The big mixed wolf

How many superpowers does it take to mess up a world? The usual answer is one - when there are two or more, they keep each other in check. If there's just the one, we get a man like George W Bush running the show.

How many superpowers does cricket have? Hmm, let's think. On the field, it has one - Australia, wobbling a bit and in transition, but still top of both world championships. Off the field, cricket also has one superpower - India, finally converting her massive population into dollars. So there are two superpowers. Or are there? Well, there would be if the cricket world was striking the right balance between sport and business. But it isn't.

Business has the upper hand. TV contracts go to the broadcasters with the most money, not those with the most viewers. Administrators express themselves in the grim, grey jargon of the businessman. Players blithely promote companies that run sweatshops, cause pollution, create obesity, collude with tyrants. Even the ICC aspires to be a brand. Money doesn't talk, it shouts, so cricket's only real superpower is the country with the fattest wallet. The new-look Indian board (BCCI) is behaving as if it had only just worked this out.

In a few weeks, the BCCI has torpedoed the Champions' Trophy, torn up the Future Tours Programme (FTP), walked all over the little guys (cancelling New Zealand, dissing Bangladesh), cosied up to the biggish boys (Australia to tour India annually, England every four years), and turned itself into a TV production company. Soon, commentators on all India's home games will be working for the board, so don't expect much free comment there. Under Sourav Ganguly, the Indian team finally developed a cutting edge. Now, just as the Ganguly era ends, the men in ties are following suit.

On Sunday Mike Atherton, one of the shrewder ex-players in the press box, called India a selfish bully. Hard to argue with that, but there is another side to the story. The Champions' Trophy has yet to find a decent format, let alone a place in cricket lovers' hearts. The FTP has done more harm than good, abolishing the one-off Test (except when it suited ICC for its Super "Series"), creating far too many two- and three-Test series, and making five-Test series even harder to schedule. And someone had to do something about Bangladesh. So far, the new India isn't the big bad wolf: it's the big mixed wolf.

Twilight of the nags
A funny thing didn't happen in the Australia-South Africa series. Glenn McGrath and Shaun Pollock didn't take wickets. The two most exacting seamers of the past decade were reduced to stock bowlers. Their averages were poor - 40 for McGrath, 54 for Pollock - but it was their strike rates that were really laughable: McGrath needed 99 balls for each wicket, Pollock 107. It can't have been much consolation that each was the most economical bowler on his side.

For years, these two have nagged away on a perfect length, just outside off stump, getting plenty of lift and a little movement (McGrath) or vice-versa (Pollock). They have given long service, taken 1595 international wickets between them, but for the moment, possibly for good, the snap has gone. The rising generation of fast bowlers are a different breed, delivering more ferocity and less precision. We are witnessing the end of a game of patience.

The other side of Kerry Packer
The tributes to Kerry Packer keep on coming, and they all call him a revolutionary. He certainly was in 1977, but the label didn't fit for long. By 1979 he had reached a compromise with the Australian board. And by the time I started covering cricket, in 1990, Packer had become a conservative. His personal baby, the annual triangular series of 50-over internationals, was exposed as a bore. Spectators turned up, because Australia's cities are far-flung and it's a great country for floodlit viewing. But as sport, the B&H, Carlton, VB or whatever you called it was a dud, long-winded and repetitive. The triangle was too often one-sided.

If Packer had been the radical visionary that the obits have depicted, he would have sorted this out. Instead he let it dribble on and on. He had become part of the establishment. His TV coverage, on Channel 9, was similarly stolid, and was made to look it as soon as Britain's Channel 4 entered the picture. His revolution had turned into Animal Farm: cricket lovers looked from pig to man, and man to pig, and it was impossible to tell which was which.