Same Leopard, Same Spots

Not content with the idea of two divisions of Test cricket, Cricket Australia’s new CEO, Todd Greenberg, has suggested that perhaps Test status could be removed completely from several ICC Full members.

“We want to continue playing New Zealand, South Africa, the West Indies, Pakistan [as well as England and India,” he told Daniel Brettig in an interview for The Age, “but we do have to be brave enough to consider whether scarcity will provide better results for Test cricket.

“Maybe not everyone in global cricket needs to set themselves up to play Tests. There might be fewer countries playing, rather than all of them.”

 

Those who would miss out, on this scenario, are not merely Zimbabwe, Afghanistan and Ireland, already excluded from the World Test Championship and existing in a shadowland of whatever the more privileged may be prepared to toss them.

Greenberg would apparently be prepared to ditch Sri Lanka and Bangladesh as well in his drive to achieve ‘better results’.

And ‘better results’, we might not unreasonably suspect, means better on the balance sheet, not on the field, because that’s all that matters these days.

If you’re inclined to dismiss this as idle speculation, pause for a moment over the fact that Greenberg, who was until recently the boss of the Australian Cricketers’ Association, has just been put on the working party established by the ICC at its meeting in Zimbabwe to consider the future of international cricket, including the calendar, the balance between formats, possible divisional structures for Test cricket, and the idea of a Saudi-backed franchise league.

The most radical version of a divisional Test structure would of course be to have just one division of, say, seven teams, Australia and the six other countries they want to play.

It’s not as if Australia doesn’t have form in this regard.

In its previous incarnations as the ominously-named Board of Control (a term now preserved only in India) and as the Australian Cricket Board (ACB), Cricket Australia resolutely opposed expansion of the charmed circle of ICC membership, resisting the election of Sri Lanka from 1946 until 1981 and contesting the very establishment of the Associates category.

The difficulty of persuading the Australians to accept tours by the ‘lesser’ Test-playing countries or to tour there themselves was notorious: most disgracefully, it took 27 years for Australia to arrange a second Test against its nearest neighbour, New Zealand, after the first, involving what was effectively an Australian second team, in Wellington in 1946.

So it should not come as a surprise that Greenberg so cavalierly envisages consigning a handful of countries to Test cricket’s outer darkness – he’s following in a long line of Australian cricket administrators.

It raises disturbing questions about the fate of the recent report by the World Cricketers’ Association, which is radical in many ways but which stops well short of amputating nearly half the countries which currently have Test status.

That report probably came out too late to be formally considered by the Executive Board and its committees in their meeting in Harare and Victoria Falls (it’s a tough life, running world cricket), but it must have caused a certain amount of muttering in the corridors of power.

The WCA and its affiliates are, after all, not exactly flavour of the decade among some governing bodies, and some still resist the notion that players’ organisations should have any say at all in the governance of the sport the players themselves make possible.

There is a clear danger that the oligarchs and their acolytes who run world cricket will pick the eyes out of the WCA report, implementing any bits which happen to suit their own agenda and dumping the rest.

And if Greenberg’s off-the-cuff suggestion for cutting back Test cricket is more than a casually-floated trial balloon, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and the rest may have a fight on their hands.

And this website may have to consider changing its name to ‘Contracting Cricket’. Pun intended.

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