Australian cricket enters the 2015 Ashes series buoyed by the stunning success of its governing body’s latest entrepreneurial business initiative.
Struck down in recent times by dire commercial circumstances, including a dismal 2014 financial year where revenues of $292m delivered a piddling $102m surplus, Cricket Australia has been forced into innovative and decisive action to arrest their inevitable slide into financial oblivion.
And what a response they have made, headlined by an idea so simple and calculating it makes the invention of the wheel, the internet, and the injection of caramel into the Caramello chocolate block seem like schoolboy high-jinks.
This week, a Cricket Australia spokesman said it is “in the middle of an overhaul of its commercial relationship with governments”, which is thinly disguised code for putting the game of cricket up for sale, setting state against state for the rights to host fixtures – including the Melbourne Boxing Day Test.
No doubt some of you will consider that cricket already sold-out long ago, but I assure you, if I can be so bold as to borrow from poet laureate Randy Bachman, “You ain’t seen nothing yet!”
With football laying mortally wounded, tainted by the grime of FIFA’s corrupt shenanigans and Sepp Blatter’s sycophantic leadership, cricket has filled the void, confirming its rightful place as the dominant global sport.
It has been able to do this for two reasons. Firstly, because by contrast global cricket administration is free from corruption, with the game’s custodians interested not in the feathering of their own nests, but always having the best interests of the wider game at heart.
Secondly, cricket is truly a global game. At any single point in time, including right now as you are reading this, live odds are being streamed to taxi drivers in all corners of the globe, every one of them a servant of and mouthpiece for the game.
In recent years Cricket Australia has slowly but surely dipped its toes into the world of sports commercialisation and saw the benefits that were on offer. Certainly, they understood the value of building brand loyalty.
Nowadays, if I watch a cricket match and don’t have a KFC dinner box and Zinger burger chaser to sustain me I feel cheap and nasty, like when I’m invited to a wedding of some distant cousin I don’t really know, but still plough through the grog regardless.
It is also nice to know that this loyalty is returned. I have it on good authority that descendants of the late Colonel Harlan Sanders host a charity cricket match every year at his birthplace in Henryville, Indiana, where they play for the Lou Vincent Cup, and pay their respects to the sport which has not only secured their financial future but turned artery cleansing into a booming industry.
It appears however that loyalty extends only so far, and cricket fans and MCG members who rock up early on Boxing Day morning in coming years to claim the best seats in the house may well find themselves counting seagulls, while the on-field action takes place elsewhere.
That where, precisely, depends on which governments Cricket Australia is talking to, and which of those feel like stumping up their spare cash for the privilege. Early front-running cities are considered to be Sydney, awash with stamp duty from a rampant property market, and aching to deliver a knee to the groin of a cocky Melbourne which thinks it owns State of Origin again, despite not actually knowing or caring if it is rugby league or rugby union.
Hobart is also a possibility, the island state of Tasmania so ravaged by a dwindling population base and Greens economic vandalism that this investment would represent an opportunity for a desperate government to go ‘all in’ or ‘misère’, a final chance to turn fortunes around lest they be cast adrift to float off to Antarctica or, heaven forbid, New Zealand.
The smart money however is on the traditional and spiritual home of cricket to claim its rightful place as the owner of the Boxing Day Test. I’m talking, of course, of the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai.
Victorian Premier, Dan ‘Let me make myself perfectly clear’ Andrews, is like most of us, none too keen to pay for something he already gets for free. However, while he may huff and puff all he likes, the sooner he understands that the currency Cricket Australia deals in is not some old-fashioned notion of entitlement for the Melbourne private school elite, but cold, hard rupees, then he will sleep much easier at night.
After all Cricket Australia has extended an olive branch to those unsuccessful tenderers, allowing them to bid for the rights to have their city name printed on the ground and signs – a kind of ‘bronze’ level sponsorship if you like. Which, when you think about it, has strong appeal, allowing Melbourne to create the impression to the rest of the world that they still host the Boxing Day Test, but without the headaches associated with drunken cricket fans rampaging through Young and Jacksons spoiling the night-time experience of other visitors to the city.
What should be apparent to cricket fans now, if it wasn’t already, is that with Cricket Australia in this sort of mood, there is no corner of cricket’s soul that will be left unturned in deference to the almighty dollar. And nor should it!
Let’s face it, the Ashes itself is a pathetic little trophy, my five-year-old nephew bought home a better one this week for most improved player in his Erskineville junior soccer team.
I would be astonished if plans were not already in place to tender out naming rights to the urn and, for the next year after that, when a new sponsor comes on board – let’s just pluck a name out of the air and say India Cements – it would be a simple matter to burn a fresh set of stumps for a new trophy. Granted, this burning would need to be handled carefully, in a customised furnace, to ensure that the Ashes retain an old, traditional smell, lest the players themselves feel the significance of the trophy is being cheapened.
The other financial ace up Cricket Australia’s sleeve is to give up the pretence once and for all of playing nations which are either hopeless on the field, or don’t rate on local television, or aren’t approved by the BCCI.
There is a role for public television and bloggers to play in broadcasting nondescript series involving South Africa, New Zealand and Sri Lanka to any losers who care about second division cricket.
But frankly, if somebody is waving a carton of 1983 Grange in front of me, I’m hardly going to warm up first with a can of JD and Cola – so let’s just get into the good stuff. Australia, India and England!
Failing all of these initiatives, there remains only one avenue for Cricket Australia where they could pursue savings of millions of dollars per annum and at the same time satisfy the Australian cricketing public.
They could terminate Shane Watson’s contract.
The mammoth rise of Jake Fraser-McGurk - his enormous potential and the destructive shot-making that he possesses makes him a very tempting option.
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The Aussie needed every centimetre of his height and reach to reel that one in!
