Andrew Flintoff is on his way to becoming the first cricket mercenary after he turned down the ECB’s ODI contract, opting for a freelance role instead. Greame Smith has mentioned in an interview that unless ‘meaningless’ tours are ended, this might become the norm than an exception. The aberration that is Flintoff can well become the standard. What will the ICC do about this? Possibly, nothing. Cricket has been struggling to reconcile the sudden explosion in money making opportunities to the current structure of the game for long. And increasingly, the national format has been losing favour among cricketers and administrators. Rock N’ Roll sold out a long time ago and now it’s the turn of cricket to mortgage its soul to profit mongers. Apparently, one day cricket has become formulaic and tests are still considered the real thing, but nobody seems to want them. Oh yes, a surfeit of anything will sound formulaic; secondly, let’s stop this hypocrisy of calling test matches the ‘real deal’ and yet avoiding them like the plague. I just read the latest Dan Brown novel, and much as I enjoyed ‘The Da Vinci Code’, I was utterly disappointed to see how a talented writer has decided to stick to the same template (maybe even dumb it down), just for sheer blockbuster success. The ICC, the BCCI and the cricket world seem to be heading in much the same direction. T20 gives an opportunity to cash out and it’s being peppered across the calendar making it more and more crowded. The diminishing marginal utility concept seems to have set in and as a result the One Day game is struggling for survival. In the recent India vs. Sri Lanka final at the Compaq Cup, I watched 25 riveting overs of the Sri Lankan chase as the match hung in balance and it was a brilliant study in tactics and small incidents that shape the destiny of a match. T20 doesn’t give you that pleasure. And if you’re looking for more such encounters, the way forward is less ODIs and not more. Make people hungry for action, not provide them a sensory overload of it.
In a 24/7 internet world everything gets amplified and so have the potential deficiencies in the One Day game (the length, the one sidedness etc.) but with a few tweaks it can still be saved. The solution could be Sachin’s idea of 25-over two innings formats or the 40-Over match but that’s secondary. The primary issue is rationalization of the calendar. Good, quality cricket doesn’t have a mode (T20, Tests or ODI); it flows whenever the top guys in the trade strut their stuff. It’s just that they cant strut it day in, day out all year long.
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