Happy New Year: welcome to catastrophe
It would be nice to write a cheery message to the game for 2025. But...
2024 went out with a blast. Classic Test matches wherever you looked. Just hours ago, Glenn Maxwell took such a ridiculous relay catch in the BBL that it made you think, what next? Is he going to scorpion kick the ball back in play? You’ve seen a teenager on Test debut ramping a bowler who is averaging 19 for his 200 wickets over the keeper for six in front of 90,000 people and then giving it the full badge kiss after reaching 50. The game on the field is accelerating with the culture, moving fast. The game is hot right now.
Away from the field, though, two catastrophes loom.
The first is Afghanistan. Once the Taliban banned their women’s cricket team, the country no longer qualified for full membership of the ICC. This fact had been quietly and tacitly ignored within the game, the general and benevolent view being that cricket in Afghanistan is one of the rare forces for good, something that looks outwards and engages, an honour so hard won it seemed unfair to take it away because of regime change that cricket could do nothing to stop.
It was a judgement call for some, not even an issue for others, but it appeared contained within cricket’s cordon sanitaire. World leaders weren’t being exercised by the line up for the ICC Trophy or a very occasional Test match.
So how did it look from the outside, in the real world? Well, for a long time, no-one was looking at all.
In September, Janice Turner wrote a column for The Times headlined, Time To Confront The Taliban’s Gender Apartheid. I hope that she and they won’t mind the longer quote reproduced here:
Among the Taliban’s first acts when it roared into Kabul three years ago was banning the women’s cricket team, exiling some players and threatening to kill those who remained if they picked up a bat again. Sport was only the first joy removed from Afghan women’s lives.
The Taliban is certainly thorough. First it stopped girls attending school and university, removed women from most jobs and demanded they cover themselves in chadors head to toe. Then it pondered other female pleasures, barring women from gyms, beauty salons, hairdressers and public parks, and making shopping trips, eating out, even buying a coffee illegal without a male chaperone. But a few chinks of happiness remained, so last month it banned the female voice from singing, reciting and speaking in public.
Even then, these devious women might post on Instagram or enjoy the solace of WhatsApp, so now Taliban female spies are tasked with infiltrating friendship groups to punish all remaining private joys.
And even then, nothing. I confess here that I didn’t read the column at the time. It was only when the website re-ran it as part of its Best of 2024 review that it began to get some traction.
That traction is only on X at the moment, calling on the England team not to fulfill its Champions Trophy fixture against Afghanistan at the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore on 26 February. Jonathan Trott, the Afghanistan coach and former England number three, also had his job choice questioned in robust terms.
The voices will grow louder as the fixture gets closer, individual players will be asked to comment and take a position in press conferences. It’s a fraught situation, and yet it is clear cut, too. The women of Afghanistan are brutally oppressed, and it cannot be ignored for the sake of the cricket.
As Turner wrote later in the column, the Taliban government is not recognised by any nation. The crime of Gender Apartheid has been coded into international law. She goes on:
This new crime could allow the prosecution of the Taliban in international courts and would declare its unique evils to the world. Could the International Cricket Council keep an apartheid nation on its fixture lists? Boycotting the Afghan team would not be a peevish act but the deployment of a rare political lever against the Taliban, which permitted the men’s game when it forbade all other pastimes. Its leaders both love the sport and know a ban would be too unpopular to sustain. Afghan players pose regularly with Taliban chiefs, who relish victory over a team such as England. A boycott would hurt.
That time has come. It’s easy for me to say, sitting here in rainy England and shoving a few words around a screen. It’s harder for the players, especially the younger ones, bound up in the game. And it’s difficult for the game, which has different agendas and perspectives wherever you look.
When I was working on Being Geoffrey Boycott with Geoffrey, we got to the point in his story when he went on a rebel tour of South Africa. There were seven tours in all, including two by West Indies. Boycott’s issue was one of fairness. He was willing not to go if the rest of the country joined him, if British Airways stopped making money from flights and British banks stopped investing and so on. He felt it unfair that it was – at the time – only cricketers being asked to turn down the money in an era when cricketers were not paid in the way that they are now and a rebel tour might offer some kind of financial security beyond the yearly county deal and the fee for playing a Test match.
This is a different situation, a different world. No-one is engaging with the Taliban, and the Taliban don’t care. No businesses are trading. There’s no clamour for the expat lifestyle in Kabul. They do not yearn for the West. The one thing the Taliban may care about is cricket. And perhaps they won’t care enough about that, either. But if England refused to play them it would stand with the rights of half of the human race, just this once.
The other calamity is of course The Hundred sale, mercifully frivolous compared to events above. At risk of overpraising The Times - other news outlets are available - Mike Atherton wrote another great piece on the upcoming fiscal jamboree.
Hampshire have demutualised and been bought by the group that controls the Delhi Capitals IPL team and several other franchise interests worldwide. Yorkshire may well be next to come out of ownership by its members. Other counties will follow, because it’s the only way, outside of old school benefactors, that they can generate any meaningful investment.
The Delhi group own the Utilia Bowl ground, and, should they - and it’s a wild guess here - buy the Southern Brave franchise, they will have the 49 per cent sold by the ECB, and the 51 per cent retained by the ‘home’ county.
What is it they want to buy, exactly? The right to merch out the lovely green jumpers that the Brave wear? The chance (admittedly enticing) to employ James Vince on a global basis? The link-up with a crisp and junk food sponsor? The opportunity to play 100 ball cricket, the format for people that don’t like cricket?
No, not that. What they want to buy is what is really for sale: the month of August and access to some of the most famous and storied grounds in England. That is what is being sold. Prime summer, prime real estate. The idea that any measure of control over anything might be retained once the sales go through is for the birds. How long will a host county hang on to its 51 per cent share when the wallets are opened before their hungry eyes? Which bidder wants to stick on 49 per cent of their investment? The Dehli group have already answered that question.
The owners will be in charge of everything from the format - already being discussed as returning to T20 once the TV deal expires, because India isn’t bothered about shorter matches or people that don’t like cricket – to the team names and which players play for them.
And it’s a buyer’s market, whatever the ECB try and tell you. What they are selling can only be sold once, and it can’t be bought back once it’s gone. That’s why, whatever jazzy headline figure they manage to come up with when the bids are in, it will not be enough. Not for what they’re selling, which will be gone forever.
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