cricket news: Death Of A Gentleman: A Response

ADMIN · August 11, 2015

Sam Collins and Jarrod Kimber’s Death Of A Gentleman (henceforth Death) is, in their own words, a story “about people, about power, about greed, and about the endless pursuit of more.” What started out as a story about Test Cricket became, in the process of its making, a story about the (mal)administration of the game. There is much in the story that will aggravate you if you are a nouveau riche admirer of the paradoxically nationalistic de-nationalization of the game via the IPL and its many imitators.

I watched the film as an unabashed supporter of the view that the point of the ICC is twofold. First, to run the game so that there are more competitive teams playing Test Cricket than before. Second, to invest in new countries and grow the game so that more people around the world learn about it and play it. The game needs to make money to serve these two ends and to ensure that players make a decent living (I don’t mean incomes comparable to those of top club footballers). This, in my view, sufficiently describes the budget and the purpose of the ICC.

The film wants to interrupt the relentless, totalizing logic of profit. The many sides of the argument are presented fairly. The film is at its best when it is allowing its informants to speak for themselves. It is at its most limited when engaged in its many allusions (cinematic or otherwise), especially the one about cricket being “a gentleman’s game”. It is debatable whether the ICC, in any of its forms, has ever been interested in running a gentleman’s game, except perhaps during the short interlude after India led a revolt against the veto. Has cricket (the sport in general) been the “gentleman’s game”? Most certainly. But I wonder if even this is exclusively true of cricket in the sense that Collins and Kimber use the word “Gentleman” (as opposed to “Gentleman” in Gentlemen vs Players which refers to a gendered social class). But that is a separate debate. For now, lets accept the trope about the “gentleman’s game”.

It is the view of Giles Clarke and N Srinivasan that national boards at the ICC table are absolutely right to look after their own interests. It is not Clarke and Srinivasan’s view that the ICC’s interests must come second to those of BCCI or ECB. It is their view that the ICC’s interests, such as they are, are only relevant to the extent that they are useful to their respective national boards. In one of the most convincing parts of the film, this particular position of the two board bosses is shown to be a dereliction of their duty as officers of the ICC’s Board.

As someone who broadly agrees with Collins and Kimber’s point of view, what is interesting about the film is how unconvincing the opposition to the Big Three is. In order to oppose the Big Three effectively, one would have to explain clearly what the larger interests of the game might mean, what “governance” means, and what the ambitions of the game should be. The preservation of Test Cricket and the expansion of the game to Ireland, Afghanistan, Scotland and beyond are two distinct pursuits which are not necessarily aligned. It is also far from clear that getting cricket involved in the Olympics is a good thing. The Olympics is notorious for its corrupt bidding processes, ruinous financial demands on its hosts and general capacity for skullduggery which makes the ICC look like a honor society on its best behavior by comparison. Things have gotten so bad that it is becoming difficult to find cities and nations willing to host the event. Is associating cricket with all that corruption and introducing cricket to money at that scale (the rights to the 2012 London Olympics alone went for 2.6 billion dollars) a good thing? Are there other, potentially less pyrrhic ways of introducing the game to China? One has to keep in mind that a fifth of the world’s population lives in China, and to talk to these people in any organized way one has to go through the Chinese Government and probably also through the Chinese Communist Party. Perhaps the distribution of revenue could be indexed in some way to population.

The uncharitable viewer would be forgiven for concluding that Death is preaching to the choir and is limited only to confirming suspicions that Srinivasan, Clarke and Edwards are not your father’s Board bosses.

Here, for example, is Arun Lal in Death:

“Nobody has forced it down anybody’s gullet. Its what the people want. Its what the reality is. But, I am no one to say that Test Cricket must be preserved at all costs. Eventually it will be the people who will decide.”

This is the sort of abdication which runs through Death. Michael Holding, Rahul Dravid and all the other former players who have not, as far as one can tell, declined employment in series involving the Big Three since January 2014 are hardly the most credible voices in this context. Even Ian Chappell reportedly declined to work in a series in India because the BCCI wanted to set conditions on what he could talk about, not more generally because it was the BCCI. Tony Greig was the radical of his day, backing Kerry Packer in his efforts to normalize the role of the profit-motive in cricket.

Lal is not the worst of the lot. A short while after offering this escheresque paragraph, he offers a novel argument. Lal’s view is that the IPL lacks the intricacies of Test Cricket, and so there is a risk that the IPL may be popular today simply because it is fashionable today. Once this wears off, it will have nothing to sustain itself. But while it is in fashion, it is undermining Test cricket. And this is the real worry - that eventually, we will be left with nothing but a diminished Test match game.

The narrative arc of the film fails to account for the basis of the explosion of revenue in cricket - the TV friendly format that is T20. This format was not invented by Lalit Modi or the BCCI. It was invented in England, precisely because the existing forms of the game were deemed by the marketing men of the ECB to be insufficiently lucrative. The hostile takeover by the the Big Three is no more than the logical culmination of that radical move in England where the game was first dumbed down for television. Would Subhash Chandra and the Essel Group have launched the Indian Cricket League (ICL) were it not for the fact that T20 was proven to be financially lucrative in England? Would the BCCI, which, as late as 2007, was dismissive of T20, have backed an venture like the IPL without the threat of the ICL?

If one is looking for original sin, perhaps there are two. First, the invention of T20 in England as a successful TV friendly form of cricket. Second, the apparent irregularities which prompted Subhash Chandra (whose bids for TV rights in 2000 and 2005 were rejected allegedly despite being higher than the winning bids because his company was deemed to lack sports broadcasting experience) to challenge BCCI.

But all this is perhaps the point. The Big Three have had their way because the rest of cricket is hopelessly weak. Genies have historically been unwilling to go back into the bottles they escaped from. When Srinivasan and Clarke say they are looking after the interests of their respective boards, it is worth considering what this really means. It seems to me that it means that BCCI and ECB, far from being the all-powerful behemoths they appear to be, are more frightened than ever that their monopoly over the game in India and England will be challenged by some corporate behemoth. The remorseless logic of capitalism dictates that if BCCI and ECB don’t squeeze out every last dollar out of cricket, someone else will. It could be possible for Governments to recognize their respective Cricket Boards as legitimate and necessary monopolies. That could be one way out of the problem. But until such time, absent a revolution which overturns the very foundations of capitalism itself, it is difficult to see what the “change” Collins and Kimber (and many others among us) desire might amount to.

As vexed as all this sounds, Death of a Gentleman is an essential, timely film precisely because Giles Clarke and N Srinivasan are likely to consider it not just untimely but unnecessary. It has already contributed to making that change by barking loudly at the ground beneath their feet. It is a revealing film which is probably more useful to fleshing out what “change” might look like than one which lays out a beautiful, well formed picture of the future. In baring the discontentment of its creators Death achieves the difficult feat of serving two different purposes simultaneously. It is a great introduction for anyone who is not well versed with these matters (most people who don’t visit ESPNCricinfo every day as a matter of course probably fall in this category). And it will leave anyone who already knows the broad contours of the story deeply troubled. It is hopefully the beginning of something new in cricket.

Wherever you are in the world, if you are a cricket fan, the 100 or so minutes of the film are undoubtedly 100 minutes well spent.