English cricket getting caught deeper in the mire

Apr 14 2008 By Jack Bannister

Just about the longest domestic season starts on Wednesday and there will be 24 weeks before it finally draws its last breath on September 27.

Cricket has lost a great deal with football's domination of the calendar now grudgingly allowing a seven-week window in June and July - and even that will be filled by the European finals which Wayne Rooney & Co can only watch on television.

This season marks the end of county cricket as we know it, and even its early start is more low-key than usual, thanks to so many international stars ignoring well-paid county contracts to play in the Indian Premier League that starts on Friday.

This summer's roll of famous overseas Test cricketers will be short of Chris Gayle, Shane Warne (don't mention loyalty in Southampton), Shivnarine Chanderpaul, David Hussey, Zaheer Khan, Glenn McGrath et al.

Danish Kaneria will not join Essex until the end of May, Mahela Jayawardene will not pitch up to Derby until June, and Sanath Jayasuriya plays for Warwickshire in June and July only in the Twenty20 Cup. New Zealand start their tour here without captain Daniel Vettori and vice-captain Brendon McCullum.

The counties, belatedly, will revert to one so-called star from abroad but few are in the top bracket now that India has cornered the market. The England and Wales Cricket Board top brass won't be here because chairman Giles Clarke, chief executive David Collier and commercial director John Perera will see the first few of 59 Indian Premier League matches to be played in the next six weeks.

Their absence highlights the confused mess they have made of the international Twenty20 explosion. Never have so many administrative knickers been in such a twist, with the overtalkative Clarke vainly trying to face all ways at once. His stance shifts almost daily from an initial insistence that no centrally-contracted England cricketer would be allowed to play in India or even talk about it.

Kevin Pietersen dodges little in life, and he blasted away to produce a volte-face from Clarke. Now he says that England players can fill their barrows with rupees, but only after the 2009 Ashes series - the start of which destroys another tradition by being staged in Cardiff. And the Ashes Test match at Lord's next year clashes with the Open Championship at Turnberry. Absolutely brilliant!

Several counties are in revolt about the arbitrary availability classification of overseas cricketers involved with the official and rebel Twenty20 competitions. Jason Gillespie, Dale Blenkenstein, Hamish Marshall, Mushtaq Ahmed, Murray Goodwin and Eric Boje have been cleared but Justin Kemp and Andrew Hall are barred, with the further anomaly that Boje and Hall played for the rebels and are wanted by Northamptonshire. Yet Boje plays and Hall does not - and that is why the lawyers are rubbing their hands.

Clarke and the rest who will watch the launch in India have just thrown out the suggestions from their own Domestic Structures Committee, and rightly so for what was the equivalent of tinkering with the positions of the deckchairs

on the Titanic. Instead of briefing the same committee properly, they have appointed a new body, but this time without a players' representative to give their ideas an airing.

The main reason why the Indian concept will not work in this country is that the eight franchises went to cities for close to £400 million and not to existing cricket provinces. Imagine Lancashire and Warwickshire becoming Manchester and Birmingham, and what about a city such as Liverpool?

Then what about the annual payments to counties related to the number of English-qualified cricketers they play in each match? The lowest payments were made to Leicestershire and Northamptonshire who each received about £500,000 compared with Middlesex who received £200,000 more. Until short-term insularity is broken down to spend money properly instead of filling the wrong pockets, county cricket will be left further and further behind. Yet one of Clarke's dazzling ideas is to allow each county to play three overseas cricketers in the domestic Twenty20 Cup.

Now for the disturbing downside to the IPL. Match-fixing and betting corruption is not exactly unknown on the sub-continent, so what interpretation can be placed on this comment from Jitendra Singh, dean of the Nanyang Business School in Singapore. He stressed that the generation of profits in India is crucial, because team owners include India's richest man, Mukesh Ambani, who does not show too much patience with an under-performing asset. Singh says: "The owners must make money, and they will turn the screws on the IPL if the right results do not come about."

The sports agency IMG is the commercial barin behind the IPL, with Andrew Wildblood its driving force. His attitude is that "corruption is attributable to players' paltry fees, but the disparity between cricket and other sports is less now and, arguably, the temptation to take a bung is reduced."

Remember the late Hansie Cronje whose cricket earnings were far from paltry.

Arguably? Try telling that to the Bombay bookmakers when they officially handled half a billion pounds of illegal betting on a Test match between India and Pakistan. Let Wild-lood have the last word. Asked what IPL must deliver, he said: "It better be bloody exciting."

Some Twenty20 games can be too one-sided for that. And then what? There is an ominous side to all this. Don't blink this Friday, or you might miss something.