Cricket's Cheap Thrills So Costly
The Age
Wednesday October 30, 1996
New Delhi, Tuesday
Former champion Indian spinner Bishen Bedi had just finished rehearsing in the nets with Peter McIntyre the infinite range of wiles and guiles he used to seduce batsmen to their ruin in Test cricket when the subject of limited-overs cricket arose.
Exclaimed Bedi: "Bah! (or whatever is the Hindi equivalent). A one-day match is like a one-night stand."
Bedi, as ever, was right on the spot. Worse, the cricket world is going through its own '60s at the moment (30 years after the real world, of course), an era of free love, cheap thrills and instant gratification. And this revolution has no Beatles or Rolling Stones to lend romance to it.
No sooner does one one-day series finish than another begins, or even sooner. This Titan tournament is still in its qualifying stages, yet in Sharjah, the Singer Champions Trophy is already under way.
The Orissa Cricket Association announced yesterday that it is planning a four-nation tournament in Cuttack next year, and in Gwalior, another anonymous series is to be played to celebrate some anniversary or other.
More than 120 one-day internationals will have been played around the world by the end of the calendar year - an unprecedented number - and there will probably be more next year. The proliferation of one-day competitions is beginning to burst the pages of Wisden Cricket Almanac. Laments editor Matthew Engel: "And the scores are always the same."
This would all be well and good if it meant something. It does not. Cricket seems to be thriving, but all it is doing is going around in ever-decreasing circles, making lots of dollars and no sense. Australia has not yet won a match here, yet could still make the final of the tournament and - one-day cricket being the affair of the day that it is - could win it.
One-day matches can be titillating in their moment, but are hardly ever memorable. Posterity shuns them. Quickly: who won last year's World Series? Asia Cup? Mandela Trophy? Only the World Cup, which gathers together all the countries in a genuine championship, outlives its day.
It is misleading to pretend that there is a one-day circuit. These tournaments are arranged at random, by whomever has the power, money and wherewithal. They have no context, prove nothing, are empty for players and fans except for whatever fleeting satisfaction they bring on the day.
Meanwhile, they compel cricketers to live as itinerants. Australia played four matches in nearly three weeks in Sri Lanka and has played three matches in two-and-a-half weeks since its lonely Test match here.
The rest of the time is for filling in. They train for the sake of training, playing themselves into form and out of it again in the nets. They run mini-triathlons, swim and lift weights, notwithstanding trainer Errol Alcott's concession that fitness matters in cricket only up to a point.
When they are through with fitness, they lie around the pool, sleep and shop. Then they make a mad rush, often in the small hours of the night in this country, for the next venue, the next match, the next result.
They get little satisfaction, even in victory. Jason Gillespie, who has played three one-dayers for Australia, says he would swap them and his next 50 for the chance to play one Test.
He is 21, has never known a time when there was no one-day cricket and so cannot be accused of soppy sentimentality. It is just that as a cricketer with gifts, ideas and imagination, he knows already that limited-overs cricket is by definition a limited form of the game.
Tacitly, Australian players and officials agree nearly to a man that these one-day events are hollow, even debilitating to their development, but tact demands that they stay silent.
Australia increasingly finds that it has to agree to make these tours - and enthuse about them - to maintain good relations with countries whose reciprocal goodwill it needs to maintain the schedule it prefers at home.
Engel thinks the problem runs deeper than the spread of the one-day plague. He thinks too much cricket around the world now is played without any more profound meaning than immediate victory or defeat, and therefore without fulfilment. One Test is played here, two there, wherever they can be squeezed between one-day fixtures. Australia and England are to some extent immune, he says, because they have a regular and popular round of Test cricket.
But in other countries, Tests are played irregularly and for appearance's sake. Pakistan and Zimbabwe dashed off two Tests in the past fortnight, then went back with alacrity to the one-day merry-go-round.
Engel, no one's idea of a stuffy conservative, is attempting through Wisden to force some meaning into the hotchpotch by formulating a Test table based on the last home and away series played by each country against all others.
On the basis of Australia's defeat in the one-off Test - ergo, series - in Delhi, it has been nudged out of first place on the table by South Africa. If this scheme wins official approbation, as Engel hopes, it will at least make countries wary of agreeing to series of less than three Tests. Whether the Asian power block, specifically India, would ever submit to regulation from afar is doubtful. The International Cricket Council has little jurisdiction anyway, and whatever it has, India operates outside it.
One-day cricket, coupled with pay television, has proved so lucrative in and for India that Jagmohan Dalmiya, the all-powerful secretary of the Indian board, scarcely bothers to conceal his fixation with it.
New chairman Raj Singh Dungapur, new coach Madan Lal and new captain Sachin Tendulkar have all expressed reservations about the explosion of one-day cricket and their anxiety for more Tests.
Only last Sunday, as the rain tumbled down in Cuttack, Madan Lal was ruminating on the rare fascination of a sustained battle of wits and nerve between a quality batsman and bowler in a Test match. He would love to see his young side exposed to much more of it.
But Dalmiya seems to miss these niceties. He talks freely of a Pan-Pacific one-day circuit that will bring untold riches to his country which Australia can take or leave.
No one is arguing that one-day cricket does not belong - it pays the bills for a start and is popular in its own right - only that it has its place. At the moment, it is all over the place.
As a prominent cricket person noted this week: "If what we are looking at is the future of the game, it is stuffed." Which is more or less what Bedi was saying when we began.
PETER ROEBUCK:
Australian cricket is in trouble. Far from lasting a decade, or a century, as had been predicted, its period of domination may not survive the year. -- PAGE 15
© 1996 The Age