Talking Cricket: Simon Hughes on the WI rebels (14 November 1998)

14 November 1998

Talking Cricket: Simon Hughes on the WI rebels

By Simon Hughes

REMEMBER that comfortable old phrase "no player's bigger than the game"? It has become obsolete, as events in the last few days illustrate. His three-month anger strike over, Pierre van Hooijdonk was back in the Nottingham Forest team last Saturday despite admitting: "If I play and do badly it won't be my fault because I'm not fit." They lost 1-0 but he still came on as a substitute at Manchester United during the week to unqualified cheers from the Forest fans.

Meanwhile Brian Lara was holding the West Indies Cricket Board virtually to ransom. Sacked as captain after demands for extra pay on the tour of South Africa, he and co-plaintiff Carl Hooper were hurriedly reinstated when the money suddenly materialised. And let's not forget that in America, there is still an impasse in the salary dispute between National Basketball Association players and owners.

In the 1990s the players are the game, and they know it. Footballers who can read see Sky paying £673 million for four years' Premiership action and understandably want a piece of it. Ever since Fabrizio Ravanelli commanded a reported £42,000 per week for Middlesbrough in 1996-97 salaries have got silly. Van Hooijdonk, offered a weekly rise of £7,000 at Celtic last year, condemned it as "good enough for the homeless but not for an international striker". Many Premiership players now earn more than their managers. Television has vested them with a huge amount of power and mob rule beckons.

Football was the catalyst for Lara's stance. His boyhood friend, Dwight Yorke, is the talk of Old Trafford with his slick skills and smiling demeanour. More importantly he banked a signing-on fee of £1 million and earns £23,000 per week. Lara, at present the No 1 drawcard in world cricket, would have barely made that on the whole five-Test, seven one-day international South African tour.

Lara, whose palatial home in Trinidad contains a marble staircase and no less than three swimming pools, has always campaigned for what he felt he was worth, consuming agents like Mike Gatting devours steak and kidney. Even when the deals were done, no one was quite sure when he would turn up. As Warwickshire captain last year, he once arrived at a Sunday League game after the start.

Lara's ally, Carl Hooper, is a kindred spirit. Under contract to Kent last season, he arrived at the ground only minutes before the first match, decided it was too cold and went home.

Twenty-one years since the advent of Kerry Packer, cricket is vulnerable again. His World Series Cricket was born out of international players' disenchantment and international administrators' fudging. No Test player in the world earns £5,000 per match, the sort of daily rate applicable to money brokers and management consultants. There is still no world league of Test cricket, despite it being first mooted some years ago.

Despondency has been spreading like montezuma's revenge. The Australian players recently threatened strike action unless their demands were met. They were. You can visualise the same thing happening in India and Pakistan, unless they request a free weekly bet. Having secured a lucrative television deal, the England and Wales Cricket Board are about to contract the nucleus of the England squad centrally, which could cause rifts within and beyond the team. Sports agents, the new stockbrokers, will hover like vultures.

When the Packer business surfaced in the 1970s there were great fears for the future of the game. In fact it benefited, with better pay and a higher profile. The 1999 World Cup in England is the perfect platform to launch new international cricketing initiatives. If the officials don't grasp this particular nettle, the pirates will pounce and the cricket world could once again become all for one rather than one for all.

Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)