To the casual observer cricket may seem to be in fine fettle. Three gripping Test series were just concluded over the festive season, with Australia and South Africa beating India and Pakistan, respectively, at home, while Afghanistan bested Zimbabwe, in two Tests. Tests in all three host countries were well supported, with the India-Australia series also breaking TV and streaming viewership records.
In addition, the last two World Cups – the ODI World Cup held in 2023 and the T20 World Cup held last year – drew significant interest, with the game’s global governing body, International Cricket Council (ICC), claiming that the two events drawing unprecedented levels of interest and viewership.
At the same time, T20 leagues are proliferating around the world, with cricketers being paid sums that would have been unimaginable at the turn of the century.
Rude health
Even here in South Africa, cricket appears to be in fairly rude health. South Africa has qualified for the final of the World Test Championship for the first time, where the Proteas are scheduled to play against Australia in the decider at Lords in London in June. This comes after South Africa made the final of last year’s T20 World Cup and the semi-finals of the 2023 ODI World Cup.
South Africa’s own T20 league, the SA20, is also now in its third edition, and has already turned a profit, while attracting large crowds and some of world cricket’s biggest names to participate in the tournament.
But limits are being placed on the sport’s growth, by its very custodians, such as the ICC, who are supposed to make the game truly global and financially sustainable.
In recent years the so-called “Big Three” – made up of cricket’s global superpowers, England, Australia, and India – have been working to secure greater revenues for themselves, to the cost of other cricketing countries. They have done this through ensuring that a greater share of revenue from ICC events, such as World Cups, go to them, with other countries getting a relatively smaller share.
At the same time the Big Three have hogged their share of global events. Between 2011 and 2023 all four ODI World Cups were held in one of the Big Three and two of the last four T20 World Cups being held in a Big Three nation, with next year’s edition scheduled to be co-hosted in India.
Television revenue
In addition, the three countries play each other increasingly often, to the detriment of other countries. Television revenue deals are higher when one of the Big Three are involved, and substantially so when two of the Big Three are involved in a bilateral series. India and Australia have just played a five-Test series and India’s next test assignment is another five-Test series against England later this year.
This is against the backdrop where other countries are increasingly playing two-Test series, due to costs, and where five-Test series are a relative rarity. For example, South Africa last played a Test series of five matches in twenty years ago, West Indies in 2002, and New Zealand last played a five-Test series over fifty years ago.
At the same time South Africa qualified for the WTC final only playing India once and without playing Australia and England. The WTC is played between the top nine Test playing countries but not on a round-robin basis, with some teams playing significantly fewer games than others, with the log being determined based on a team’s percentage of wins. South Africa managed to make the final playing significantly fewer games than the Big Three, leading some former players to argue that South Africa did not deserve to be in the final.
Michael Vaughan, a former England captain, said South Africa had made the final on “the back of beating pretty much nobody” while a former Australia player and coach, Darren Lehmann, said that South Africa wouldn’t be able to beat any of the Big Three sides.
Closed shop
But the Big Three are thinking of making the game even more of a closed shop, and allowing the trio to play each other more often. There is talk of creating two divisions for Test cricket, with an upper division consisting of the top seven sides, and a lower division of five sides. While there has been talk of promotion-relegation, there has been talk of making India, Australia, and England exempt from it, a bizarre proposal, and one which will make world cricket even more unequal.
While having two divisions for Test cricket will allow the Big Three to play each other more often, and thus fatten the Golden Goose, teams in the second division, could see their share of income fall, and could even threaten the continued survival of the game in some countries. West Indies, which has a long and proud cricketing history, and which dominated the game in the 1970s and 1980s is particularly vulnerable. Clive Lloyd, who captained the team through much of its Golden Era said he was “disturbed” by the idea and that a further decline in funding for the team could see the West Indies cease to exist as a cricketing entity.
Cricket is now at a crossroads. It is not impossible that in a decade or so global cricket is dominated by T20 leagues with the only Test cricket being played by the Big Three, with the only other international cricket being limited-overs series and tournaments. Cricket will have lost something of its soul if that happens, but sometimes that is the price of progress.
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