As soon as the authorities, broadcasters, sponsors and rich businessmen realised that young people prefer to watch bowlers being smashed all over the park for a few hours than a life and death struggle between bat and ball, that spelled trouble for longer forms of the game. The Indian Premier League turned everything on its head because of the amount of money involved and the glamour associated with it. Suddenly, there were billionaires and movie stars involved in cricket, the sport seemed sexier, the fans lapped up the razzmatazz and players became rich beyond their wildest dreams.
When I started playing cricket, hardly any cricketers were rich. I certainly didn’t expect to make my fortune playing cricket. My biggest ambition was to play Test cricket for England, and the old-fashioned way was to graft in domestic cricket, score lots of runs, get picked by your country, make a name for yourself on the international stage and then earn a load of cash playing Twenty20 for a few years at the end, almost as a bonus. But I suspect we’ll start seeing younger players taking a different route: playing loads of Twenty20, lapping up the glitz and glamour, making a load of cash and hoping that that will be a route into the England set-up. And if it isn’t a route into the England set-up, at least they might be financially secure.
The IPL and Twenty20 in general reflect modern society. I look at Twenty20 like Love Island. To get invited onto Love Island, people don’t have to do anything other than look good. And once they’re on it, they don’t have to do anything other than look good and be slightly amusing for a few weeks. Twenty20 cricket is similar. Players who aren’t even that good can get picked up by an IPL team and earn a lot of money for playing one or two decent innings. They might be the next big thing for five minutes, but at the end of their career hardly anyone will remember them. They’ll just be one of hundreds of IPL players who smashed a few sixes one night in Mumbai or Chennai or Jaipur for some team or other that they didn’t even have any connection to, other than the fact their owner decided to buy them at an auction, usually because some other rich person had bought a player they wanted. There are cricketers who are brilliant in all forms of the game, but they won’t be remembered for what they did for the Rajasthan Royals or Sunrisers Hyderabad, they’ll be remembered for the great things they did for their countries in Test matches or World Cups, whether it’s Ben Stokes for England, Steve Smith for Australia or even India’s own Virat Kohli.
But even I realise that saying that Tests are the ultimate form for cricket comes with a bit of snobbery. West Indies cricket was in a terrible place for years and years. They went from being the most powerful Test team in the world in the early 1990s to also-rans in the space of less than a decade. Kids fell out of love with it and they stopped producing world-class players, I suspect because people who might have been batsmen concentrated on football instead and people who might have been fast bowlers concentrated on basketball. But the fact there has been a bit of a resurgence in West Indies cricket is down to Twenty20. Players like Chris Gayle, who was probably the most famous Twenty20 player in the world for a few years, made cricket attractive again, the West Indies won a couple of World Cups and you could argue that without Twenty20, cricket would be on life support in the Caribbean. I’m not sure if the West Indies will ever be a force in Test cricket again, but if you’re winning Twenty20 World Cups, does it really matter? Then when you go to India, cricket there is like football is here, except maybe bigger. And Indian cricketers who make a name for themselves in the IPL earn more than Premier League footballers. Once they retire from cricket, they never have to work again. People argue that Twenty20 has ruined the delicate balance between bat and ball, but I wouldn’t worry about that. There are lots of problems with cricket, but I’ve never been one to complain about wickets being too flat and bowlers not having enough assistance. There were periods in history when bowlers had the edge, and now batsmen have got the upper hand. Fans have always liked to see runs, so we should give them what they want. The challenge for bowlers is to learn new things and be more skilful.
Far more of a worry than international cricket is first-class domestic cricket. The County Championship actually costs the counties money to play it, because hardly anyone watches it. How long can that carry on? It makes no sense. If hardly anyone watches something, year after year, the only rational thing to do is to stop doing it. Surely at some point in the not-too-distant future, someone will take over the domestic game – some innovative thinker, who’s maybe only a young kid now – and think, ‘Hang on a minute, I’m all for tradition, but if the County Championship is being played to empty grounds, what’s the point of it? Who’s it aimed at? Why are we spending money to keep this afloat when we could be playing Twenty20 cricket – which people watch and makes money – all the time instead? And players now get selected for England on T20 form.’ That’s when massive changes will take place, not just in England but all over the world. The purists will dig in and fight, but the changes might just save the game and assure its future.
No other branch of the entertainment industry would continue doing the same thing if hardly anyone was interested and it was losing money. If hardly anyone was watching Top Gear, they’d pull the plug mid-series. If a musical in the West End was only 10 per cent full every night, it wouldn’t last a month. If your band went on tour and was playing to a handful of people in arenas, the tour would be cut short and you’d probably break the band up. If the County Championship does ever come to an end, it will be like when old high-street chains like Woolworths go under. Everyone will be running around clutching their heads and crying and shouting about how much they loved it, and when you’ll ask them, ‘When was the last time you watched a County Championship game?’ they’ll reply, ‘Oh, not since I was a kid’, just like people hadn’t been to Woolworths for decades. How does it make sense to be upset about losing something you weren’t interested in in the first place? I’m interested in county cricket and I like it, but does it make sense?
The County Championship is the worst business proposition imaginable, an almost impossible sell. If you went on Dragon’s Den with that idea – ‘Right, it’s a game that hardly anyone will want to watch in person, which will lose loads of money and will be propped up by TV money, although hardly anyone will want to watch it on TV either, because they’re all watching sports that make sense like football instead’ – they’d not take you up on the offer. When I played the game, I wanted to win the County Championship so badly. The fact that I didn’t still irritates me today.
People sometimes ask me, ‘How can we make first-class cricket cooler or sexier?’ I’m sorry, but sitting there in the cold at eleven o’clock in the morning watching Derbyshire versus Leicestershire will never be cool or sexy to a lot of people. You can chuck millions of pounds of marketing at it – ‘Forget about Love Island, get yourselves down to the County Ground in Derby and you might get to see some cricket between the rain!’ – but people aren’t stupid. Watching Derbyshire versus Leicestershire wasn’t even cool or sexy 100 years ago. The difference is, things didn’t have to be cool or sexy in days gone by, they could be interesting and complicated and eccentric and that was fine. Now, unless something is marketed as cool or sexy, people think it’s a waste of time. Perhaps those people in authority who keep pushing the shorter forms of the game are the wise people and people like me and other ex-players and journalists who think the longer forms of the game are king are delusional.
At least you used to be able to say that the County Championship was a breeding ground for Test cricketers, but even that’s not the case any more. Nowadays, someone will score a few runs in Twenty20 cricket, play a few funky shots and hit a few sixes, and everyone will be talking about them playing Test cricket for England. Or a player will be rested for England games and end up playing in the IPL instead, for a lot more money. If someone wants to prioritise playing Twenty20 cricket for franchises all over the world, good luck to them. But if you want to play Test cricket for England, you’ve got to earn your spot by churning out run
s week in, week out in the County Championship and be available when picked. Otherwise, it makes first-class cricket irrelevant.
I’m not sure the cricket authorities really know what they want cricket to be. We’ve got Twenty20 cricket, 40-over cricket, 50-over cricket, three-day cricket, five-day cricket – which some people think should become four-day cricket. They seem to be chucking as much as they can at a wall and hoping something sticks, and now they’ve come up with a new tournament called The Hundred. The Hundred has had a lot of criticism from traditionalists, not least because it’s set to be played by city-based franchises rather than the traditional counties. But I get what they’re trying to do – put on a competition in the summer holidays, when the weather is at its best and families are looking for things to do, broadcast it on the BBC, which has to be a good thing, and build everything else around it. I hope it’s a success and I’ll do my best to make it one.
Being a cricket presenter isn’t necessarily what I want to be, but I felt like I had some sort of responsibility to get involved with The Hundred. There’s been unprecedented amounts of money spent on it (although probably not enough to get the Indian lads interested) and if it doesn’t work, the repercussions for the game could be terrible. So I think we’ve all got to try and make it work, even if we might have some misgivings about the tweaks they’ve made, like introducing city franchises and 10-ball overs. Did I think we needed another format? Probably not. But when all things are said and done, and whatever you want to call it, it’s just another game of cricket. It’s people bowling and people trying to hit fours and sixes and generally entertain.
I remember when the ECB signed a deal with Ian Stanford for a $20 million Twenty20 match between England and a West Indies XI in 2008 and everyone going on about how it might be the end of cricket as we know it. But as soon as they realised they stood to earn a few quid from it, loads of those ex-players suddenly wanted in on it. Ian Botham came out and said he loved the idea, said Stanford could be great for the game. And then when it all went tits up, he said that the ECB should never have gone along with it. It’s funny what money does to people, and we’re seeing it with The Hundred. I’ve had conversations with people who have said how rubbish and pointless it’s going to be, and the next week I’ve found out that they’re going to be working on it. Then they’re all over the media, telling everyone how it could be the saviour of English cricket. As for the players involved, of course they’ll be happy with it, because it means they’ll get to bag a few more quid and show off their talents on terrestrial TV.
But something has got to give. It won’t be 50-over cricket, because that allows for so much advertising, which funds the game, especially in India. And it won’t be Twenty20 cricket, because it’s still popular. So I suspect it will be the first-class game. I’ve always been an advocate for fewer teams playing fewer first-class games of a better standard. That might mean creating regional teams, like the state competition in Australia. Their competition isn’t that strong, but if more care was taken over an English regional competition, the standards were high and games were marketed as events, I think it could be a success. Just as important, it would be a far better breeding ground for Test cricketers. But that’s not going to happen any time soon, because the people in charge of the counties are incredibly proud to be part of the County Championship and too steeped in tradition to support anything that threatens their existence.
Ultimately, the public decides how successful or out of time something is, and they’ve been deciding with their feet and remote controls for a long time now. Cricket’s fundamental problem is that times have changed. Nothing can survive on tradition and nostalgia alone and almost everything eventually goes out of fashion. Look at snooker: in the 1980s, it was all the rage. Even before he became world champion, Dennis Taylor was a household name mainly because he wore his glasses upside down and Kirk Stephens was rock and roll because he wore a white waistcoat. Now, almost everyone you meet thinks snooker is dull, even though the standard is miles better than it was back then. I’d also argue that the standard of cricket is higher than it was. There are fewer batsmen who can stay at the crease for hours on end, but they have got more skilful and found lots of different ways of scoring runs. For that reason, I’d also say it’s a better product than it was. But just as snooker will always be snooker, cricket will always be cricket. Either you’ll be into it or you won’t, however much they try to dress it up or make it cooler or sexier.
The one thing that leaves me cold about cricket, as it does with all sports, is the fact it’s become so tied to technology. I’m not a technophobe, I just think that there’s too much technology about that solves problems that don’t exist. That sort of technology leaves me cold, whether it’s to do with sport, cars or anything really. When I’m driving a fast car, I actually want to be driving it, not the car driving me. I don’t want to be looking at a load of touch screens, I just want a speed dial to tell me how fast I’m going and hear the roaring. Too much reliance on technology makes things sterile. Look at Formula 1, it should be the most exciting sport in the world, but an awful lot of people find it dull. In modern sport, there is so much computer analysis and everything is so professional and planned to within an inch of its life, it’s almost as if they’re trying to take chance out of it. I’ve always said that sport is an art, not a science. It should be creative and unpredictable, not nerdy and calculated. That’s why people love sportspeople who are unconventional and why Tyson Fury is so popular. He’s flawed but he’s interesting. In fact, he’s interesting because he’s flawed. He’s a free spirit and you’re never quite sure what’s going to happen when he speaks into a microphone or enters a ring. When he comes on my TV screen, I can’t take my eyes off him.
Ben Stokes is similar. He’s a brilliant cricketer, but I wouldn’t put my house on him. He might walk out and score the best 100 you’ve ever seen or he might get caught in the slips third ball, having a right go. I’d rather that than watch someone blunt 100 in a day and a half. Not interested. People don’t like perfection, which is why when a sportsperson gets too good, the public turns on them. ‘Good’ becomes synonymous with ‘boring’. We’ve seen it across all sports, from Steve Davis in snooker to Michael Schumacher in Formula 1 to Floyd Mayweather in boxing. Steve Smith is getting to be that way, unless you’re Australian. His Test average is 63, so he’s going to get at least that whenever he bats. Well done, Steve. I don’t like predictability and probably would have hated Don Bradman. Imagine going to watch a cricket match and knowing that someone was probably going to score a 100?
I think Steve Smith is brilliant, as a player and a bloke, and I won’t hear a bad word against him. But as I said when I interviewed him in Australia a few years ago, ‘Steve, to me you’re like beetroot in a sandwich.’ He was a bit perplexed, so I had to explain to him that, like beetroot in a sandwich (which Aussies love), he shouldn’t really work but he does. As a player, he annoys me so much. I don’t know what I’d do if I had to bowl to Steve Smith. I’d probably abuse the shit out of him. I’d have to. And what makes him more annoying is the fact that he doesn’t mean to be annoying. Just the way he leaves the ball would drive me round the bend. I wouldn’t be able to stop myself having a go at him. But then I’d feel all conflicted, because he’s such a nice lad. It’s easier to get stuck into someone when you know they’re a prick.
Other than the abuse, I’d bowl to him just like any other batter. I’d bowl my best ball, pitch it on or just outside off-stump. Bowlers create more problems for themselves by changing what they usually do to suit him. Just bowl as you normally would and make him hit your best balls. If he’s doing that successfully, just try and hit him on the head. Bowl bouncers and set fields for that. But that’s easier said than done, because if he started doing that extravagant leave of his, it would wind me up so much. The last person I saw leave a ball like that was England wicketkeeper Jack Russell, and everyone thought he was daft.
Actually, Jack Russell was
daft. When I was 17, I was 12th man for Jack and one of my jobs was making his Weetabix at lunch. He gave me strict instructions to put milk on his Weetabix at 1.04, so that they were ready for him when he came off at 1.15. The first two days were fine, but on the third day I put the milk on a bit late. I gave him his Weetabix, he had a taste and said, ‘Did you put the milk on a 1.11?
‘No, Jack, 1.04, just like you said.’
‘You did, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, Jack. Sorry, Jack, I forgot . . . ’
Nowadays, I’m always being asked if Ben Stokes is better than I was. Personally, I think it’s a bit unfair on Ben, because he’s a left-handed batsman and I got left-handed batsmen out in my sleep. Ask Adam Gilchrist and Brian Lara! I’m only joking. Sort of. Let’s just say that I was a better bowler than he is and he’s a better left-handed batter than me. Saying that, I’d get Ben out every day of the week . . . But seriously, as well as being a fine player, Ben now has something that’s impossible to quantify: stature. Ian Botham had the same thing, and I had it a little bit. If you considered Ben’s bowling in isolation, you’d think it was just all right. He’s a decent bowler, because he’s quite quick and swings it. However, because it’s Ben Stokes bowling those same deliveries, it’s a completely different proposition. Whenever Ben comes on to bowl, it’s an event. Everyone is thinking, ‘Ben Stokes has got the ball in his hands – and he makes things happen.’ Botham was the same in the second part of his career. He’d be sending down deliveries at barely 80 mph and getting wickets based on reputation, because batsmen were playing the man rather than the ball. And when Ben walks out to bat, you can almost see the panic on the faces of opposition players. Bowlers will be thinking about doing things differently, instead of doing what they should do, which is bowl their best deliveries.
Right, Said Fred Page 5
