Give cricket the respect it deserves

It was strange to hear of Lord’s, the home of cricket, hosting the landing of a helicopter — that too carrying a business magnate with crates full of dollar bills. But it was only a precursor of the farce to follow, a farce that has made utter nonsense of all the ICC’s and ECB’s protestations that they are doing their utmost to ensure the survival of Test cricket, the purest form of the game, and their loud expressions of belief that this form of the game has a long and secure future. Former Pakistan captain Asif Iqbal writes about the Stanford 20/20 for 20 in the News.

The complete abandoning of all norms and even rules for this extravaganza makes a mockery of all the high moral complaints cricket administrators had against Kerry Packer and what was disdainfully described as ‘his circus’. If that was a circus, this was a trapeze act, for whatever Packer may or may not have done, he stuck to the rules of the game and never did anything to harm the formal structure of the sport.

But tournaments like this one will harm the sport’s formal structure in the long run, by making the traditional form of the sport, specially Test cricket, so much less attractive for both players and spectators simply because the money involved will, by comparison, be laughable.