19th centuries wore coloured shirts to help identify their clubs.
Those professionals would receive challenges from clubs and villages around England and would be paid handsomely for their skills. There were thus plenty of historical precursors to Kerry Packer and his traveling circus of pros including William Clarke (of the 1840s) and Thomas Lord (the founder of Lord’s cricket ground) a century earlier.
The first recorded match in which prize money (10 Pounds Sterling) was on offer was played in 1700. Just 50 years later the first and most famous professional cricket club was formed at Hambledon, Hampshire (referred to as ‘the cradle of cricket’).
By the 1830s the railways were opening up new avenues and trains began to replace the horseback pro, leading to the wider spread of cricket.
Bookies and match-fixing? You better believe it. Cricket faced its first major crisis when the cover was blown on these professional cricketers indulging in widespread betting and fixing as well as violence and rampant alcoholism.
This was when the amateurs emerging from the elite schools of England such as Eton and Harrow and colleges like Oxford and Cambridge took control of the game and began establishing the county championship in the 1850s, though 1873 is generally regarded as the first year of the championship. This brought to an end the era of the traveling professional circus.
The Marleybone Cricket Club (MCC) was established as the guardian of the game and it’s rules and spirit with Lord’s as its headquarters.
The division between amateurs (known as ‘gentlemen’) and professionals (aka ‘players’) remained in English cricket till it was formally abolished after the 1963 season.
There are uncanny resemblances between those horseback professionals of 250-plus years ago and the modern day cricketer. And a conflict is brewing as more and more super-rich businessmen with giant egos and fortunes to match crop up to up the ante and attract the top players to their fold.
Thus more than a century after the establishment of the county championship in England spelled the end of the traveling professional, history is about to be neatly reversed.
The first of these cricket-oriented businessmen in the modern era was of course Packer and his two-year World Series Cricket that was launched in Australia in the 1977-78 season (and wound up a season later) and was the biggest force for change in cricket in the 20th century.
Since then the late Packer has had clones springing up all over the cricket world.
Sheikh Abdul Rahman Bukhatir was the first to follow in Packer’s footsteps. He launched cricket in the Sharjah desert with exhibition matches between India and Pakistan in 1981.
Two years later, having learned an expensive lesson at the hands of the Australian media tycoon who sued and won, the respective national bodies decided to co-operate with Bukhatir and his right-hand man, former Pakistan captain Asif Iqbal and the Cricketers’ Benefit Fund Series (CBFS) was born.
The matches received official sanction and the tournaments were a huge success whenever India and Pakistan faced off.
But the emergence of the crime underworld attracted the attention of the Indian government and once the Indian board withdrew their team in 2000, the curtains came down on the show.
There is now the spectre of the betting mafia once again descending on world cricket. 20/20 cricket is an ideal format for illegal betting (and its evil off-shoot, match-fixing) and herein lies the danger of this new format and its many avatars.
The IPL was launched by the BCCI to counter the Indian Cricket League (ICL), the brainchild of Essel chairman Subhash Chandra who like Packer 30 years earlier was thwarted in his bid to get the exclusive cricket telecast rights for his own Zee TV network.
The sporting world was stunned by the auction of nearly 80 international cricketers in Mumbai with the fat cats of Indian business combining with Bollywood’s glamour boys and girls. The eight franchise teams floated by the IPL had earlier attracted massive price tags and now it was the cricketers who for the first time found themselves on the auction block.
It was India’s ODI and 20/20 captain MS Dhoni who attracted the biggest price tag of $1.5 million followed closely by Australian all-rounder Andrew Symonds.
But just as Bukhatir offered more riches than Packer and the IPL has gone one up on the ICL in the financial stakes, now comes the news that the IPL too is being put in the shade by Texas oil billionaire Sir Allen Stanford.
Stanford has made Antigua his home and has completed a stunningly successful second year of his Stanford 20/20 tournament involving 20 island nations of the Caribbean (Cuba will join next year), all playing at his own Stanford cricket ground in Antigua. This is the home of Sir Viv Richards who heads his ‘legends’ band of consultants made up of the greatest living cricketers from the West Indies.
Initially opposed to this private cricket event, the West Indies Cricket Board had no option but to dance to Stanford’s tune considering they are one of the most impoverished cricket boards in the world.
In 2006 Stanford offered $5 million for a one-off match between South Africa and his West Indies ‘All Stars’, the cream of the crop chosen from his own tournament. That never came off due to official opposition from both boards.
Last year after India won the inaugural T-20 World Cup in South Africa, Stanford upped the stakes, this time putting up $10 million for a match between the world champs and the West Indies.
The response? “They [the BCCI] said, 'no, we don't want to do that because it would be endorsing a privately funded programme,’" according to Stanford. “And look what they've done. They've set up their own privately funded programme. This is all about business, and it's big time business.”
He calls those who have signed up with the IPL as “mercenaries” which is a bit hard to swallow.
Clearly miffed, Stanford has now doubled the prize money and Australia have been invited. “$20 million for 20/20 cricket” he is calling it and who can resist? Certainly not the cricketers.
Yes, believe it or not, a winner-takes-it-all one-off match between the West Indies and Australia for $20 million!
Suddenly Dhoni’s price tag for the one IPL season is beginning to look like peanuts. Imagine being in a position to earn that kind of money for a game lasting barely three hours.
So what is to stop some other billionaire from some other part of the world doubling that amount? Say for argument’s sake, the Sultan of Brunei who has a passion for cricket and once employed Sir Viv to personally coach his son?
"Maybe another millionaire will come in with a different competition. Hopefully, it won't be too long," West Indies star batsman Chris Gayle (IPL price tag $800,000) was quoted after his side Jamaica lost in the final of the Stanford 20/20 to Trinidad.
So instead of riding on horseback to play in challenge matches around England as professional cricketers did 250 years ago, we may soon witness the spectacle of the modern-day pro flying around the globe from one private league to another to line his pockets.
The ICC will be just a mute spectator and probably killed off, as banning players will only bring in the restraint of trade law as Packer’s men did successfully 30 years ago.
It was respected Australian cricket author and journalist Gideon Haigh who wrote a few years back that it was the winner-takes-it-all concept of prize money first introduced in the modern era (it was the same in the 18th and 19th century) by Packer that laid the seeds for match-fixing in the last years of the 20th century.
If some of the captains of that time could sell their national pride for financial gain from illegal bookies, can one expect today’s cricketers to feel even a shred of loyalty while playing 20/20 matches, that too for franchises?
Further, the ICC has deemed the IPL a domestic event and will not be deploying its Anti-Corruption Unit (nor its drug-testing labs) at either the IPL or at Stanford’s events. And the ‘rebel’ ICL is beyond their purview.
Already the ICC and the Federation of International Cricketers’ Association (FICA) have expressed grave concerns over the threat of match-fixing in these new leagues.
The conflict with the traditional Test and ODI calendar is already obvious while a spate of international cricketers have been announcing their retirements in order to concentrate on these lucrative leagues. National bodies around the cricket world are running for cover, unable to stanch the outflow of their players.
20/20 cricket it appears has opened a Pandora’s Box.
