By Kamila Shamsie/The Guardian
When the Ashes are in progress in England and Wales, it becomes possible, for a while, to imagine that cricket is a game of continuity rather than change, with traditions, uniforms and rivalries dating back well over 100 years. If you grew up with cricket in the subcontinent, though, chances are you always saw the game as part of a story about the exuberant casting off of the shackles of empire. But the new documentary Death of a Gentleman suggests that this tale is no less outmoded than the one about continuity.
Cricket arrived on the subcontinent with colonialism. “East will always be east and west, west, but the crease is not a very broad line of demarcation - so narrow, indeed, that it ought to bring about friendly relations,” wrote Lord Harris , whose name is synonymous with the introduction of cricket to the subcontinent.
Harris’s idea was that cricket could help maintain the racial hierarchy of empire while also fostering enough good feeling to quell rebellious thoughts. Stunningly, Harris’s racial hierarchy stayed in place within international cricket until the mid-1990s.
Up to that point the game’s governing body, the International Cricket Council - the ICC - was run by the men who ran English cricket, and both England and Australia had a veto. But by then there was no denying the power of the Asian countries. In recognition of the changed landscape, all vetoes and special privileges for England and Australia were scrapped, and for the first time the ICC had a non-white, non-English chairman in Sir Clyde Walcott . It was hailed as the start of an egalitarian era and the end of imperial attitudes. All that the ICC was now missing in the minds of many people, including the journalist Mihir Bose , was “the money it needed to widen the game’s horizons”.
For many years the ICC’s only revenue was from member subscriptions, but once it started selling broadcast rights in the late 90s all that changed (and with that change, free-to-air cricket soon disappeared from British television screens).
In the period 2015-23 it is estimated that the ICC will have $2.5bn in revenue . Rather than widening the game’s horizons, as Death of a Gentleman reveals, this vast influx of money has led to a greater concentration of power and influence. In 2014 the short-lived egalitarian structure of the ICC was changed to reflect the realities that lurked beneath the structure: India, England and Australia - the “big three” countries - formed an oligarchy that would control many of the ICC’s decisions, including those around broadcast rights, and would claim most of its revenue. But the lion’s share of the lion’s share would go to India - from where the vast majority of all cricketing revenue arises, thanks to its cricket-mad population of 1.2 billion.
Although it was clearly to the disadvantage of the other seven nations of the ICC to agree, most did - with Pakistan and Sri Lanka abstaining. Rumours swirled around that a mix of threats and incentives convinced the other nations to vote against their own best interests.
Even so, there were still those who wanted to tell this tale as one of the triumph of a particularly dynamic former colony. Death of a Gentleman, however, tells a more convincing kind of tale - one of intimidation, bad governance and corruption, in which international cricket itself is the loser.
And in the process, the documentary reveals how stories about national narratives dissolve when enough money enters the frame.
At the end, I didn’t find myself thinking of books or films about gaining independence from empire, but instead of Ned Beatty’s speech to Peter Finch in Network : “You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples … There are no third worlds. There is no west. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variant, multi-national dominion of dollars.”
Set against this dominion is the campaign Change Cricket, spearheaded by the makers of Death of a Gentleman - Jarrod Kimber and Sam Collins. Their aim is to bring independent, transparent governance to the ICC, something that was proposed in an independent governance review of the ICC - the Woolf report - in 2012. A new system of governance would, among other things, lead to a change in revenue distribution, according to Change Cricket. At the heart of the campaign is an online petition asking sports ministers to demand changes in the “cricketing cabal”.
Is this likely to work? Probably not. But when Jimmy Anderson uproots the stumps , or Steve Smith flicks another ball to the boundary, it’s impossible not to want to sign the petition - just to ally yourself with the ones who truly love the game.
Steven Finn took six wickets in Australia’s second innings.
