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On December 2, 1977, two men walked out to the centre of a cricket field to toss a coin.
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The venue was a VFL park in Melbourne, which had a capacity of 80,000 people.
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And yet, there were only 500 spectators in this large ground.
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There was just one in-house photographer to record the moment.
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At the toss, when the coin finally hit the ground, you could probably have heard it in
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that silent, empty stadium.
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This was a match that was not recognised by the ICC, a match with few spectators.
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And yet, it was the legend Garfield Sobers who were supervising the toss.
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And the two captains were Ian Chappell and Clive Lloyd.
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This was a day that cricket changed forever.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioural
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Please welcome your host, Amit Barma.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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My topic for today is Money in Cricket.
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And I will be examining this topic through the prism of World Series Cricket and the
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My guests today are both legends of cricket writing, Gideon Hay and Prem Panekar.
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Gideon is an Australian Cricket writer who has written more than 30 books.
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Many of them are about cricket, the rest about business and economics.
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Which makes Kerry Packer's World Series an ideal subject for him, as it falls at the
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His first cricket book, The Cricket War, the inside story of Kerry Packer's World Series
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Cricket, was released in 1993 and it was released in India in a new edition a few days ago.
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Prem Panekar needs no introduction to cricket lovers in India.
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He was probably the first blogger in the world, long before blogs even existed, with his cricket
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updates for Rediff in the mid 1990s.
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He is also an authority on media and on politics.
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And like me, he's followed the IPL very closely.
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I caught up with Gideon and Prem at the Bangalore Literature Festival last weekend and recorded
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this episode with them there.
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Gideon, Prem, welcome to the show.
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Gideon, I have in my hands right now your first book, The Cricket War, which is releasing
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now in India for the first time.
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It took a while to get here.
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Yeah, and you wrote it in the early 90s.
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It essentially covers World Series Cricket and how Kerry Packer transformed the game.
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And all of that is incredibly relevant even today because all those fundamental questions
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about the commercialization of the game, about what it does to the spirit of the game, the
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way it is played and so on, are incredibly relevant no matter which side of the fence
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And you mentioned that when re-reading this book now, you felt that it was still incredibly
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relevant for what they were introducing.
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Well, I mean, what does strike me when I reflect on World Series Cricket now is how incredibly
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If you think about where cricket was in 1977, you had the occasion of the centenary test,
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which was the celebration of all good things about test cricket, honoring the fact that
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they'd been the first test match in March 1877.
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It was a great pretext for self-congratulation about the stature that the game had achieved,
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its place in the national life, its role in the Commonwealth, its upholding of certain
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values that the people like to believe about the game as embodying.
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And then even as that test match was in progress, there was a private entrepreneur with a broadcasting
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company recruiting the best cricketers in the world for his own role, your own television
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There's never been anything quite so audacious since then.
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And in the course of the next two years, cricket would learn a great deal about the effects
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of the arrival of private capital.
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It would receive a timely education in the value of commercial rights, which of course
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had underpinned the game's growth for the subsequent four years.
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The players would get a first feeling for their role as something other than mere athletes.
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They became celebrities, if you like, for the first time.
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They became commercial properties to be bought and sold.
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And for the first time, we saw the potential that was latent in one-day cricket, a new
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variant on an old theme.
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There'd only really been relatively few one-day internationals before World Series cricket.
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After World Series cricket, the format goes forth and multiplies, not least of all in
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And just taking a tangent off before exploring it further, do you believe in the great man
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I mean, would this evolution have happened without Packer or is cricket, in that sense,
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was he necessary for it?
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I don't think it was a bit of a perfect storm.
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It was a very unusual concatenation of circumstances in 1977.
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A, you had a game that was very, very popular.
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And there's no doubt about it.
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Cricket in 1977 was hugely popular, in Australia in particular, because it had this very vital,
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gregarious, exciting team, Lillian Thompson, the Chappells, Marsh, et cetera, who felt
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nonetheless alienated and underpaid and exploited by their administrators, because they compared
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their rewards to those that were available in individual sports, such as tennis and golf,
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which were rapidly professionalizing off the back of television.
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You had the rights for, the commercial and broadcasting rights for that cricket were
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being significantly undersold.
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They were basically in the hands of a national broadcaster that broadcast the game essentially
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on a kind of a grace and favor basis, I guess in much the same way as Doodharshan had in
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India forever and a day.
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You had a set of players who had a kind of an accumulation of about 10 years worth of
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grievances with their administrators and an administrative class that I think had become
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dangerously separated by a generation and more from the attitudes of their players.
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And you had certain stars, Denis Lelive notably, and the Chappells, who had links in with people
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The important figures in World Series cricket are not simply Kerry Packer and the players,
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but they're people like John Cornell and Austin Robertson and Paul Hogan, who played such
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an important part in bringing the players and Packer as an impresario together.
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I think that where Packer had a unique advantage was that he was quite a young man.
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He's trying to make his own way in the world out from under the influence or the reputation
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of his late father, who had been a great press baron, Sir Frank, in his own right.
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He was looking not necessarily to make his name, but to create something of his own.
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And he'd already revolutionized the magazine market in Australia by setting up the first
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really significant sort of new wave women's magazine, Clio.
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And he was fascinated by sport, the potential of sport to create lots of content throughout
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the year, relatively cheap to produce, embroidered with natural ad breaks, which had, which naturally
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captured the nation's imagination.
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I don't think any single individual with the possible exception of Rupert Murdoch in Australia
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could have had quite the same grand conception about the role of sport as a kind of a commercial
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I think the players too tended to gravitate towards an individual, a compelling individual
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such as Packer, rather than necessarily a faceless corporate enterprise, because players
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naturally defer to an inspirational authority.
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And the minute that Packer really had the chapels on their side at Libby, who were such
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important opinion makers in their own generation, it was inevitable really, that all the players
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They were very susceptible to the influence of these strong men of Australian cricket
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Perhaps these days, they might take a slightly more sort of individual and selfish attitude,
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but then the Australian cricket team moved as a block, and they were kind of arm in arm
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from that point forward for the next few years.
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And they were sort of used to moving as a block, right?
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Because for the past few years, they had been fighting for higher wages.
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It has this backdrop of kind of constant agitation about not just pay, but also conditions and
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prestige and treatment.
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The touchstone that I know Cipeli talks about all the time is the 1972 tour of South Africa,
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where the Australian players were playing, they were on a double tour, they'd played
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against India, they'd come from India, they'd beaten India at home, but had been a terribly,
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They went to South Africa, they were smashed by a very great South African team.
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And the cricket board tried to persuade them to play an extra test.
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And Cipeli said, well, basically, you know, you'd have to get us to sign another contract,
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and we're not going to sign another contract.
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And that was the first evidence that the players were capable of defying their administrators.
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The administrators chose to back off in that confrontation, but it did give the players
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a bit of a feeling for their power if they acted collectively.
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We've actually, interestingly, we've seen further evidence of that during the recent
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pay dispute in Australia, where the players did, they did stick to one another, both the
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male and the female players, international and domestic, and it proved that in the end,
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if you couldn't break them, if you couldn't divide them, then they did have the opportunity
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And would you say that the players today have a much greater sense of what they actually
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worth than perhaps they did back then?
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But they also have, this was a bit of an education for us all in Australia recently.
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I think that the belief had built up that players now looked after themselves individually
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because of the way in which the IPL option kind of carves up the players' individual
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lots and sells them for different prices, that they somehow had a different attitude
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to industrial relations.
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We learned a different lesson in Australia this summer, that the players look at each
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other and they say, what are you doing?
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And if one of them says, we're sticking together, then that's what they tend to do.
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Still, even in this day and age.
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And they cater to the self-interest by doing that because they're much like you.
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They do a good deal of collective bargaining.
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So what was the reaction to World Series cricket back then among the general public, for example?
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Well, I can recall my own action.
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I was an 11-year-old child who was massively excited about cricket, really coming to terms
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with the game for the first time.
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And I was shocked, I was shocked, appalled that the players would desert.
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All these things that I'd been told were vitally important, tradition, etiquette, the honour
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of representing your country, the fact that the game was beyond price.
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To my prim 11-year-old sensibilities, that was a gross affront.
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At the same time, part of me was absolutely fascinated by this new enterprise.
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It was so different, it was so exciting, it was so colourful, it was so full of personality.
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And it was another channel, how exciting to have cricket on two channels all of a sudden.
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So over the course of the next two years, I probably went on the same kind of journey
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as the Australian public in the sense that having gotten over my initial shock, I began
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to see that there was value in this new kind of cricket, that it afforded opportunities
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for greater remuneration for players, which no doubt they deserved.
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It was exciting, it was accessible, it was innovative, because for the first time we
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saw players playing in helmets, we saw them playing under lights, we saw them playing
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We saw a vastly enhanced television coverage, the kind of thing that we take these days
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for granted, but really World Series Cricket is the first iteration of that evolution of
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the game which is more than simply being a kind of a silent, distant witness to the game.
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Cameras for the first time kind of got close up to the action and really dwelled on it
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and teased out all its possibilities and replayed endlessly from all conceivable angles.
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We forget that Packer introduced the standard innovation of filming cricket from both ends,
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because when I started watching cricket in the mid-1970s, you saw it from one end only,
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you saw it from behind the bowler's arm in one over and then from behind the batsman
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Packer said, well I can't stand looking at batsman's arses half the time, I want to
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see it from behind the bowler's arm each time and that's an amazing change of perspective.
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And it also underscores that this sport is one that is played for the audience, you want
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to give them the best experience.
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It's not just that the sport is happening and as a matter of fact, but the audience
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is at the centre of it, so that's a good change.
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So now my next question is sort of a multi-part question, what kind of changes did World Series
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Cricket kickstart in cricket in three aspects, one, the game itself, the way it was played,
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two, the lives of all the stakeholders involved, players, administrators and so on.
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And three, in terms of cricket's place in the culture, because like you correctly said,
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it had a place in the culture, it went beyond mere mindless entertainment.
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You have phrases in the English language like that's not cricket, thereby it embodied that
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I'll start with the third one first because I think that is the most interesting.
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It's a very good quote from an Australian writer called Greg Manning, an academic, who
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said that Packer didn't spend all that money to buy cricket.
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He spent that money turning cricket into something that he could buy.
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For the first time cricket was turned into a tradable commodity.
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It was something that could be bought and sold.
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Players could be bought and sold.
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In a sense that liberation of kind of animal spirits is something that we're still coming
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It did instil in players an idea that they were entities, they were entities in a free
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market of entertainment who could sell themselves potentially to the highest possible bidder.
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In some senses it's almost impossible to conceive of the Rebel Tours of the 1980s having gone
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ahead if not for what had happened in 1977.
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It made players think, okay, I'm only around for a short period of time, I should take
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opportunity of whatever opportunities, take advantage of whatever opportunities come my
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way and that pariahood can be survived because for two years those players were kind of non-persons
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in the idea of the eyes of the establishment game and yet in 1979 everything went back
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to the way it had been and the players in that period for that short period had been
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The first part of your question, what did it do to the game?
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Well in some respects Packer was predominantly a great resurfacer of the game.
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He didn't sort of fundamentally change the balance between bat and ball.
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He didn't invent a new kind of bowling.
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What he did was he popularized a form of cricket that had already been explored by the establishment.
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We'd already had the World Cup of 1975.
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We'd seen the pent up potential of one day cricket.
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What we hadn't done was take full commercial advantage of it and once it had been demonstrated
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that people would turn up for innovations like night cricket then the establishment
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was able to take advantage of that.
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The interesting thing about the fact that Packer strikes with the game not in 1979 is
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that he gets an even better deal than he initially bargained on because PBL Marketing, his organization
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becomes the official marketing arm of the Australian Cricket Board.
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So he's basically getting to prepare his own attractions for television.
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He gets a chance to participate in the creation of the marketing and the advertising that
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is going to be screened on his own television network.
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That's an amazing power.
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In fact, Channel 9 lost that power in the mid 1990s but they held it for a long time.
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So Packer was really able to reshape cricket according to the values of his own, the priorities
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of his own television station.
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That was a remarkable innovation and broadcasters got a sense that they could influence kind
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They could influence the way in which the calendar was structured.
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Because they were bringing such rewards to the game through commercial opportunities,
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they had a say in the way in which cricket was run.
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Pring, let me turn to you now.
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You've been writing about cricket, covering cricket since the mid 1990s and coincidentally
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that also happens to be around the time the Indian Cricket Board and Indian Cricket began
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to discover its commercial potential where suddenly it became mass marketed entertainment.
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Players started earning a lot which is a great thing and then 10 years ago we had the IP
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deal come up and that seems in many ways like the World Series and steroids.
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And we've both celebrated aspects of it and lamented aspects of it.
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So what do you feel about what you've seen in these years?
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Well, one of the things that struck me about Gideon's exposition of how Packer changed
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or brought an entirely new paradigm into cricket is the fact that those thought behind every
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single thing that was done, there was a set of circumstances that came together to create
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both a dissatisfaction and therefore an opportunity and there was a person who was smart enough
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to do the math, see the opportunity and ultimately as Gideon said, he ended up gaining far more
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than he would have gained if they hadn't listened to him in the first place.
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I think the one thing that strikes me about Indian Cricket and that's true from even before
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the 90s but certainly true from the 90s on till very recently and this includes the inception
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of the IP deal is that there has never been any thought at any stage of development.
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It is either that you've tripped over something and fallen into something and then realized
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that you got lucky and fell with your face pointing the right way or you have been forced
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by external circumstances to sort of, so an innovation has been to circumvent somebody
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else from innovating, so the ICL, this became a preventive measure because you probably
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know this because you were covering cricket at the same time, Lalit Modi had been speaking
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Yeah, even during the Dalmia regime, he had repeatedly gone and done presentations.
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I interviewed Bindra in I think 2002 or 2003 and that's when the cricket foresight, but
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Bindra talked about it.
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He said there's this guy called Lalit Modi who's got this great idea.
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The interesting thing is there's a great photograph in this edition of his book which is launching
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which shows Subhash Chandra posing like a media bag, almost like an Indian packer and
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in that sense with ICL he forced the issue because Lalit Modi and the BCCI was kind
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of sitting on the idea for a while and then the ICL happened and it was a rebel league
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and all of these players joined and that forced the issue and the BCCI.
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Yeah, which was kind of my point that it's always been somebody's always had to drag
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Indian cricket kicking and screaming from one era into another while they dragged their
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I mean, that's true, the IPL, but even the period that you were talking about of discovering
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the commercial properties, again, this completely happens now.
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I mean, it was an egoistic bid that brought the World Cup to India in the first place.
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It was not a commercial concentration.
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Having done that, you were desperately in trouble and then the whole Indian jugard system works
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because somebody knows somebody who knows the Ambanis who at that point were trying
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to put a benign face at a time when they were getting slammed for pretty much everything
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and they were by Ambanis then and they realized that identifying with cricket was pretty much
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And that leads to the Reliance World Cup.
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It was a nice little whitewash and stuff, so they come in and money comes in and it's
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always been said that sometimes the benign effects of something are in front of their
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You find the BCCI is still resisting it until somebody gives them a kick up the backside.
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Would it be fair to say that all of these changes, what World Series brought about and
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what has happened in India in the last 20 years were inevitable, except that Packer
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came slightly ahead of the curve and enforced the issue and in India, they were bound to
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happen and they happened and they would have happened anyway, but there was no visionary
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figure like Packer leading the way.
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For me, what is amusing about that whole thing is that it was inevitable.
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The set of circumstances or the set of disaffections that Gideon outlined had to erupt at some
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point or the other because you couldn't see a logical sequence where these things built
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and what, I mean, it's not like we were just escaping, it had to result in an outburst.
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It so happened that it was Packer who was poised and had the wit and the intelligence
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to take advantage, but one way or the other, something had to happen.
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The funny thing about it was, forget about the changes in cricket and stuff, like today
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in the last four or five years, say 10 years max, we fetishize a disruption, we have entire
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conferences that are, for me, I mean, what Packer did, that was disruption.
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He took something that had a history, it had a deep root in culture and thing and he just
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said, I'm not tampering with it, I'm just coming at it from another way, like Mac did
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with notebooks, they didn't invent a computer, they didn't invent a different computer, they
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just made it friendlier.
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So you could say Packer overrised cricket.
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I mean, he was disruption before people started thinking of disruption as a means of taking
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your business to the next level.
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And we are, yeah, like I said, we really need to...
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Well, few things are more ripe for disruption than a monopoly, aren't they?
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I mean, all national boards are inherently monopolies, they arrogate themselves the right
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to hold official cricket within their territorial boundaries.
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Not just as a monopsony, because people can't sell their services anywhere else and I've
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written about this a lot and I can't figure out a solution to this because it's obviously
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undesirable, but what do you do about it?
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And the typical answer that fellow free marketers often give is that, look, the BCCI may have
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a monopoly and a monopsony on cricket in India, but they are competing with other sports and
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other forms of entertainment and that will be the corrective that they need.
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And I'm not sure how good an answer that is, but it seems to be the best answer at this
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But that kind of brings me to this next question that just as cricket has changed, the world
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has also changed in the way we consume entertainment and I'm loosely categorizing all sport as
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entertainment, whatever we choose to do with our time as entertainment has changed.
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And much as I'm a purist and I love test cricket more than anything else, and it is true that
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the opportunity cost of test cricket is very high in this day and age.
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Back in the day when you didn't have much to do with your time watching a five day test
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match made sense, but today you have so many competing demands on your time, including
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on your smartphone where there's so much of addictive entertainment happening.
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But does test cricket have a future and was it inevitable that we are eventually going
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to make a journey from five day cricket to one day cricket to T20 cricket?
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That's the next stage, isn't it?
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It's barely bears thinking about, isn't it?
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I think that it's perfectly possible to imagine that as a potential scenario.
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What we need to reflect on, I think, is what we would lose in that process.
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And what we are losing in the, in the extending of the short forms of the game is the idea
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of the epic, the performance of scale, the idea of endurance, that dimension that cricket
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has had that other sports do not, except when you see, when you see an epic five setter
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between Federer and Adal, it wouldn't have been better as a three setter or a two setter,
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It actually needs that duration.
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It needs that rise and fall.
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It needs that, that push and pull.
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You can't have everything proceeding in a series of explosive moments because explosive
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moments, well, they impress themselves on the mind, but in a very disorganized way.
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I mean, isn't it fascinating that you can still remember test matches that you saw in
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the 1970s or the 1980s or the 1990s, but it's actually quite difficult to remember that
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T-29 that you saw last week.
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In an ideal world, you would have a perfect balance between both, both the kind of the
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sugar hit that short form operates and the more wholesome sustenance that I think the
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In the end, economics might be the ultimate determinant.
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You have to come up with some sort of estimation of what you would lose economically.
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And I think there is, there is a cost to the fading value of test cricket.
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Test cricket does anchor us.
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It does provide us with a sense of continuity, a sense of generational renewal.
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It provides us the forum for players to be great.
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T-20 provides a forum for players to be spectacular and explosive and eye catching, but it doesn't
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really allow us to study them at length and up close in all their manifestations and to
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see the full range of their skills and the full complexities of the game.
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That doesn't make it a bad form that makes it a certain kind of cricket that if only
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that kind of cricket was on offer, then the game would be somehow diminished.
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And also to take that forward, I'd say that a five day test match is far richer than say
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a five setter in tennis, because the fifth set is really pretty similar to the first
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set in terms of your playing conditions and it's the same two players and you know, you
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could even interchange them sometimes, obviously there's a change in context, but the richness
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of a five day test where a pitch is crumbling and you're fighting to chase 187 against a
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good attack or the kind of drama and joy that say Gavaskar's last winnings 96 against Pakistan
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under spinning back brings and there's really nothing in T-20 cricket which can kind of
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But what is the value of that and what is the price of that?
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So here's the thing, Gideon pretty much laid it out.
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And your question supplies its own answer that we are increasingly trying to figure
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Being cricket tragic should probably feel that somehow something must be done to preserve
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test cricket and to encourage test cricket and stuff like that.
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And being pragmatic, you realize that it's drawing fewer and fewer crowds and it's making
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lesser amounts of money every single time.
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The logic, the economics, everything is making us very strong case for this cricket being
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pretty much phased out of the equation, but counter-intuitively, I'll try a hypothetical.
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What if there wasn't any issues with India and Pakistan or magically the issues that
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dissolved themselves last night and we announced that India and Pakistan were going to play
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a five day series in India starting next month.
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What do you think the crowds will be?
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What do you think the money making potential will be?
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Where does that come from?
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A, from the fact that it has a narrative, but that narrative was largely made by us
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and by us, I mean, the boards, the organizers, the society, the media, all of us, right?
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I mean, the narrative didn't exist otherwise, it didn't exist in a vacuum.
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The ashes, which draws back houses even today, despite the fact that, I mean, you have some
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landmark ashes that the 2005 was lost, really, you know, the storied ashes.
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I'm pretty certain that this ashes, again, you will get a sell-out crowd.
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The reason being there is a strong narrative that has been created by the marketing wing
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of cricket, by the administrative wing of cricket, by the media which is complicit in
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the manufacture of pretty much every single narrative, we do not create similar narratives
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for such events outside of England plays, Australia and India is never going to play
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Pakistan in the conceivable future, so we're left with a single narrative, which has to
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bear the entire burden of lifting cricket.
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And I'm left with a slight mixed feeling about this in the sense that I understand that if
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India plays Pakistan, that larger narrative of what the rivalry has been plays a part
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in drawing a lot of people, but equally it would seem that just the more basic narrative
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of these are the 11 players versus these 11 players and it's their skills out and their
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personal life histories sort of, you know, coming to this is also a fascinating narrative,
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which will simply, which will appeal to cricket tragics like us, perhaps, but not more broadly.
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That particular narrative of 11 against 11 playing for two countries is harder to sell.
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Yeah, we haven't seen that narrative for any time in the last 20, 25 years.
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It's always, there needs to be a trigger.
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India, Australia was, I mean, it was brilliant marketing and it kicked off because of Saurav
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Ganguly came along at a time when you had a strong willed steel war at the other end
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and Saurav played the imp who would tease and torment and that became the narrative
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of that entire series, despite the fact that it had magnificent performances on both sides.
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It had one of the most magical days of cricket when these two guys got together, Lakshman
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and Dravid got together and turned the series on its head.
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What do we still remember?
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The first memory that comes is Saurav being late for two test matches and then when that
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becomes a thing, Saurav deliberately comes 10 minutes early and stands there like, look
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And, you know, we never, and remember that is two of the best lots of players you had.
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You would expect that the narrative would have been about how steel war will counter
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the Indian bowling or how Lakshman and Dravid and Tendulkar and the others would counter
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the Aussie bowling led by Vaughan and McGraw and, you know.
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And the other interesting thing about the mythology of test cricket is that when India
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played Australia or India played Pakistan or you have an Asha series, all the players
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are almost sort of mythic figures.
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They've got their stories, they're part of that.
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But today what you have is with the preponderance of T20 Leagues and so on, they're familiar
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to the extent where they no longer have the same aura, no matter how good they are, you
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I don't think a Steve Smith will ever have the kind of aura that, say, war had back then.
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Simply because we are so much more familiar with.
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And T20, one of the points that Gideon made is that you can't remember what happened last
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I mean, the same test players are also playing T20, they're playing the IPL, they're playing
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in international T20s and stuff like that.
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Somewhere along the way, their skills are getting trivialized.
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And so I don't, I mean, I don't know how much of that aura that you're talking about.
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I would still have, if I'd seen, say, a Steve Warplay T20 and a Mark Warplay, we were talking
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this morning about the styles of, the stylistics of Mark Warplay and stuff like that.
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You have them trotting out in colored clothes and trying to win the first ball for a six
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And suddenly Marco is this human, you know, he's just another guy.
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It's somewhere along the way T20 is, to my way of looking at it, diminishing the mythical
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aspect of some of these test players.
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So having said that, tell me your reaction to this.
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And this is something which fellow cricket critics often get shocked when I express,
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but I think A, T20 is a completely different sport from test cricket and it's unfair to
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compare them and B, I think what T20 cricket has done, what one day cricket did to a certain
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extent, but T20 cricket has done much more, is that it has given players new skill sets
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which have even egg on and enhance the original game.
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Well, I think what has done is it's changed the nature of skill.
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Previously skill operated on one axis, probably let's say a vertical axis.
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It was all about the ability to reproduce certain core skills consistently to a very
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It was a relatively narrow set.
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Keep it simple, do it well again and again.
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Glen McGrath, perhaps the ultimate example, the bowler who could just land the ball on
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a six minutes over and over again, do a little bit either way, inherently kind of undramatic
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cricketer, but with amazingly robust mechanism and an endless patience.
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Skill now works on a kind of a horizontal axis.
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It's a range of skills.
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Players are more skillful, they have more skills than perhaps they ever have before.
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What they perhaps don't have is the kind of the robust mechanism that allows for their
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constant repetition, but the accent is now on variety rather than consistency, isn't
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It's the ability to access 360 degrees to the ground.
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It's the ability to bowl six different balls in and over so as to maximize the disruption
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to the opponent's rhythm.
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You actually have two games now sort of operating at right angles to one another.
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It is amazing when you see the skills migrate from one format to another.
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I actually thought the World Cup in 2015 was utterly fascinating, precisely because you
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got kind of test match quality bowling because the accent was on the only way to slow down
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batsmen these days is to get them out and T20 batting skills on show and they both kind
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of mesh to this new model of ODI cricket, which made it for a very heady brew.
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That's why I found it such a compelling tournament to watch.
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In fact, I often express the unpopular opinion that Virat Kohli is the most skilled Indian
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batsman there has ever been and I felt pretty much the same about AB de Villiers in the
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sense that he can do things that no batsman in history could have imagined.
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I heard Gideon at a panel at the Bangor Olympics, he made this point about having talked to
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a lot of contemporary Australian players, I think he mentioned some 25-26 players and
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he was saying that one of the things that he found uniformly among these players is
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that because of the breakdown of traditional structures, you're playing T20 as an international
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player but you're also playing it for your club and for various clubs around the world
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and stuff like that, that the players are no longer as invested in the outcome of an
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individual match as they used to be.
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They don't suffer the defeats as much and they don't celebrate the victories as much
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because there's another game coming along.
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Which I would argue as a former poker player is actually the correct attitude.
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But then to your question, one of the fun things and I don't know how you will prove
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this empirically, but if you're not invested in the result, then the fear of the result
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is also taken away from your mindset and you're able to go out there and play without that
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So where Gideon started talking about doing the right thing and then just repeating it
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ad infinitum throughout the day, that's no longer your mindset.
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Your mindset is it's not about what I've been trained to do, it is about doing exactly what
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I'm not expected to do.
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And that is adding a certain richness to the vocabulary you're bringing.
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No, I mean, I think that you would bowl a full-toss delivery.
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Yeah, but if Magra was bowling today, I think he'd bowl exactly the same way and be as
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I mean, Magra, in fact to me exemplifies that approach of process over results where you
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just keep on doing the right thing and the results are not themselves.
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But I would still love to see Magra going up against a Virat Kohli or a Navy de Villiers
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Who can just hit him off his left.
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No, also because he's so very predictable in where he's going to land the ball, give
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it a centimeter to the left or a centimeter to the right, you can decide to go down the
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wicket to him because you know what the length is going to be, you can decide to switch the
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bat around and play him to angles that Magra, when doing that has never been challenged
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in an unorthodox fashion.
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You can play Magra orthodox and you will just keep Magra versus Dravid is the ultimate cricket
#
thing because neither of them will be able from what they do.
#
One thing I would say in Magra's favor, I suspect that there's a great player who would
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have adapted to what our security chances offered.
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He was also incredibly psychologically strong and that is something that is required of
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For a bowler to be able to come back and bowl a good delivery having been hit for six previous
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balls that requires an immense poise and concentration and faith in one's ability and I think Magra
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So would it then be fair to say that if it is the case that Magra would have been challenged
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more by contemporary batsmen and would have lifted himself accordingly that the contemporary
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age of cricket has actually lifted the quality of play overall because people are challenged
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more and have to, you know, just using that particular example.
#
I think it's made players more brilliant and more brittle.
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I think it's made momentum much more important.
#
It is interesting to see how test teams just seem to disintegrate now, how one team gets
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on top and the other side just falls away almost abjectly, pitifully.
#
Because the defiance is a loss.
#
Well, they've got lots of skills but they have them only in one dimension and if those
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skills don't work they don't really seem to have much to fall back on.
#
I'm interested to see, there's been a lot of talk lately about how quickly games are
#
ending because of this advocacy of four-day test matches.
#
I'm interested to see what the trend is in margins in test matches.
#
Certainly it's observably true over the last ten years that the margins in anxious test
#
matches, both one way and the other, have been just getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
#
We're just not seeing close test matches anymore.
#
That's really interesting.
#
Going back to, you know, a classic batsman versus bowler struggle that I remember, Atherton
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Would it then be fair to say that if in Atherton's place there was a modern-day batsman, maybe
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Atherton himself had 10 years of pre-20 cricket behind him, would his approach be different
#
A and would his approach be better B?
#
It's an interesting question.
#
I've asked Mike this directly, I said that when you were playing the game, there was
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no batting coach in the England setup.
#
How do you think he would have used a batting coach?
#
Do you think it would have made you any better player?
#
His answer was actually quite a thoughtful one.
#
He said that towards the end of his career, he had begun sort of fiddling almost compulsively
#
with his tip net, partly because of his bad back, just to feel more comfortable with the
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The most valuable coaching that he ever received was just the reinforcement not to make changes,
#
just to rely on doing things simply to have faith in yourself, that degree of reinforcement.
#
It's interesting that a man is psychologically strong as Mike would have required that degree
#
of reinforcement, but that was something that he did feel that he'd missed out on.
#
Mike loved the batting.
#
Mike loved resistance, and since that is quite an old-fashioned quality these days, players
#
want to lead the game, players want to take the aggressive role.
#
Mike loved to withstand, and at his best, there was probably no one better.
#
I suspect that withstanding is something that's kind of enduring, like a rock in the face
#
of erosion is something that's kind of going by the board, because there is this constant
#
accent on enterprise, on taking control of the game, of forcing the game, imposing your
#
will and imposing your momentum.
#
And to be fair, in the shorter form of the game, aggression is just more positive, just
#
pays more than resilience does, and because players play so much more of that, that almost
#
perhaps becomes reflexive to them, which is why I'm wondering if a modern-day batsman
#
playing Donald like that would just say that, heck, I'm not going to try to survive five
#
overs because he's really good, he's going to get me, I'm just going to try and hit him
#
The interesting line in Peterson's last book, which I was reading just recently, he talked
#
about batting with Jonathan Trott, and he said that Trottie was kind of a bit of a figure
#
of fun in dressing room, or at least to bat with him, because he was constantly talking
#
in mid-pitch about how he was going to take the bowler on, how he was going to hit him
#
back over his head, how he was going to take the initiative, and he went back to his end
#
and he just went on playing the way that he always did.
#
Peterson said, interestingly, that at least that demonstrated a positive mindset that
#
even if he was getting into position to play aggressive shots, even if he didn't actually
#
play them, you're naturally a better player if you're thinking positive thoughts, even
#
if you don't actually attack, at least thinking of attack puts you into better shapes and
#
makes you more resilient under those circumstances.
#
I'd like to end by asking both of you two questions.
#
Question one, what makes you more hopeful about the future of cricket?
#
And question two, what gives you the spare about what is happening in cricket today?
#
Well, the thing that always makes me hopeful about playing cricket is playing it.
#
I play for a club, I played for this same club for about 24 years.
#
I'm the games we've got hold of there, I'm disappointed to be in Bangalore today because
#
it means that I'm missing a game this weekend.
#
I love it more than ever.
#
I love getting out there, I love my teammates, I love the challenges that cricket throws
#
I love the unique perspective that you have as a player.
#
There are certain insights that only the player has that we as journalists in our daily life
#
will never have the same view of the game.
#
I think that the love of the game among those who play it is still abiding.
#
And frankly, while I'm out there, I'm just constantly surprised by what a great game
#
it is, how uniquely satisfying, how uniquely skillful, how uniquely fun and full of comradeship
#
it is, how it can blend people from different backgrounds, how it teaches respect for opponents,
#
it teaches respect for officials.
#
It humbles you before it constantly, just at that very moment where you think you've
#
got it mastered, it turns around and bites you in the bum.
#
The thing that cricket has going for it most today is the game itself.
#
And what makes you pessimistic?
#
My concern is the constant bending out of shape of the game by exogenous factors, by
#
commercial agendas, by political and administrative ambition.
#
And I don't detect in those constituencies the same deep and abiding love that those
#
who play the game have.
#
Here, I happen to watch one particular day, actually three days of the recent India-Australia
#
chess series in three different sports parts, partly because my wife threatened to throw
#
me out if I had cricketed volume.
#
But what is striking was you remember that Riyadh thing that Hans Gumbend, Sean Marsh
#
This was a young audience, it's a bar and kids.
#
And they sat riveted through that entire thing, who thought?
#
And the audience at the ground was transfixed by that thing.
#
And it was absolutely brilliant because you realize that for all the talk, and that audience
#
would never have possibly seen some of the great Riyadhs of even the Athenera and before
#
that the Gavaskars and all the people that we celebrated at our thing.
#
Just the sheer contest, even though nothing was happening, it was mostly just being played
#
back to a fielder or whatever, the contest held them riveted and somewhere I think that
#
ultimately we look at a lot of external factors to explain what may or may not happen to the
#
And I think if the game just lifts itself up, I think it has a future.
#
What keeps you hopeful is therefore just the inherent drama of the game itself.
#
At its best, it is one of the most entrancing thing and I don't mean the sixes that are
#
flying, I mean the contest, it has that narrative scope to it.
#
What makes me despair, I'll take off from what Gideon said, I think you look at what
#
is happening in sports administration at the ICC level or at the most civilized cricket
#
boards like Australia for instance and then the Dark Ages of India, every single innovation,
#
every single tweak and twist is all with a very short term gain in mind and each one
#
of these is independent of the other, sometimes contradictory to the other and it is not leading
#
in an organized fashion to all the questions that you have been concerned with in the course
#
I mean I don't see the administration asking itself those questions and addressing those.
#
I mean they are essentially just corporate suits.
#
So why would you have Sri Lanka come back and tour again, I mean what possible logic
#
The only logic you had was here is a broadcaster who has given us this load of money and we
#
need to make him happy, therefore let's give him some message.
#
And you dilute the drama and you also disillusion the players who are just very too much.
#
So you know where you were looking at a team that is all conquering and stuff that and
#
you have built up the mythos around Virat and his invincibles and you suddenly have
#
them playing school games.
#
I am sorry, I mean I have full respect for Sri Lankan cricket but right now they happen
#
to be unfortunately at a point of transition.
#
They are not opposition, they are just playing Zimbabwe and fighting their way back and you
#
host them here for longer than you are going to be in South Africa.
#
And in what world that makes any kind of sense, I don't know, so if the game gives me hope,
#
the administration of the game gives me total despair and that is what I am trying to say.
#
So we can end on a hopeful note that even if you know the administration of the game
#
tries to take it backwards, we the fans will fight and it will flourish.
#
Thank you so much for your time.
#
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking, sorry to say but there
#
has been a slight delay due to the apocalypse having suddenly begun.
#
As you can see there is death, destruction and chaos taking place all around us.
#
But don't you worry, food and drinks will be served shortly and I would recommend checking
#
out IVM Podcasts to get some of your favourite Indian podcasts.
#
We will keep you going till this whole thing blows over.
