In search of wisdom

So it has come to this. Just as the United Nations stamped its feet and shouted itself hoarse but was unable to prevent the United States and Britain from invading Iraq, so the ICC, for all the harrumphing and tub-thumping of David Morgan and Haroon Lorgat, is proving entirely impotent in preventing the BCCI from jackbooting the primacy of international cricket for six. To scream or to cry: that is the question. Laughter certainly doesn’t come into it.

The trouble with an Englishman portraying Lalit Modi as the devil incarnate, or lamenting even the teeniest aspect of this Indian-led revolution, is that it leaves him wide open to charges of racism, or jealousy, or both. As someone who has spent a goodly chunk of his journalistic career lamenting the Anglo-Antipodean duopoly, befriending south Asians, bemoaning the patronising treatment of Sri Lanka, advocating the ICC relocate from Lord’s to Kolkata and expressing undying gratitude for the way India’s obsession with all things flannelled and foolish has kept the planet’s most anachronistic ballgame alive and kicking, I reject the first charge with every bone, fibre and cell in my body. But am I envious of the fact that cricket means so much more on the subcontinent than it does here? You bet.

That the game is at a crossroads cannot be doubted. Anyone who cares for its long-term future can only observe the Acronym Era with fear and trepidation. Of course it is about time the old world tasted what it is like to be dictated to by the new. Of course the desire to avenge decades of disrespect, however carefully concealed and repeatedly denied, is completely understandable. But with power comes responsibility, and the BCCI seems so utterly, so wilfully, oblivious to this.

Lorgat makes much of “ICC values” in the body’s latest quarterly bulletin, but to suggest that one of them is “working as a team” would be comical if it wasn’t so horrendously wide of the mark. Who does he think he is fooling? As Tim May, the eloquent leader of the Federation of International Cricketers' Associations, seldom tires of advocating, the need for a new governing body, independent of national interests and historical/racial rivalries, is paramount. But is there the will for such a radical overhaul? Not so’s you’d notice.

In Dubai today and tomorrow there is a golden opportunity to begin the game’s reformation. The priorities seem plain: revamp the Future Tours Progamme, fix a four- to six-week window in the calendar for the IPL and another for a credible annual World Test Championship. First, though, the elected delegates must look reality directly in the eye and concede that, for all the billions of dollars swilling around, there really is something rotten in the state of cricket. Without that acknowledgement, without that will for change and concern for the game’s long-term future, there can be no progress.

The current economic crisis assailing the wider world was born of short-termism and greed. Is it too much to hope that cricket is capable of greater wisdom?