What can cricket learn from the Olympics?

We have been following the progress of the London Olympic Games with keen interest and believe there are many useful pointers for cricket.

Firstly the ticketing situation: there have obviously been problems with the corporate elements of this. It's quite clear that some non-corporate minor former stakeholders (what used to be called "sports fans") have snuck into many of the stadiums, taking up valuable seats that could have been left empty just in case key partners such as Deutsche-Lehman-Bastarbank, NucleoSpill Plastics Corp and TransBurger felt like turning up.

For those corporate partners who did grace the Games with their presence, however, it was nice for them to have plenty of space to stretch out in their seats. And rows. Could cricket build on this by perhaps converting seats into luxury king-size beds so that sponsors could enjoy a nice lie-down after lunch?

Such ordinary people as have managed to get into the Olympics have tended to be very noisy; cricket has itself had problems with stakeholders unable to hear their mobile phones, BlackBerries etc due to crowd cheering. Conducting cricket in silence apart from a very loud tape recording of Ravi Shastri shouting on a loop (atmospheric and informative) is a possible solution.

The situation with the Chinese badminton players is instructive. As was stressed clearly in our keynote programme address "The Cricket Family: Together as One Nation", one of the most pressing of our concerns is how to get more India teams playing in international cricket. Taking the (ideal) hypothetical situation where all cricket matches were India v India clashes: how could the games be manipulated so that, say, India could lose to India to avoid a potentially unsuitable match with India in the next round and instead set up a ratings-favourable clash with India? We have got some of our top people from Pakistan exploring ways to lose games in a way that does not cause the sort of negative attention that the badmintonists have suffered.

Lastly, there is one area where cricket is quite clearly ahead of the Olympics: frequency. In a spirit of sporting fraternity, we have offered the International Olympic Committee the benefit of our expertise, and we are delighted to report that, following the example of cricket, the Olympics will now be held not just every four years, not just annually, but on a rolling 365-days-a-year basis. We are confident that, just as in cricket, the appetite for constant international sailing, archery and wiffle-ball remains inelastic in the face of constant international sailing, archery and wiffle-ball. We salute our brothers at the IOC in marching forward together in a spirit of perma-sport, between India and India, played in front of spacious stadiums full of slumbering corporate partners, and are delighted to unveil cricket's new Olympics-inspired motto: Indianer. Corporater. Constanter.