A broken ECB promise

First up, please accept my apologies for the two weeks of inactivity. Some times the real world simply gets too busy. Posting may be light (or less) for the next week but after that it should be full speed ahead.

In two weeks of absence several remarkable things have occurred, including England winning a T20 game and Ray Price rising to third in the ODI bowling rankings. These are clearly strange times we are living in but what finally forced me to thrash about on my keyboard once more is the hoary issue of cricket broadcasting.

To summarize developments, the United Kingdom government asked a panel led by former Football Association Executive Director David Davies (and inexplicably including Eamonn Holmes) to come up with recommendations on the future of the sporting "crown jewels" - the events which must be on free-to-air television. One of their conclusions was that the home Ashes series should not be on Sky. This has led to predictably apocalyptic forecasts from the ECB, and on both sides of the argument in the media. The most balanced case I have read is from John Stern, who cuts to the heart of the issue in attempting to measure exposure against revenue.

An element missing from the coverage is that ECB never actually should have sold the rights to Sky. In the early years of the Labour government, when the England cricket team were still floundering under the captaincy of Alec Stewart, the ECB chairman managed to get test matches taken off the list of "crown jewels." Somewhat naively (these were the days when a Labour minister could still be described as such) the Culture Secretary came to a gentleman's agreement with the ECB; home test matches could come off the list as long as most of them remained on free-to-air television. Fast forward a few years and Sky gobbled up the rights, with the ECB collecting a sizable check.

Following the public uproar at this decision, the parliamentary Culture, Media and Sport Committee investigated the issue. In their findings they wrote:
“It is very evident to the Committee no matter what description it is given and no matter how its precise ramifications are interpreted, the understanding between Lord Smith and Lord MacLaurin constituted an agreement. And the content of that agreement was unequivocal: live Test match cricket played in England was not to be removed completely from free to air TV. What is equally evident to this Committee is that the terms of that agreement have manifestly been breached by the ECB with the tacit approval of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport."

It is clear that the ECB broke a promise to keep most test match cricket on free-to-air television. As such it is hard to feel too much sympathy for their protestations. Let's hope we can finally strike the balance which the "gentleman's agreement" was meant to create; enough revenue to sustain cricket at all levels and the exposure necessary to keep it as one of national sports.

Autobiographies

Five of England's players during the last Ashes series have already written their autobiographies, and it was with some alarm that I read about 23 year old Stuart Broad's soon-to-be published Bowled Over. The Amazon description promises a "lavishly illustrated book", which does not seem to bode well, but Broad joins Monty Panesar, Alastair Cooke, Andrew Strauss, Andrew Flintoff and Kevin Pieterson in the autobiography club. I admit, not without a little pride, to have read none of these, but the general consensus from reviews seems to be that Strauss, Flintoff and Pieterson's tomes were perfectly readable, Cooke's merely pointless and poor Panesar's utterly anodyne.

Player biographies are nothing new, and the standard seems always to have been poor; even my ten year old self was disappointed with Graeme Hick's "My Life So Far." This also leads to the subject of titles; some players seem to opt for a variation of Hick's as part-apology for writing about their life when it has only just started (Cooke's is "My Early Life, even Flintoff's was called "Being Freddie:My Life so Far"), the senior pro must call his book something akin to "Time to Declare", and the opening batsmen usually calls his "Opening Up." Praise be for exceptions to the rule, such as Steve James' "Third Man to Fatty's Leg" and "There are only 2 Tony Cotteys."

There are some excellent cricketing autobiographies, such as Michael Atherton of recent vintage or Fred Root from many years past, allowing us mere mortals an insight into the world and mentality of professional cricket. However it is not a coincidence that both Atherton and Root wrote after their retirement. Not only did their age allow them greater insight into their game but they were also freed from the pressures of playing. This is seen in another autobiography which is about to be published, Michael Vaughan's "Time to Declare." Some of the book's serialization in The Times has been rather sensational but one passages stands out. Vaughan talks about "a terror of the ball coming to me" in the field, admitting that he placed himself in the field in positions where catches would not come. This is an admission which no current player could ever make, but such weaknesses are essential if the reader is to begin understanding the subject.

Banned for two games for blogging

Tom Redfern writes a great blog cataloging his efforts to score a "pure" century, which for him means against decent bowling and scored in fifty balls or less. He was recently banned for two games for allegedly swearing at the umpire after being sawn off in a game. For his side of the story read Tom's post on the game, but the inexplicably stupid part of the decision was that they also charged him for the comments he wrote on the blog.

The committee cited section 2 (b) ii of the Middlesex County Cricket League constitution in claiming that the blog brought the spirit of the game into disrepute. Section 2 (b) ii states that"disputing an umpire’s decision or reacting in an obviously provocative or disapproving manner towards an umpire at any time" is not within the spirit of the game. Not only does it seem absurdly petty to include post-game writing in their deliberations, the MCCL handily defined their parameters in the preamble to section 2 (b):

"Each player shall conduct himself with the spirit of the game on the field at all times. For the purposes of this sub-paragraph, the field shall include any part of the cricket ground and not merely the field of play."

It would take a very selective reader not to understand that the drafters of this constitution viewed that their powers to enforce behaviour was limited to the ground and the day of the game. Put simply, punishing somebody for writing their opinion on a cricket game is unacceptable. If anybody can spare five minutes out of their day to email the MCCL Chairman and Secretary asking them to rethink the decision, their emails are available here.

Getting back on the train one Hitler mask at a time

For various reasons (well two really - lots of work and lots of fairly uninteresting Twenty 20 games) I have not watched that much cricket in the last couple of months. I managed to catch the last few overs of India's innings against Australia this morning and a couple of things embedded themselves into my mind.

1) Ricky Ponting dropped an easy chance. Having to endure the snickers of the thousands at the ground and millions watching at home he looked more like the hapless captain of 2005 than a father-figure nurturing a new team towards greatness.

2) As Dhoni and Raina blasted India towards 350, the camera panned to the crowd and found a fan wearing a mask. Fair enough, apart from it was very distinctively an Adolf Hitler mask. This raises several questions: Why did the fan choose to wear this mask to show his support of India? Does the Nagpur joke show carry a range of genocidal dictator masks? Maybe one can browse through Stalin and Mao before deciding upon the fall-back of Adolf? And why did the television company decide that of all the thousands of enthusiastic fans this was the one to put on screen? To make the moment even stranger, the Australian commentator (it might have been Michael Slater but I'm not sure) opined on seeing the Adolfed face that "everyone in the ground has a smile on their face at the moment." Tis a strange world...

The baggy green

Before the Ashes, when he was still seen as Australia's great weapon, Phil Hughes described his relationship with the baggy green cap that he had been given on debut. His words are so odd that they deserve to be quoted at length:

"I keep it locked away in a pouch in the top left-hand corner of my wardrobe ... every day I make sure it's there. I'll have a peek. It might be in the morning, at night, or even if I'm having a coffee, I'll walk upstairs and look at it. I'll smell it sometimes. It smells like alcohol because of the couple of wins we had in the first Tests in South Africa."

The much missed Amy S. described this as "like something a sex-obssessed teenage boy would do," but now Phil Jacques has gone a step further by attributing the cap with healing qualities. In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, Jacques said that before and after an operation for a bulging disk in back he would stare at his baggy green to top up his motivation and beat the pain barrier.

It has been well documented by among others Gideon Haigh that this fascination with the cap is a modern phenomeonon. The baggy green first started being worn in the 1920's; before then the national team donned green and gold skull caps. The baggy green remained merely an accessory for generations; Bill Lawry was reputed to have worn his while cleaning out his pidgeon coop, and one of Richie Benaud's caps was sold for 50c at a charity shop.

The cap began being attributed with greater significance under Mark Taylor's captaincy in the 1990's. All players wore the cap during the first fielding session of a test match, and whereas caps used to be liberally distributed before a tour, now one cap was expected to last an entire career. Steve Waugh took up all matters baggy green with gusto until the skipper in his tattered cap became one of the defining images of sporting greatness.

As ever Gideon Haigh summons the appropriate concept, looking to Eric Hobsbawn for the notion of "invented tradition," which aims to create practices to link the present to the past. One senses that Waugh's motivations lay beyond mere patriotism and that he deliberately created rituals around the cap to forge a link with earlier Australian cricketers, a link which had been severely dented only a few years before he started playing with World Series Cricket. Indeed, he came close to admitting as much when he said that he introduced the on-field presentation of a baggy green to a debutant from a former player as it "gives me power and the team aura."

Several past players have criticised the legend that has grown around the cap. Some, such as Bob Simpson think that it should only be worn when clean and new. Former captain Brian Booth is perhaps more revealing when he says that he is uneasy about growing "idol worship." It is hard to disagree with him when one sees the photo of Hughes (above) or reads about Jacques. With the Australian team shawn of their legendary players and with Ponting the only link to the Taylor and Waugh eras, the younger players appear to look to the baggy green as an almost mythical object. And it can never be good when a cricketer, when anyone, unthinkingly and unquestioningly accepts something.

American variances on cricket

Samir Chopra has discussed recently (here and here) the possibility of introducing baseball-style fielding statistics into cricket, for example a catch to dropped catch ratio, runs saved, fielding errors and so forth. Having finally finished reading Tom Melville's excellent The Tented Field: A History of Cricket in America, I can report that such experiments (and several more) were tried a century ago.

Melville's central argument is that cricket failed to take hold in America not for social, political or historical reasons but "because it never established an American character." Towards the end of the book he outlines some of the various failed attempts to achieve this Americanisation after the Civil War, most of which were heavily influenced by baseball, which by then had become the dominant bat and ball sport in the country.

In the 1874 match between the Merion club and St. Georges of New York a distinction was made between earned and unearned runs, as well as a recognition of fielding errors on the scorecard. It seems that these were trialled more widely in Philadelphian cricket during the 1888 season before being abandoned. During the 1880s there were also suggestions to allow double-plays, where the two batsman could have been dismissed in the same delivery (it is hard to imagine that this would have occurred very often!) as well as sporadic calls for all fielders to be permitted to wear gloves, something which was eventually trialled in Chicago and judged a "dismal failure."

Not all American innovations failed. Philadelphian cricket modified the MCC's LBW law for their 1885 season, a move that quickly proved popular for its relative simplicity, and the Philadelphians also allowed declarations years before the MCC. Nevertheless, most of the attempts to change cricket reflect the increasing dominance of baseball, and many are little but attempts to mimic it's structure. One such was the "American Plan" to alternate the batting side at the fall of every third wicket during the second innings of each team. The plan was proposed in 1882, and several college matches played under the new rules, but it never gained more than a foothold before disappearing into oblivion.

As Melville comments, none of these ideas cut to the heart of how Americans viewed (and still view) cricket; as simply too long. It would be tempting to consider Twenty 20 the answer to these long-held prayers, but that is to forget that a century and more has passed since the American Plan and its' ilk. Cricket's appeal will always be on the margins of American society, and there is nothing wrong in that. For now, lets try to get fielding errors back on the scorecard.

The ICC Super Series

In an alternative universe, where everything the ICC decreed came to pass, we would just have witnessed the second Super Series, presumably between South Africa and a World XI side. Four years ago, the first meeting ended in a thumping victory for an Australian team determined to prove their Ashes humiliation was only a temporary blip. Alongside the international all-stars of a World XI, the series (there were three ODIs and a test match) experimented with extra technology for umpires and a six-day test match (it was finished in four.)

The reaction from all and sundry was resoundingly negative. Gideon Haigh described the play as "pretty grim", Geoffrey Boycott decided that "there was nothing that resembled cricket", and Peter English wrote that "throwing money at a team can only make it show up." Perhaps most damning, the World XI captain Graeme Smith criticised "the fact that there were no consequences for losing so badly."

Four years on, with the advent of the Indian Premier League and the Champions League Twenty 20, it is possible to be a little more sympathetic towards the idea. After all, the teams at IPL teams are brought about through little more than the deep pockets of the franchises' owners, and the only real incentive in the current Champions League is financial. The differences are of scope, duration and support; the architects of the IPL recognised the need for a competition based in urban areas and lasting several weeks to enthuse fans, while the pot of money has grown exponentially over four years. Wisden summed up the problems of the series well, calling the series "OK in theory, but the World XI did not want to be there ... and nor did the people of Sydney and Melbourne." In other words, what the ICC began, Lalit Modi and the BCCI perfected.