That is perfectly right. That is how it was. Sadly, it is no longer so. The great game is now almost entirely driven by considerations of what will make the most money, which in turn means that the more cricket matches that can be arranged/crammed in to attract paying spectators and/or rich TV rights and/or commercial sponsors the better. Thus do they dull the hungry edge of appetite with their excess. Torrents of twenty/20s piled on ODIs piled on (not quite forgotten) Tests forced into newly arranged tournaments, series, leagues, competitions and championships played for numberless cups and trophies, shields and bowls: international cricket 24/7/52 is threatening to become a gigantic festival of boredom. Interestingly, the only matches that have really gripped the attention and the imagination of cricket lovers in the last couple of years have been Test matches – West Indies v England in the West Indies, England v Australia in the Ashes series last year, South Africa v England in South Africa and the just concluded series India v South Africa. And many of these memorable matches were drawn!
What disposable cricket has become is brilliantly related in an article An Embarrassment of Riches by one of the very best cricket writers, Rahul Bhattacharya. Here is part of the article in which he describes the descent into meaninglessness of cricket in India, that new powerhouse in the game.
“I used to look forward to the Challenger Trophy. The name Challenger, while hardly original, was accurate. A quick tournament, four matches in four days, between India’s best and the rest. The sides were hierarchical and given appropriately hierarchical names – India Seniors, India A, India B. Reputations were made and broken here, a talent gauged often in a face-off against Sachin Tendulkar. At 17, Piyush Chawla bowled the great man with a googly he didn’t pick. Sreesanth being Sreesanth once kept getting in Tendulkar’s face. Tendulkar forehanded him over his head for six and hissed: ‘Don’t ever come so close to me again.’
“There have been a lot of empty cricket grounds in the world recently, but none as bare as Nagpur’s for this year’s Challenger – partly because, it must be conceded, Nagpur’s new stadium is not in Nagpur but at a remote location in interior Vidarbha. But the raison d’être of the competition itself has been done away with: players are now mixed and matched into three teams and named after colours. Nobody knows who the challengers are and who the challenged. And the best players need not play. Tendulkar wisely opted out. Sehwag, Gambhir, Ishant, Karthik, Mishra, Dravid, Rohit, Virat, Praveen Kumar, R.P. Singh – they were playing the other tournament, also conceived by the Indian board.
“This was the wildly lucrative Champions League (the twenty/20, featuring clubs, provincial sides, franchises and the sovereign nation of Trinidad and Tobago). Having done the homework for last year’s edition, eventually cancelled after 26/11, I thought I was an expert. No such thing. The teams had increased from eight to 12. The format had morphed from something straightforward to something with more pools than Florida. The number of matches had shot up from 15 to 23, an extraordinary growth rate between years 1 and 2 when you consider there had not been a year 1.
“And here too it appeared anybody could play for anybody. Take, to cite just one instance, Dimitri Mascarenhas, a journeyman English cricketer who does the Indian Premier League (IPL) as a Rajasthan Royal. For the Champions League, he arrived with the New Zealand state side, Otago. And his ‘team’ really is the county of Hampshire, for which he might well have turned out had they qualified.
“In short, cricket has reached a stage where even committed watchers don’t know which teams are playing, when they are playing, who’s playing for whom, and, because they’re playing all the time, why they are playing at all.
“Just when we got used to Victoria and New South Wales occupying our prime cricket season, they dissemble and come together in part as Australia for seven old-fashioned one-day internationals against India. Not a single match, be assured, will feature full-strength sides. That kind of thing doesn’t happen in international cricket any more.”
I am sure Riyad and myself are not alone among lovers of cricket in lamenting this accelerating decline into meaningless proliferation. But one fact far more important than that is clear. The players like it this way, grumble though they sometimes do pro forma about over-crowded schedules. Those long-ago days when every international match really mattered are gone beyond recall if only because the players would laugh to scorn any move to bring back greater relevance by sharply reducing international tournaments. Why should they consider for one moment circumscribing their opportunities to earn a comfortable living and, in the case of quite a few these days, even become millionaires? Nor will cricket boards around the world contemplate anything less than maximizing financial returns.
Quite soon only a few eccentric connoisseurs of the ancient game will be left to regret the yesteryears of cricket. What is happening in India the rest of the world will want to make happen everywhere as quickly as possible. No one will heed for a second Nerissa’s warning to Portia in The Merchant of Venice: “They are as sick that surfeit with too much as they that starve with nothing.” And thus will cricket continue to descend into the hellish depths of never-ending glut and superficial glamour signifying nothing of any real importance whatsoever.
