Sphere of Influence: Writings on Cricket and its Discontents

Name: Sphere of Influence-Writings on Cricket and its Discontents
Author: Gideon Haigh
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pages: 403
Price: Rs 399
ISBN: 978-0-85720-684-8

The day Kapil’s Devils won the Cricket World Cup in 1983 after entering the tournament as 66-1 outsiders, the team members dined at a nondescript Wimpy Bar in Piccadilly.

The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), then headed by NKP Salve, couldn’t afford to host a fancy feast for the triumphant boys because it had only Rs 2,00,000 in its coffers. This was the reality less than three decades ago. Indian cricket was perennially strapped for cash.

Cut to the new millennium. BCCI, flush with money, calls the shots in international cricket. How did this dramatic transformation come about? Few cricket writers are better placed than Gideon Haigh to probe the phenomenon.

An English-born Australian journalist who has been writing on business and cricket for over 25 years, Haigh brings his knowledge of both domains to bear upon ‘Sphere of Influence: Writing on Cricket and its Discontents’. 

This collection of articles authored by Haigh over the past four years, dwells upon the sweeping changes that cricket has witnessed, driven by the rise and rise of the BCCI. ‘Sphere of Influence’ is an incisive, insightful and balanced inquiry into various aspects of the story.

Haigh pulls no punches as he delves into the panoply of questions that have arisen around the changing game and the way it is run. The articles in the the book cover a wide swathe of issues.

It analyses the politics of the International Cricket Association (ICC), a hopelessly toothless tiger in the face of BCCI’s predatory instincts. It probes the raging television wars, the emergence of Twenty20 cricket and Indian Premier League and the IPL scandal that led to the ouster of Lalit Modi.

The book also brings us to speed on the spectre of match-fixing against the backdrop of the steady erosion of the values that the gentleman’s game once denoted in our colective consciousness.

Indeed, the dominant theme that runs through the book revolves around the slow but steady demise of traditional cricket. Haigh, by his own admission, is a purist, and believes that cricket should serve a greater purpose than merely making money and stacking up the numbers. 

It’s all-out war between the past and the present and how you perceive the evolution of cricket obviously hinges on which side of the divide you are. Unfortunately, the battle is a hugely unequal one.

Haigh puts the power shift and the end of Empire in perspective: “For all that the game’s past provided for the enjoyment of fans, the ambitions of players and the pride of patriots, it also shored up old imperial structures and political prejudices.”

“But there is,” he is quick to add, “a sense that the game’s present has become so thoroughly subverted by economic objectives, the interests of broadcasters, advertoisers, corporate investors, a group of entrepreneurial administrators and an elite of international players, that the rest of us must accept our lot as simple customers at the end of the assembly line.”         

World cricket is today divided into two halves: one involving games that are either played or lapped up by India, the other made up of matches that are not. It is obvious where the big bucks are.

Haigh writes: “The size and vitality of India’s economy has divided an ancient and widely-loved sport into two streams: the fixtures involving India, as competitor and consumer, and those not. The former are so staggeringly more lucrative that the latter have a diminishing relative existence.”

In this scenario, the ICCl has been completely emsculated by the “wealth and vitality” of the BCCI… “with its mixture of feudalism and hyper-capitalism, vaulting domestic political ambition and postcolonial chippiness”.

The game itself has suffered a rapid decline in quality. As Haigh points out, IPL has engendered a situation in which a young player aspires to be a Dan Christian rather than a Ricky Ponting – fast money is the hook.

“For all its obsession with youth, colour and vibrancy, cricket is developing a problem commonest among old men: an ability to remember what happened last year but not last week… in the headlong pursuit of sensation, the quest for the memorable appears to be falling by the wayside,” Haigh asserts.

Is ‘Sphere of Influence’ an alarmist’s diatribe? It is anything but. All it does is provide a cautionary pointer to the future of the game. “As we are finding elsewhere, no hubris fails to find its nemesis,” Haigh warns. Too wrapped up in its own world, BCCI is currently in no state to read the writing on the wall.