In This Issue

A collection of Alan Gibson’s cricket writing for The Times and this magazine has been published under the title Of Didcot and The Demon and nothing illustrates better how the times have changed. The majority of his pieces span a decade from the mid-1970s, a period of drunken cricket reporting, missed deadlines, plentiful jokes, generous expenses, rail and newspaper strikes and, for Gibson, an almost exclusive focus on county cricket.

Occasionally he was sent to do ‘colour’ on international matches but he did not much care for it. He would not much like the current state of the game, if his report of a match between Somerset and a World XI at Bristol’s Ashton Gate in 1980 was anything to go by: “No doubt floodlit cricket has a future,” he wrote, “because this is the age of the sporting stunt. In ten years’ time, mark my words, we will have floodlights at Lord’s.” Well, he was right, if two decades ahead of time.

 It is now 20 years since I made my England debut and the period in which I played could be described as a bridge between Gibson’s forgotten world of English cricket and today’s globalised, some might say bastardised, game. Two decades is not a long time within the context of a historic game’s development but, my, how the pace of change quickened in that time.

In 1989 I received an invitation from the Test and County Cricket Board (the England and Wales Cricket Board but a twinkle in the professional game’s eye) to play against Australia. There was no sense of an England squad then; performances week in week out in county cricket were the determining factor in an ever-changing team landscape. There were no central contracts, of course, just a match fee of, if memory serves, about two grand. A county match finished on the Tuesday. There was a light net on Wednesday afternoon. The Test began the next day.

The captain was, demonstrably, the man in charge, although the notion of a team manager/head coach had been established a couple of years before. There were no other backroom staff, just a physio and his magic sponge. There was a rest day on the Sunday, so everyone got royally smashed on Saturday night. Six Test matches were the focus of the international summer, three one-day games the hors d’oeuvre: whites, red balls, no power plays or other artificialities.

The Ashes was the dominant theme but there was no sense, as there was this past summer, of it being to the exclusion of everything else. Domestic cricket was considered important in its own right. The Championship was a single division, a mix of three-day and four-day games, and there were four limited-overs competitions – a Sunday League, the Benson & Hedges Cup and NatWest Trophy and the long-forgotten Refuge Assurance Cup. Teams were more representative of their communities than they are now and overseas players were, for the most part, recognised international stars. The word Kolpak did not exist.

Internationally there was an established pattern. South Africa were still ostracised, so Australia monopolised matches over the festive season; West Indies played at home in the months that followed and, following the World Cup in Asia in 1987, the first signs of Indian dominance could be detected. With the proliferation of one-day tournaments the seeds of cricket’s greatest crisis were sown – to be harvested by Hansie Cronje and others less than a decade later.

In England the central themes of the two decades after my Test debut have been the dominance, firstly, of the professional game and then of the England team. The ECB was established in 1997 – combining the old TCCB and the National Cricket Association – and, in a sleight of a hand little commented upon, the voice of the recreational game was instantly diminished. Its ability to profit from the funds that flowed in, once Sky and Channel 4 became competitors to the BBC, was diminished to the benefit of the professional hordes riding the gravy train.

Nobody benefited more than England players from this transformation of the national governing body into a commercially proactive organisation whose concern, despite protestations to the contrary, has been the first-class game. Central contracts came in and within eight years their value increased from a top band of £60,000 a year to somewhere in the region of six to eight times that amount; backroom staff ballooned in numbers and every whim is now catered for. (I was staggered, talking to an England player this year, to learn that after a Test match there are drivers available to deliver players’ cars to whatever destination they choose to prevent any possible drink/drive-related incidents.)

If things at a national level have been clear-cut, then domestically the years have been characterised by a complete absence of vision, with the one glaring exception of the ‘invention’ of Twenty20, which even then has led to more not less head-scratching from executives eager but unsure of the best way to exploit their good fortune.

The level of tinkering has been staggering: one-day competitions have gone from zonal to regional to knock-out, from 40-over to 50-over and back, with Twenty20 competitions appearing then disappearing with bewildering rapidity. The result is incoherent, a fixture list that few can follow or understand and competitions that neither fulfil the national team’s needs nor cater for the spectator.

If the English game has suffered from a failure of imagination, then the failure of leadership in the International Cricket Council has been the defining feature of the last two decades at international level. In only two respects – curing the game of match-fixing (a not inconsiderable achievement) and improving umpiring standards – can the ICC be said to have acted with the game’s best interests at heart. For the rest it has been a Machiavellian game of politics. The shaming of the ICC over Zimbabwe’s finances really ought to have finished it as a governing body, rather than finishing the career of its chief executive Malcolm Speed, but it limps on.

On England’s tour of India in April 2006 I did an interview with someone who English cricket followers would have been surprised to learn that I thought was the “most powerful” administrator in world cricket. Lalit Modi was little known in England then and, indeed, held no official position within world cricket. But he did control the Indian board’s finances, which were ballooning even faster than England’s backroom staff.

It was a prescient piece but for the wrong reasons. Love him or loathe him – and on that score the numbers are about equal – Modi has become the most powerful man in world cricket because of his vision rather than his position controlling the purse strings of what is now the big beast of the world game.

In a game blighted by lack of visionary leaders Modi’s foresight has stood out. Into the black hole caused by the morass of self-interest of the ICC, which has given rise to a bloated international fixture list with far too many uncompetitive, uninteresting matches, Modi envisaged a football-style environment, where privately financed franchises and domestic clubs with ambition could compete internationally and, furthermore, compete with players’ loyalty to their national boards.

The defining moment of the decade will in time be seen to be April 18, 2008 – the day the Indian Premier League began. This was both a remarkable coup by Modi and an even more remarkable piece of organisational skill, showing administrations hampered by tradition and legislation what could be achieved in such a short space of time. It was extraordinary how the chief executives of all the major cricket-playing nations could be cajoled into giving away their prize assets (their star players) in return for absolutely nothing and it was the moment, I think, which set cricket on a path where the dominance of international cricket will eventually be challenged.

According to Forbes magazine, the IPL is the fastest growing sports franchise in the world. The recent Champions League, which was a natural and inevitable off-shoot of the IPL, might not yet have caught the imagination of English followers – nor indeed Indian supporters, given the lacklustre form of the Indian teams – but it provided a snapshot of cricket’s future.

There is one simple reason, I believe, why international cricket will eventually be superseded by club cricket, with the odd marquee Test series and tournaments such as the World Cup reminding people of how it once was, and that is the ability of clubs/franchises to create competitive teams.

Unless a country (like England) has a liberal immigration policy, then an international team is determined by the talent within its boundaries. At the moment Zimbabwe, Bangladesh and West Indies are hopeless; New Zealand are ordinary (as would England be without their South African imports); India’s focus is on one-day cricket and Pakistan are hampered by the political situation there. That does not leave much scope for high-quality, competitive international cricket. Clubs, on the other hand, can sign whoever they wish, from wherever, finances and availability allowing. Over time competitiveness, which is at the heart of good sport, is much easier to maintain.

Within this rapidly changing landscape English cricket must work out quickly what it wants. It is clear that Giles Clarke, the ECB chairman, sees England as the natural home of Test cricket but, as the focus of the game shifts to club competitions, English domestic cricket needs to work out its priorities. Does it want to be, to paraphrase the Somerset chairman, Andy Nash, Under Milk Wood or Bollywood? The latter would require a radical restructuring of the county game (the results of which might not please the Somerset chairman) into something leaner and more competitive. And that argument is just about the only thing that has not changed in the two decades since I first pulled on an England shirt.

Mike Atherton, the former England captain, is chief cricket correspondent of The Times and a Sky Sports commentator. His latest book Atherton’s Ashes, published by Simon & Schuster, is out now


 

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