Last week — April 2016 to be sure — during the International Cricket Council’s board meetings (ICC) in Dubai, two full member officials got together on the sides and wondered whether this was 2008.
They did so because the day-long meeting of the chief executives’ committee they attended had reminded them of a presentation they sat through at the ICC’s annual general meeting in 2008.
That was of a report produced by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), with the encouragement of Cricket Australia (CA), which outlined a radical restructuring of international cricket.
According to one of the authors of that report, the impetus — a pretty damning one — for it was the fact that for three years and 46 weeks international cricket had no contests of any real consequence. And then came the World Cup.
That was the way cricket had grown, from a bilateral contest between Australia and England to a larger web of bilateral contests, some with historical context, most without. If you were setting up a sport today, the authors thought, you would never do it the way cricket is now.
In their vision, BCG created a four-year cycle, in which every international game — Test, ODI or T20I — carried consequence. Three years of the cycle were given to Test round-play, and in the third year itself would be a Test semi-final and final.
The fourth year was for any other bilateral series sides may want to pursue, such as an Ashes series if England and Australia did not come across each other in the first place during the round-play. There would be an ODI league final in the second year and a T20I final in the first year, as well as the World Cup in the fourth year: every year of the cycle would have a major final to build towards, every game would mean something.
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BCG went some way to ensuring this cycle came with a feasible and viable economic solution (predictably, a centralised revenue pool was dismissed outright), whereby cricket’s financial ecosystem would not be greatly stirred. The overall pie, BCG argued, would anyway be larger because with new context, every single match carried greater value than before.
The reception to the plans were mixed. Some boards rejected it outright. Others did not really grasp what was going on. Some progress had already been made with the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) that year, BCG officials travelling to India several times and even presenting the report to them separately.
In September 2008, N Srinivasan was elected the new BCCI secretary and when next the BCG went to the BCCI, the report was dismissed outright. One account of this has Srinivasan telling them they have shown him a new, beautiful room with a beautiful view and invited him in. But, he adds, he liked the room he was in and moreover he did not like the people in the other room.
As Srinivasan rose in influence so too dwindled that of the report. Bits and pieces of it hung around, such as the plans for a Test Championship that the ICC tried — and failed — twice to implement. Essentially it was cast away.
Until last week, that is, when cricket once again sat down to discuss how it can acquire shape and meaning. Since the departures of Srinivasan and CA’s Wally Edwards, and sidelining of England’s Giles Clarke last year, cricket has been talking seriously about giving itself context, and in this meeting the most significant step forward has been taken.
For a start, there was consensus that change must come. The 15 chief executives were divided into three groups of five to discuss ways and ideas to contextualise one format each. They worked to a few broad, though admittedly vague, principles: the best players should be playing international cricket, those players should be incentivised, spectators should get the best quality of international cricket, and every single international should have context.
Once these sessions were done, the three groups sat together as one to present their solutions and models. Through this brainstorming the spirit of that BCG report floated through the room, evident in a number of ideas and proposals that reimagine international cricket.
Test championships; a two-tier structure; an ODI qualification league to the World Cup for all sides other than the host; four-day Tests; and, perhaps, most ambitiously, breaking up the calendar (over one or two years) into format-specific windows so that only one format is being played internationally across the world at one time; nothing is off the table.
This jumble of proposals and ideas will now be turned into more formal and coherent models by the ICC management, spearheaded by its head of cricket operations, Geoff Allardice. He will work with two working groups of the board chief executives, to look at the commercial implications as well as cricketing ones of such a vast shake-up.
Those models will be presented to the ICC’s cricket committee in June, before it is shown formally to the ICC board. After that nobody can say. The breadth of change under discussion upturns the way cricket is, and has been forever, run so it is unlikely to happen overnight.
Each country has its broadcast deals, internal compulsions and economic realities and, increasingly, its own domestic Twenty20 league that eats into the international calendar — cricket’s diversity, where its geographic reach is vast if thin, means standardising a calendar will not be easy.
The good news, it is being said in the ICC, is that the commitment to change is in place. In theory, that means all boards understand they may have to lose a little now for cricket to gain in the long run.
But that should be tempered by the real — though not necessarily bad — news, that cricket is only now catching up to where it arrived eight years ago.
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