'What Do We Gain From Making Cricket A Worldwide Sport?'

Writer-­supreme and cricket historian Gideon Haigh, ever alert to the SHAPE­ SHIFTING WAYS OF THE GAME, was in India recently, and in an informal interaction with senior journalists at The Hindu’s head office, he spoke extensively about cricket’s current state, its governance issues and the challenges posed by the Twenty20 format.

Cricket is at its tipping point. The game’s shortest format threatens to canni­balise its elder siblings — Test and ODI cricket. The Interna­tional Cricket Council is mulling a trial measure with four­dayTests. And for a sport with a limited global footprint, but still yearning to emulate football’s world ­wide spread, there is the grim reality of accepting that just four strong teams — India, Australia, England and South Africa — are propping up the willow game. Other squads, be it the mercurial Pakistan or promising New Zeal­ and, are struggling for a toehold and Sri Lanka and the West Indies are in a free­fall.

Interestingly, in a case of his­ tory repeating itself, the threats of commercialisation of cricket — first evident in 1977 when Kerry Packer unveiled his World Series Cricket (at that point derisively called as pyjama cricket) — are back in vogue through mush­ rooming Twenty20 leagues, led by the Indian Premier League (IPL) which commenced in 2008. “Show me the money,” is not just an oft­repeated dialogue from the 1996 cult­hit Jerry Maguire, it has now become a strident echo from cricketers asking for more than their pound of flesh in an era of big brands and bigger bucks that define various Twenty20 leagues, including the IPL.