Tag: International Cricket Council

The party-spirited cricket World Cup

Sharda Ugra has a sharp piece out in the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack 2024 laying bare the ways in which the BJP hijacked the 2023 ODI Cricket World Cup via the BCCI, whose secretary Jay Shah is the son of Union home minister Amit Shah. The Reddit thread on the article has a link to a full archival copy.

It was clear to everyone the World Cup had been stage-managed by the BCCI; as I wrote when it concluded, just a few of the symptoms of the BJP’s interference were that Sunday games had been reserved for India, many tickets were vouchsafed for government officials or to bodies with ties to such officials, police personnel were present in the stands for many games, snatching away placards with shows of support for Pakistan; many spectators (but not all, and not everywhere) often chanted “jai shri Ram” — the BJP’s “call to arms”, as Ugra put it — in unison; Air Force jets flew past the Modi stadium named for Prime Minister Narendra (even though he’s alive) on the day of the finals, which only the government has the power to arrange; the man himself elected to bunk the game once it started to become clear India would lose it; and throughout the tournament the game’s broadcaster was fixated on showing visuals of celebrities, including BJP leaders and supporters, in the stands when they weren’t of the game itself.

Together with releasing the tournament schedule late, all-but-accidental delays in clearing visas for Pakistani and Pakistan-affiliated cricketers and journalists, suppressing the sale of merchandise affiliated with the Pakistani and Bangladeshi cricket teams, and DJs playing songs like “Ram Siya Ram” and “India jeetega” during India games, the BJP’s hyper-nationalist hand was in plain sight, especially to those who knew what to look for. Many of these feats had been foreshadowed during the 2022 Asia Cup, when Star Sports and Pepsi had joined in on the fun. To these incursions, Ugra’s essay has added something more in-your-face, and obnoxious for it:

… three independent sources — one each from the team, the ICC and the BCCI — have confirmed the existence of an all-orange uniform, which was presented to the team as an alternative two days before the [India-Pakistan] game. They had already been given a new training kit — an orange shirt and dark trousers — a week before their first fixture. When the all-orange kit arrived in the dressing-room, the players looked nonplussed, according to an insider. Here, the story split into two versions. One, out first, said the uniform was rejected because it “looks like Holland”. The other had the Indian cricketers saying to each other: “This is not on… We won’t do it… It is disrespectful to some of the members of the team” [referring to Mohammed Shami and Mohammed Siraj].

That this was an ICC tournament had become moot by this point, with the BJP-BCCI combine subsuming or just disregarding too many of its rules and tenets for the international body to matter. The BJP sought to have a literal saffron-versus-green contest on the ground, replete with provocative music and police presence — not to mention also packing the stands with people who booed Pakistani players as they walked in/out — and the BCCI obliged. The only reason this doesn’t seem to have succeeded was either an unfavourable comparison to the Dutch circket jersey — which I’m sure the BJP and/or the BCCI would have noticed beforehand — or that the players didn’t want to put it on. According to Ugra, an orange or a blue-orange jersey was on for a UNICEF event called “One Day for Children”, and the corresponding match was to be an India-Sri Lanka fixture three weeks after the match against Pakistan; there, India wore its traditional blue, presumably the BCCI had stopped insisting on the saffron option.

But what rankles more isn’t that the ICC folded so easily (Ugra: “The ICC demonstrated neither the nous nor the spine to resist the takeover”) but that the BCCI, and the BJP behind it, laboured all the time as if there would be no resistance to their actions. Because, clearly, the two things that seemingly didn’t go the BJP’s way were the result of two minimal displays of effective resistance: the first when “Young Indians among the ICC volunteers eventually had [“Ram Siya Ram”] removed from the playlist for the rest of the tournament”, and the second when the Indian men’s team refused to don the saffron tees and trousers.

The ICC is a faraway body, as much undermined by the Indian cricketing body’s considerable wealth and political influence in the country as by the BJP’s now well-known tactic to take advantage of every little administrative loophole, leeway or liberty to get what it wants. The latter alone is reason enough to not expect more from the ICC, at least not without being exposed a few times to the demands of the adversarial posture engaging with the BCCI merits. Instead, the BCCI’s capitulation — completed in 2019, when Jay Shah became its secretary — and its organisational strategies in the Asia Cup and the World Cup cement the conclusion that it cares nothing for rituals and traditions in service of the spirit of the game. There is no public-spiritedness, only party-spiritedness.

And just as the BJP wins its third term to form the national goverbment, the T20 World Cup will begin.

Featured image: A surfeit of India flags among spectators of the India versus South Africa match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, 2015. Credit: visitmelbourne, CC BY 2.0.

ICC pitch-rating system is regulatory subversion

In today’s edition of The Hindu, Rebecca Rose Varghese and Vignesh Radhakrishnan have a particularly noteworthy edition of their ‘Data Point’ column – ‘noteworthy’ because they’ve used data to make concrete something we’ve all been feeling for a while, in the way we sometimes know something to be true even though we don’t have hard evidence, and which found prominent articulation in the words of Rohit Sharma in a recent interview.

Sharma was commenting on the ICC’s pitch-rating system, saying pitches everywhere should be rated consistently instead of those in the subcontinent earning poorer ratings more of the time.

Rebecca and Vignesh analysed matches and their pitch-ratings between May 14, 2019, and December 26, 2023, to find:

  1. Pitches in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka receive ‘below average’ or ‘poor’ ratings for Test matches more often than Test pitches in Australia, West Indies, England, South Africa, and New Zealand;
  2. In Test matches played in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, spin bowling claimed more wickets than pace bowling; and
  3. When spin bowling claims more wickets than pace bowling in Test matches, the former pitches are rated worse than the latter pitches even if both sets of matches conclude after a relatively lower number of balls have been faced.

This is just fantastic. (1) and (2) together imply the ICC has penalised pitches in the subcontinent for being spin-friendly tracks. And this and (3) imply that this penalty doesn’t care for the fact that non-spin-friendly tracks produce similar results without incurring the same penalty.

The longer a Test match lasts, the better it is for stadiums and TV networks broadcasting the match: the stadium can sell tickets for all five days and networks can broadcast advertisements for Test matches on all five days. This thinking has come to dominate ODIs, T20s, and Test matches, but it’s a sad irony that the ICC created the ODI and the T20 formats to be more entertaining and more profitable without compromising the Test format. Now, with the ICC’s pitch-rating system, this entertainment + profitability thinking has percolated through Test matches as well.

Sharma alluded to this when he said:

I mean, we saw what happened in this match, how the pitch played and stuff like that. I honestly don’t mind playing on pitches like this. As long as everyone keeps their mouth shut in India and don’t talk too much about Indian pitches, honestly.

I’d take this further and say Test match pitches can’t be rated badly because the purpose of this format is to test players in the toughest conditions the sport can offer. In this milieu, to say a Test match pitch is ‘below average’ is to discourage teams from confronting their opponents’ batters with a track that favours bowlers’ strengths. And in the ICC’s limited view, this discouragement is biased markedly against spin-bowling.

Criticism of this paradigm isn’t without foundation. The A Cricketing View Substack wrote in a February 2021 post (hat-tip to Vignesh):

The Laws of Cricket only specify that the game not be played on a pitch which umpires might consider to be dangerous to the health of the players. The ICC has chosen to go beyond this elementary classification between dangerous and non-dangerous pitches by setting up a regulatory mechanism which is designed to minimize the probability that a bad pitch (and not just a dangerous pitch) will be prepared.

If anything, a bad pitch that results in uneven and potentially high bounce will be more dangerous to batters than a bad pitch that results in sharp turn. So the ICC’s pitch-rating system isn’t “regulatory expansion” – as A Cricketing View called it – but regulatory subversion. R. Ashwin has also questioned the view the ICC has taken, via its system, that pitches shouldn’t offer sharp turn on day 1 – another arbitrary choice, although one that makes sense from the entertainment and/or profitability PoV, that restricts ‘average’ or better spin-bowling in its view to a very specific kind of surface.

Point (3) in the ‘Data Point’ implies such pitches probably exist in places like Australia and South Africa, which are otherwise havens of pace-bowling. The advantage that pace enjoys in the ICC’s system creates another point of divergence when it meets players’ physiology. Pitches in Australia in particular are pace-friendly, but when they’re not, they’re not spin friendly either. On these tracks, Australian pacers still have an advantage because they’re taller on average and able to generate more bounce than shorter bowlers, such as those from India.

I believe Test matches should be played on tracks that teach all 22 players (of both teams) a valuable lesson – without of course endangering players’ bodies.

  1. How will stadiums and TV networks make more money off Test matches? The bigger question, to me, is: should they? I’m aware of the role stadiums have played through history in making specific sports more sustainable by monetising spectatorship. But perhaps stadiums should be organised such that the bulk of their revenue is from ODI and T20 matches and Test matches are spared the trouble of being more entertaining/profitable.
  2. Who decides what these lessons should be? I don’t trust the ICC, of course, but I don’t trust the BCCI either because I don’t trust the people who currently staff it to avoid making a habit of tit-for-tat measures – beyond one-off games – that massage Indian teams’ player-records. Other countries’ cricket boards may be different but given the effects of the ICC’s system on their specific fortunes, I’m not sure how they will react. In fact, it seems impossible that we will all agree on these lessons or how their suitability should be measured – a conclusion that, ironically, speaks to the singular pitfall of judging the value of a cricket match by its numbers.