The Ambush Clause: Globalisation, Corporate Power and the Governance of World Cricket
Published in Following On: Cricket and National Identity in the Postcolonial Age, edited by Stephen Wagg (Routledge, 2005)
Long before it was a global game, cricket was an imperial game. At least, that was how it was seen by the rulers of the British empire, in Whitehall and at Lord’s. Their subjects sometimes saw it differently, playing cricket often in spite rather than because of its imperial origins, as a means of claiming space within the empire or challenging it from without.
When the anti-colonial movements ended British rule they also initiated the slow collapse of the structures and assumptions on which world cricket was based (this process was completed only in the early 1990s, with the downfall of the apartheid regime in South Africa). Cricket itself remained, however, and in some regions, notably south Asia, acquired ever greater popularity. After an exceedingly slow start, the governors of world cricket raced to catch up with the new post-colonial reality. But by the time they did so (again, only in the mid 1990s), they found themselves plunged into a neo-liberal world flux, characterised by corporate power, extreme inequality among nations and the dominant sway of the United States. Among the latter’s many cultural peculiarities was a reluctance to worship at the shrine of cricket. Cricket’s institutions and traditions, inherited from the imperial era, have nearly buckled under the strain.
A Spectre Haunting Cricket: Rupert Murdoch and World Cup 2003
Most cricket fans will not have heard of it, but there is indeed an entity called the Global Cricket Corporation. It’s a name that says so little and yet so much. Bland and non-descript, yet bristling with hubris. Corporate self-aggrandisement at its most egregious. It is, nonetheless, an apt description.
GCC is a small slice of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch’s global media-entertainment conglomerate. In 2003, News Corporation boasted total assets of $43 billion and annual revenue of $17 billion (Jamaica’s GDP, by comparison, is $10 billion). Among its liabilities is a guarantee to pay the International Cricket Council a minimum of $550 million over five years in return for global broadcasting and marketing rights for the World Cups of 2003 and 2007 (and other ICC events).
It’s hardly an onerous guarantee for News Corp, and not only because of Murdoch’s vast and diverse assets. Already most of it has been recouped through the sale of south Asian TV rights to Sony. What’s more, built into the contract are clauses that protect the Murdoch empire from many of the vicissitudes that afflict the game.
“Apparently two factors went in favour” of the Murdoch bid, reported cricket commentator Harsha Bhogle. “One of them was a fascinating qualitative factor — the commitment to build the ICC as a brand … to nurture it, to look after it and protect it like you would a child… ” The second factor arose from what Bhogle called “a brown-white split” in world cricket. The rival bid from Indian-based Zee was rejected, despite being almost a hundred million dollars higher than Murdoch’s, in what Bhogle described as “ an obvious move by a power bloc to counter the Asian administrative offensive.”
Though Murdoch will eye the fortunes of 20th Century Fox, Fox News, the Sun and other major News Corp holdings with greater interest than the ups and downs of the ICC, cricket is nonetheless an integral part of his corporate strategy. Sport, he has famously declared, is a “battering ram” to secure entry into new markets. And cricket has already given Murdoch a valuable foothold in millions of Indian homes. It is also a contributor to the corporate “synergy” through which Murdoch’s various assets enhance each other. The ICC deal gives any Murdoch subsidiary or affiliate “first right of refusal and the last right to match” any bid for the broadcast rights in any particular territory. So even where Murdoch’s broadcasting arms – in south Asia, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, or North America – lose the bidding war, their very presence ensures there will be a battle for the rights – to GCC’s advantage. In the World Cup of 2003, the exception was the UK – where the rights were left to Murdoch’s Sky because neither the BBC nor Channel Four were interested in making a bid.
Nonetheless, for Murdoch, cricket is an auxiliary investment, one among many; for the ICC, in contrast, the Murdoch deal is make or break. All the Test playing countries are reliant on the income stream it guarantees – and that has given Murdoch tremendous clout within the world game.
This became apparent in the wake of the 2003 World Cup, when GCC withheld some $15 million in payments owed the ICC. Murdoch’s team were claiming compensation for revenues lost as a result of England’s refusal to play in Zimbabwe, New Zealand’s refusal to play in Kenya, and alleged violations by Indian players of the ‘ambush clause’. The latter was designed to protect GCC’s exclusive right to sell sponsorships, and, as will become clear, embodied claims and carried implications likely to shape world cricket in the coming years.
Initially, the ICC decided to dock New Zealand 2.5 million dollars, England 3.5 million and India 6.5 million. Though these amounts were later scaled down, the GCC compensation claim was still an onerous one for all concerned. “Approximately 30% to 35% of our forecast income for the next five years would be lost [if GCC pulled out of the deal] and that would have a huge impact on all aspects of cricket in New Zealand including player payments,” warned New Zealand’s cricket manager, Martin Snedden. So although the GCC deal was supposed to free national boards of financial anxieties – and enable them to focus on development – it has introduced a new and over-riding anxiety, one characteristic of an economy globalised from the top down.
Zimbabwe: Human Rights and Double-Standards
The dependence on Murdoch money weighed heavily in the run-up to England’s World Cup boycott of Zimbabwe. “Sport is a business,” Tim Lamb, the ECB’s chief executive, kept saying. “We are a company and we have signed contracts for a multi-million pound event. This is not a game of beach cricket.” But under pressure from the media, the government and the players, Lamb and the ECB shifted their position. Now it was “security” and not finance that was to be the deciding issue. Despite the entreaties of the ECB, the ICC ruled that the venue was safe and the match should proceed. At the insistence of the players, England then unilaterally forfeited the match – along with a possible berth in the super six (the World Cup’s intermediate round) and several million dollars.
As the debate unfolded, the hypocrisies on all sides defied enumeration. In Britain, there were strident demands for a boycott from people who had been equally strident, not so long ago, in denouncing the boycott of apartheid South Africa. The plight of white farmers in Zimbabwe seemed to reawaken old racial alliances; sections of the British media peddled a not very well-disguised appeal to back our white “kith and kin”. On the other side, there was the surreal spectacle of ANC politicians solemnly declaring that politics have no place in sport – the same people who once recited the mantra, “no normal sport in an abnormal society”. The Indian government would not allow its team to play in Pakistan – but had no problems with Zimbabwe. The British government railed against Mugabe, but was delighted with General Musharraf’s military dictatorship. In the midst of the World Cup, Britain and the US launched their attack on Iraq. As Imran Khan pointed out, there was a powerful case for a boycott of Britain as an international aggressor and violator of the UN Charter. Because of fear of an al-Qaeda attack, New Zealand refused to play in Kenya – but would they refuse to play in New York?
For the UK and Australia, Mugabe was a handy third world bully against whom they could afford to take a moral stand – while continuing to promote the policies and forces that had brought independent Africa to its knees. For the south Asian nations, backing Mugabe carried a hint of anti-imperialist fervour – but one that did not require them to actually challenge the imperial power or the multi-national corporations they were trying meanwhile to seduce. Both sides shouted “hypocrite” at the other and both were right.
Zimbabwe’s crisis is rooted in the legacy of empire. The negotiations that led to majority rule left disproportionate economic power – not least land ownership – in the hands of the white minority (as did the later transition in South Africa). In the early years of his reign, Mugabe extolled cricket as a tool to build “a nation of gentlemen”. But cricket never became a mass sport in Zimbabwe and remained associated with the white farmers who in time became the targets of Mugabe’s desperate bid to camouflage his failures with anti-colonial rhetoric.
The fog of double-standards and expedient rationales should not obscure some salient facts about Zimbabwe. Mugabe has ruled the country as a corrupt and petty autocrat, and it was his servile compliance with the ‘structural adjustment’ demands of the IMF that first fuelled mass opposition to his regime. The democratic opposition forces in Zimbabwe – not the white farmers but the Zimbabwe Trade Union Congress, the popularly elected opposition politicians of the MDC (Movement for Democratic Change) and the human rights organisations – called for a boycott of the cricket as part of their call for wider sanctions against the regime. That call should have been respected – by cricketers, corporations, and ordinary citizens.
As in the past, the same cricket authorities who speak freely of the spirit of fair play and the virtues of cricket as a nation and character builder hotly denied any ethical or political responsibility. While ready to crack down on a glare of dissent, they permit the game to be used by dictators, demagogues and corporate raiders. In contrast, the England players – and even more the Zimbabwean dissidents Henry Olonga and Andy Flower – decided in the end to draw a moral demarcation.
The motives and politics of the England players may have been muddled, but they showed greater wariness about how history will judge them than the ECB or ICC. Like other international cricketers, they struggle with the multiple roles they’re expected to play in the modern game. On the one hand, they’re “just cricketers” and their sole mission is “to win”; on the other, they’re “ambassadors for their country”, “ambassadors for their sport”, and, of course, ambassadors for the sponsors. They perform for the population of the host country and at the same time for the folks at home. In a world of warfare, repression and gross economic inequalities, Zimbabwe is likely to pose cricket only one of many dilemmas.
A cancelled sports event always costs money, but it’s hard to see why GCC should not bear at least some of the burden. The crisis in Zimbabwe was clearly not of the ICC’s making. And the pressure not to play in Zimbabwe came from governments that Murdoch supports – Tony Blair’s in the UK and John Howard’s in Australia – and from some of Murdoch’s own newspapers. Synergy, it seems, maximises profits and minimises responsibility. And what of GCC’s vaunted concern for the ICC “brand name”? The dispute did nothing to enhance the reputation of world cricket.
‘Relationships of ownership, they whisper in the wings’
In contrast to their muddle over human rights, the cricket authorities and the GCC showed sterner mettle in protecting the rights of sponsors and advertisers.
The contracts signed by GCC (on behalf of the ICC) and the sponsors (“partners” in corporate-speak) contained an “ambush clause” guaranteeing the sponsors exclusivity and prohibiting attempts by competitors to cash in on the World Cup. The clause was binding not only on the ICC and the World Cup organisers, but also on the participating governing bodies and the individual players. Effectively, it barred players from endorsing any rivals to official sponsors for the duration of the Cup. It also made the ICC the disciplinary agent for GCC – thus reversing the chain of accountability which binds the ICC to the national boards and through them the players.
The players cried foul. Their rights had been sold without consultation or compensation. A long, intricate and (at the time of writing) still unresolved controversy ensued. Indian players, who stood to lose most because of their extensive personal endorsements, refused to sign the original contracts. They agreed to participate in the tournament only on amended terms, which diluted the original clauses. As a result, in the wake of the tournament, GCC withheld a substantial part of its payment to the ICC, which passed that penalty – $6.5 million – to the Indian Board. The Indian Board protested, and eventually counter-charged the GCC with “inadequate marketing”.
The champions of globalisation are militant in their assertion of “intellectual property rights” – private and exclusive ownership of brand names or scientific formulae or indeed sporting events. In an effort to placate the World Trade Organisation and the multi-national corporations, South Africa had already passed a tough new statute against ambush marketing; violators could be sentenced to jail. GCC and others had made clear to the ICC that if it wished to maximise the value of the World Cup, and of world cricket in general, it had to ensure that the rights it sold were exclusive. No one else was to enjoy the opportunity to exploit the game.
During the World Cup itself, the cricket authorities were vigilant in enforcing the ambush clause. At the match between Australia and India at Pretoria, a spectator was ejected for the offence of opening a can of Coca Cola – official sponsor Pepsi’s arch rival. The renegade Coke-guzzler was Arthur Williamson, a Johannesburg businessman, who claimed that security personnel ‘manhandled’ him out of the stadium. World Cup communications head Rodney Hartman argued that the restrictions were clearly printed on the back of all match tickets and were necessary “to protect the interests of sponsors”.
This neo-liberal effort to protect corporate property rights stripped players and national boards of rights and property they had long considered their own. Moreover, the ambush clause rested on an assertion of exclusive ownership by the ICC – a body whose legal basis is a Monaco-based corporation. At what stage and on what basis were the assets of world cricket in their entirety appropriated by the ICC – to be sold to Murdoch? By what right does the ICC make its claim on the players’ faces and bodies and names? It’s a claim that certainly cannot rest on the ICC’s performance as a world governing body or its track-record in managing cricket’s assets effectively or accountably.
What the ambush clause imbroglio demonstrated is that there is an on-going and unresolved struggle within the game over the division of the spoils. And it’s not just about how the pie is sliced, but also who gets to wield the knife. In other games, the increased market value of sport in a media-saturated society has bred player-power, as the stars have learned how to exploit their growing celebrity. In this, as in so much else, cricket has lagged behind. But having found themselves ambushed by the ambush clause, the cricketers are increasingly considering their options. At a meeting in autumn of 2002 of more than one hundred Test players from nine nations, Tim May, the Australian off-spinner who leads the nascent Federation of International Cricketers, attacked the employers’ presumptions. “The ICC has sold your images to the sponsors without permission. You don’t want a situation where a player is standing next to Pepsi and endorsing it for free. He needs to be paid for the personal endorsement.”
May also warned the players of the dangers inherent in a dispute with GCC. Given the decline in the rights market, he speculated that the $550 million deal might be worth only half what it had been when it was signed in 2001. He speculated that GCC would welcome an excuse to withdraw – a prospect that frightens both the ICC and the national boards.
Cricket was a creation of the world’s first market society – 18th century England – and the cash nexus has always played a role in shaping the game. But for more than a century, cricket was shielded from the market by aristocratic and imperial privileges. No longer.6 As the aftermath of the 2003 World Cup vividly demonstrated, the game is now subject to all the vicissitudes of capitalist globalisation. It’s a fate for which cricket’s history has left it ill-prepared.
The Inherited Terrain – the ICC in an Unequal World
The ICC was a late bloom of the British empire. Its history has been shaped by imperial hierarchies – and its transition to a post-imperial order has been belated and incomplete.
The Marylebone Cricket Club was founded in London in 1789 – and rapidly became the recognised arbiter of the game, at home and abroad. It was, and remains, a private members’ club, and for generations its leadership was drawn from Britain’s ruling elite. Over the years, the game followed English soldiers, sailors, colonists and merchants around the world, but international competition remained informal and ad hoc until 1877, when England and Australia played the inaugural official test. Here two teams widely recognised as representative of the best cricketers from each of the two countries met for the first time. But the Test series and cricketing relations between the two countries were at this stage and for many years to come governed through negotiations between the MCC in London and its counterpart in Melbourne.
The family of Test playing nations was expanded to include South Africa in 1888. At this time South African cricket was less developed than cricket in North America, but the compulsions of empire were always uppermost in the minds of the MCC elite, and at that moment the empire was deeply engaged in staking a claim to South Africa, where vast gold deposits had been discovered. Cricket was used to bolster that claim, and specifically to support the English-speaking colonists against their Boer rivals. After the Boer War, imperial priorities shifted. The aim now was to incorporate white south Africa as a whole, and cricket tours were seen as a means of fostering friendship between “Briton and Boer”. It was largely in order to consolidate the empire in South Africa that the ICC was founded – as the Imperial Cricket Conference – in 1909, with three member nations, England, Australia and South Africa (at a stroke severing the USA from world cricket).
As part of its imperial burden, the MCC took responsibility for administering the ICC, and the MCC Chairman and secretary became, ex-officio, President and Secretary of the ICC. This amateur arrangement continued for the next eight decades. Unlike football, cricket’s spread remained confined to societies under the direct rule of the British empire. As a result, the MCC’s imperial prerogatives were rarely challenged. And when they were, as in the Bodyline controversy during England’s tour of Australia in 1932-33, it was very much a confrontation between two senior members of the world cricketing club; the other nations, and the ICC itself, stood aside.
Just as the MCC widened its circle of members as and when it suited the convenience of the dominant elite, so the ICC welcomed new Test playing countries. After South Africa, the next to join the club were West Indies in 1928, New Zealand in 1929 and India in 1932. All of which reflected in different ways the impact of nationalist politics and the ongoing effort by the empire’s masters to incorporate and manage the new forces emerging within it.7 After partition, India sponsored Pakistan’s admission to the Test club, despite English scepticism. Sri Lanka’s application was in turn backed by both India and Pakistan, but resisted by the English for many years. Even after they won Test status in 1981, the Sri Lankans found themselves treated as a second-class Test nation by the English authorities for nearly twenty years. Within the ICC, it has always been the case that some Test-playing nations are more equal than others.
Until recently, the ICC’s role in organising international cricket competition was minimal; tours and Tests were arranged bi-laterally, according to the traditions or whims or political designs of the separate national boards. The ICC never required recognised Test nations to play against each other. The old South Africa refused to play against West Indies, India or Pakistan. Australia shunned New Zealand (playing an initial Test only in 1946 and not again until the 70s) in an attempt to assert regional supremacy and in keeping with their view that New Zealand were unworthy opponents. Neutral umpires – a device that would seem a sine qua non for any international sporting competition – were not even contemplated in cricket until the late 1980s, when they were unilaterally introduced by Pakistan.
Cricket’s transition from colonialism was remarkably retarded. In 1993, the paternalistic, Anglo-centric system was replaced by an elected president and the beginnings of an independent full-time administration. The patricians of the MCC gave way to hard-headed businessmen and politicians from South Asia, South Africa and Australia. Members of elites from various countries with various priorities, they have all been united in a desire to exploit the emergent global marketplace.
However, the ICC is still governed by the exclusive club of Test-playing nations – and the Test-playing nations retain the right to decide who shall be admitted to their ranks. Apart from apartheid South Africa between 1971 and 1992, the ICC has never stripped a country of Test playing status. No matter how poor your cricket is, no matter how routinely you are beaten by others, if you’re a Test-playing nation you will retain your vote on the ICC’s top table – cricket’s equivalent of a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. It is sometimes assumed therefore that long-term cricket development is a one-way process, that it may stall but cannot recede. The recent evolution of Zimbabwe’s cricket – to cite only the most salient example – suggests otherwise. Yet it’s hard to imagine any country ever losing Test status. Political and commercial imperatives will continue to make it virtually impossible to assemble a consensus within the ICC to relegate anyone.
Test Cricket still lacks the kind of transparent and internally consistent global competitive structure that football boasts. The national boards continue to prefer the contests they know they can sell – England v Australia, for example – to those demanded by a more equitable and open system. But it is not only the parochialism of the boards that presents problems to ICC modernisers here. There are problems in the scale and logistics of such a competition that derive ultimately from cricket’s origins in an earlier, pre-industrial age. Five- and six-test series evolved not only because they were supreme and sustained challenges for mastery that made for rich entertainment, but also because the exigencies of global travel demanded longer visits. It’s hard to see how global cricket, with its numerous seasonal and geographical peculiarities, can ever be rationalised in accordance with the norms of an age of a deracinated virtual reality.
In comparison with FIFA, the ICC is top-heavy, dominated by the big cricket nations, and at the same time less centralised, with far more powers remaining in the hands of the national boards. The new president of the ICC, Ehsan Mani, a Pakistani accountant long resident in the UK and with many years of service in the corporate sector, is the latest in a series of would-be modernisers hoping to push the ICC towards the FIFA model. He is seeking greater control (not least commercial control) over all international cricket. Like his predecessors, Mani will find his efforts inhibited by the sheer unevenness of the global cricket market. You can hear him struggling with this dilemma in an interview he gave shortly after his appointment:
“If cricket is to survive it has to compete with other sports. In the sub-continent, cricket has no competition. So, the development priorities are different. In these countries, what we lack are top infrastructure facilities — high-performance coaching centers, academies… . But, in England, and in some other countries, cricket is competing with other sports such as football and rugby. … What the England and Wales Cricket Board has to do is to go out and attract the young kids who go into other sport… . In the long run, I am very clear that members will have to yield more power on a variety of issues to the central body. It has to happen. Only then can the ICC go forward. … at the ICC, we are constantly looking at the way Test and one-day cricket is structured in terms of where the ownership should lie and whether it should be programmed centrally. On whether or not ICC should own all Test and one-day cricket, we are of the opinion that the ICC ought to leave behind money to countries to run their own cricket. Imagine India without any money at the board level! It may change in the future. Every country has its own rights and we don’t want to step on those.”
The ICC has inherited a lop-sided game in a lop-sided world. The South Asian Test-playing countries boast a total population of 1.5 billion, and within these countries cricket is unrivalled as a spectator sport. In contrast, Britain, Australia and New Zealand – a bloc of predominantly white, advanced capitalist economies – boasts a total of 84 millions, and cricket competes in these societies with a much wider array of sport and leisure activities. However, it is in the nature of the globalised economic order that some people are more equal than others. Average per capita GDP in the Anglo-Australasian bloc is ten times greater than in the South Asian bloc. The ‘old Commonwealth’ countries’ combined GDP is some two thirds that of the south Asian countries, whose population outnumbers theirs by 17 to1. The 84 millions in Australia-Britain-New Zealand consume the same volume of electricity each year as the 1.5 billion in South Asia. There are more people connected to the internet in Australia (pop. 19 million) than in India (pop. 1.1 billion). Britain’s military expenditure is three times India’s – and equivalent to the entire GDP of the West Indies or Zimbabwe.
South Africa’s role as a swing power within the ICC reflects its peculiar position in the global hierarchy. Its average per capita GDP is about mid-way between South Asian and western levels – but this “average” disguises the unspeakable gulf between the wealthy, mostly white minority and the impoverished black majority. There may be nearly as many cellphones in South Africa as in India, but life expectancy – at 46 – is by far the lowest of any cricket playing country.
Making a Killing: National Identity in a Globalised Economy
As Ehsan Mani is only too aware, the ICC has been riven by conflict between the South Asian and Anglo-Australians blocs. The south Asian bloc’s economic and political clout is formidable and the Anglo-Australians have found that reality hard to swallow. Jagmohan Dalmiya, former ICC president and for some years the dominant figure on the Indian Board, has frequently characterised this attitude as an “imperial hangover”. That element is certainly present. But the south Asian bloc’s case has been weakened because of its inability to tackle its own problems – as it tacitly admitted when the former commissioner of the London’s Metropolitan Police was drafted in to deal with the match-fixing crisis. But even more than the allegations of corruption and incompetence, the south Asian bloc is compromised by the continuing disruption of the India-Pakistan cricket rivalry – world sport’s fiercest derby and, apart from the football World Cup final, perhaps its biggest single spectator attraction. The absence of competition between India and Pakistan has been the hole in the heart of world cricket.
Its future depends, of course, on the evolution of relations between the two countries. Here too, cricket finds itself dogged by the legacies of imperialism. But while cricket cannot bring an enduring peace between India and Pakistan, it can be used to advance or obstruct the processes that might lead to this peace.
The principal culprits in the disruption of India-Pakistan cricket relations have been the forces of rightwing Hindu nationalism in India. They have used cricket (usually ignoring other sports) in their attempts to rally public opinion against the designated enemies without (Pakistan) and within (Indian Muslims). The questions raised by cricket between India and Pakistan become, in times of international tension, tests of patriotism. A frustrated Pakistani Board routinely denounces the Indians for “playing politics” with cricket – which is a bit rich coming from men appointed by a military dictatorship.
Meanwhile, the India-Pakistan cricket rivalry is sublimated offshore – in Sharjah, Singapore, Bangladesh, Australia, England and South Africa. This displacement seems to have made it an attraction of even greater intensity for television spectators at home. A report in the Indian press by Anand Vasu described reactions on both sides of the border to India’s victory over Pakistan in the 2003 World Cup, thanks to a masterful innings by Sachin Tendulkar.
“There was a spontaneous eruption of firecrackers, cheers, chanting and joy across the length and breadth of a large country as India pulled off a stunning win against the old enemy Pakistan for the fourth time in as many World Cup clashes… . It was always going to be a day of heated arguments, passionate following and a tense battle out in the middle. Several cities in India had declared a public holiday to watch their team take on Pakistan in a one-dayer for the first time in three years. Cities that did not were paralysed as children stayed away from schools, offices emptied out by the start of the game and the streets wore a deserted look. Time stood still, life was put on hold as India delivered the game that a billion people wanted… . There will be mourning in the streets of Lahore and Karachi. There will be heartburn in Pakistan’s provinces. There will be calls for a change of captain and coach. There will be anger, there will be disappointment and there will be a sense of shock.”
One of the paradoxes of globalisation is that it has fostered the attractive power of parochial identities. In a world dominated by the likes of GCC, national identity, in particular, is a prized commodity – malleable, manipulable, profitable. When India played Pakistan in Australia in early 2000, the series was promoted by its south Asian broadcasters, Star-ESPN, under the slogan “Qayamat!” – apocalypse – accompanied by thunderous rumblings and flashes of light. For Murdoch (owner of Star) and the Disney Corporation (owner of ESPN), the clash between the two nuclear-armed neighbours, replete with religious connotations, was merely handy matter with which to attract an audience and enhance the value of its investment in cricket.
The American Delusion: World Cup 2007
With a mere six million people, and a combined GDP of only $28 billion (New Zealand has about two thirds as many people, but its GDP is three times larger), the West Indies are today, as they have always been, a marginal outpost in the global cricket market-place. Nonetheless, in 2007, they will host the World Cup. In other circumstances, it might have been the fulfilment of CLR James’ vision of West Indians “making their way with bat and ball into the comity of nations.” But much has changed since 1963, when James’ classic Beyond a Boundary was published.
As elsewhere in the British empire, cricket in the West Indies reflected social and racial hierarchies. It was the genius of James to see that the game did not belong exclusively to the colonial power or the local elite and that it could be an instrument for national unity and liberation. As if in fulfilment of his prophecies, between the 1960s and 70s, the West Indian cricketers became the game’s first real global champions, winning hearts and minds in Australia, India, Pakistan, and Britain.
It was always remarkable that a sequence of world beaters should have sprung from the Caribbean: an impoverished society with a relatively small middle-class, economically and strategically marginal, an entity embracing numerous nation-states and diverse cultures. Buoyed up by the anti-colonial movements of the era, their peripatetic cricketing representatives forged a new unity and played with unrivalled purpose. Thanks to their Caribbean and world-wide prestige, the cricketers exercised both a political and financial independence rarely seen before in the game. Kerry Packer’s star-studded breakaway series of the late 1970s rattled world cricket from top to bottom and led to the banishment of some of the game’s biggest names, but the West Indian cricketers played for Packer unpenalised. They also used their clout to block the Packer series from being used as a Trojan horse by apartheid South Africa.
Just as no one – except CLR James – had foreseen the West Indies’ rise to dominance, no one foresaw their precipitate decline. Various reasons have been advanced for this manifest downturn in the standard of West Indian cricket since the mid-90s. The impact of US sports via television, the difficult economic conditions of the last twenty years, insularity and disunity, the waning of post-independence élan. Whatever the diagnosis, cricket authorities, politicians and cricket fans across the region are joined in a hope that the 2007 World Cup will usher in a West Indies’ cricket revival.
What’s being dubbed “Windies World Cup 2007” will be the largest single sporting or cultural event ever undertaken by the region. Tourism, sponsorship and the sale of intellectual property rights are expected to generate over a half billion US dollars, with other World Cup-related activity bringing in several times that mount.
Across the West Indies, there has been much emphasis on the fact that “the world will be watching” – and much anxiety about the region’s capacity to perform. At a press conference in Guyana in March 2003, the ground-rules were spelled out by the Managing Director of Windies World Cup 2007 Inc, Chris Dehring, an investment banker. “What we’re talking about is the International Cricket Council Cricket World Cup. That is extremely important for people in the Caribbean to understand. This is not the West Indies’ World Cup, to do what we want with and to any standards we choose. There are standards to be met, even while maintaining a distinct Caribbean flavour … Windies World Cup 2007 has to be seen and appreciated as a global event that the West Indies have been given the privilege of hosting.”
Dehring emphasised that “right alongside us” will be the Global Cricket Corporation. “This international event will come with its international sponsors and there will be little room for domestic sponsors. In fact, it is anticipated that ‘sunset’ legislation will have to be put in place to guard against ambush marketing, such is the seriousness with which we have to protect the rights of international sponsors who have paid all that money. Understand clearly what we are saying because there will be grave consequences for Guyana if you do not. As an example, Bourda [one of West Indies long-established Test venues, in Georgetown, Guyana] and its environs will have to be absolutely clean of all signage in order for it to be usable as an official stadium in 2007.”
As if to rub home the point to the Guyanese, Dehring stressed that Bourda could not assume it had a right to stage a World Cup match just because of its traditional status as a Test ground. “No venue in the Caribbean has ever hosted an ICC World Cup match, so there can be no ‘traditional’ World Cup venue. To compare the traditional hosting of a Test match to that of hosting a World Cup match is like using the qualification of being a teller in a commercial bank in Guyana to apply for the job as head of the World Bank.”
In response to Dehring’s warnings, an editorial in the Stabroek News commented:
“For Guyana’s part, it is inconceivable that the World Cup could be brought to the West Indies without matches being staged in the land of Kanhai, Lloyd, Kallicharran, Gibbs, Fredericks, Croft, Hooper, Chanderpaul, Sarwan et al. Guyanese here and abroad would simply not be able to comprehend this possibility. But there should be no mistake about it. There is a risk that matches might not be staged here unless we – all of us, not only the government and the Guyana Cricket Board – spring out of the inertia that cocoons us until it is usually too late to act.”
The newspaper went on to argue that unless the local authorities moved quickly, Guyana could find itself squeezed out of a World Cup match. Since the ICC and GCC called the shots, “Guyana is unlikely to benefit from any sentimental considerations of its cricketing legend, the immaculate beauty of the Bourda sward or the near fanatical attachment of its citizens to cricket. Purely hard-nosed determinations will be made by the venue analysers who will scour the region in the upcoming months.” In the absence of traditional prerogatives, Bourda would find itself in open competition with newer but better appointed venues in Grenada, Antigua and St Vincent. And as if that were not threat enough, the newspaper noted that “the ICC and GCC are clearly of the mind to expand the reach of cricket in the region, if only to make the tournament more lucrative.” Florida, New York, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands were all mentioned as possible Windies World Cup venues. “This means even tougher competition for Guyana.”
The ICC has always been reluctant to grant the West Indies a World Cup not only because of doubts about facilities but also because it is bound to be a less lucrative proposition when it comes to advertising and media rights than South Asia, England or Australia. But in compensation they have the lure of America. Indeed, for the ICC and the GCC, the main attraction of the Caribbean seems to be its proximity to the USA.
Expanding cricket’s domain into the USA has been a long-standing dream of the big players in the ICC. Since the mid-90s, there’s been talk of staging a one-day series in Disneyworld. In 2002, a board meeting of the ICC in Monaco was treated to a commercial presentation by Major League Baseball. Ehsan Mani explained the strategic thinking to Rediff.net:
“We have to take cricket to new areas and new markets like the United States. We are working very hard to stage World Cup matches there in 2007. If we don’t do it, cricket will get blocked out in the United States. Just the sports revenue market of the US is $100 billion a year. The ICC is talking about raising $ 550 million over seven years. That puts into perspective the gap we have in this area. The game needs money to move forward, for development, to set up proper structures for the ICC and its members. We are not in a position to just play cricket and say that we are not interested about the money.”
It seems as if the lords of cricket are worried that in the absence of a toehold in the American mainland, they will always be second-class citizens in the global empire of sport. In the end, the ICC decide not to stage any 2007 World Cup matches in the USA. The factionalism that has hobbled US cricket for twenty years made the whole proposition too fraught with peril, political, financial and legal. Instead, in an attempt to go over the heads of the competing factions, the ICC employed a British businessman as director of something called ‘Project USA’, whose main aim is to find ways of staging one-day internationals in the USA. But factionalism in cricket is by no means confined to the USA. The deeper problem is that cricket’s American dream is both a vainglorious delusion and a colossal failure of the imagination. The US sports market is indeed the world’s richest but it is also its most competitive. While the South Asian communities now resident in North America are sizeable enough to provide big audiences for occasional matches, there’s little likelihood that cricket will ever break out of the immigrant niche and grab a piece of the action from baseball, basketball or American football. Even soccer has prospered in the USA only after decades of intensive grass-roots development and with the help of an immigrant and immigrant-descended base many times larger than cricket enjoys.
Overall, globalisation as currently designed and managed is more likely to foster the export of US sports (and culture in general) than the import of alien games like cricket. But for the cricket bosses, the American market offers a short-cut to prestige and wealth. So much easier than the long-term grass-roots investment needed to develop cricket in its existing markets – where the game is inhibited by either mass poverty or the strength of its competitors.
In the run-up to Windies 2007, as elsewhere, globalisation promises to eradicate local traditions in favour of the priorities of multi-national corporations. The preparations for the tournament also confirm the gravitational pull of American wealth and power within the neo-liberal world order – of which, after all, Rupert Murdoch is the great champion. The local boards and even more the local fans feel themselves helpless playthings in the grand schemes of the ICC, but the ICC feels itself a plaything in the hands of the GCC and global market forces.
Yet one can never be completely pessimistic about cricket, even about the fate of a commercial pawn like the World Cup. As Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguyan novelist, said of football in south America, “The more the technocrats programme it down to the smallest detail, the more the powerful manipulate it, the more it continues to be the art of the unforeseeable.”
