One of the things that unites most of the cricket fans I know is a shared frustration with the administration of the game we love. For years we’ve seen the interests of fans sidelined in favour of the pursuit of power and money, with cricket suffering as a consequence, and in many ways it has felt as if the game is being wrested from us.
Earlier this week I went to see the film “Death of Gentleman”, which draws on that frustration through the journey made by Jarrod Kimber and Sam Collins, a journey that starts out by questioning whether and/or why test cricket is dying and ends up investigating the stench of corruption around those at the very top of the game. The end result is a thought-provoking film that makes you laugh at times but, ultimately, uncontrollably angry at the custodians of the game (if you weren’t already). It’s powerful stuff and I genuinely think that “Death of a Gentleman” should be mandatory viewing for anyone that loves and fears for test cricket. Excellence of the film aside (and I won’t spoil it for those that haven’t seen it yet, except to say that you can see my head in it at one point), it also has a crucial side effect of spawning the start of a movement for change.
Watching ”Death of a Gentleman” I was reminded of a time, over a decade ago, when a group of us (including Ian and Tom) started a short-lived cricket fanzine. It looked at many of the same issues being discussed today (it was around 2003 when Twenty20 first came on the scene), specifically within the UK, and one of the ideas mooted was some sort of a fans’ organisation. The idea behind that wasn’t akin to a competitor to the Barmy Army, but instead something that went beyond England and international cricket but represented supporters of counties too.
That idea never came to fruition – back in 2003 the Internet was nowhere near as omnipresent or accessible as it is now, and so geographical borders were still a barrier to a global movement, but here in 2015 it is a wholly different story. Now it is possible to see how the issues in county cricket are replicated at test level and how the administrators of both are intrinsically linked. For every English – and Welsh – cricket fan that has complained about the ECB’s Giles Clarke over the years there are hundreds in India who have railed against N. Srinivasan. Both have drawn on their own privilege to make domestic, and then international cricket, their own private members’ club in which they, together with Wally Edwards of Australia, pull all of the strings at the expense of the rest of the world’s cricket boards.
“Death of a Gentleman” focuses the mind on those similarities, as well as the scandalous pursuit of money ahead of spreading the global reach of the game – the latter is surely what custodians should be bound to do – and urges fans to work together for change. It’s early days but the changecricket.com website has a petition you can sign and on Thursday 20th August, the first day of the final Ashes Test, a three minute silent protest (one minute for each of the elite boards) is planned outside the Hobbs Gates at the Oval at 10am.
Why is this important? Well, if you live in the UK and have bought a ticket for an international match in recent years then you’ll probably have noticed that it was pretty expensive, the increases meaning that many fans have been priced out at the expense of corporates. The ECB will claim – on a technicality – that this is not down to them, but without going into the details, their bidding system to stage games is at the very root of the increases in test and ODI match prices. In turn, this expands the brand (yes, brand, it is so wrong for sport isn’t it?) that the ECB has built, and the growing number of series against the big draws of Australian and India (coincidentally the other two boards running world cricket). In short, it maintains and builds upon the power base that exists. Conversely, if you are a West Indies or a Bangladesh fan (amongst others) then you’ll have fewer tests against the big three, and the series you do get will be pushed into as short a period as possible. These things may seem a far cry from the deals that go on at the ICC in Dubai but they are the products of those handshakes and agreements, the consequences for you and me as fans.
Arguably neither a petition nor a protest outside a cricket ground will do much to change the power base of cricket, but the important thing for me is that it’s a start, and all movements need to start somewhere. I can’t be there myself on Thursday, instead I shall have to settle for three minutes of contemplation at my desk, but I hope that lots of fans do turn up and send a signal, however small, to those running the game. And more than that I hope that this is just the beginning, because a movement to try and change cricket for the better is something that I really, really want to get behind: let’s #changecricket.
hackneyhaz.com 