Sunday Times

Cricket has a complicate­d relationsh­ip with television

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● Television used to be what brought cricket to your lounge, but if you reckon that’s the beginning and end of the role it plays in the game these days then your TV is as blackand-white as your thinking.

The fact that the Internatio­nal Cricket Council (ICC) leans on private broadcast companies to supply and operate, at their own expense but under the guidance of the ICC’s umpires, the decision-review system is only part of the problem.

If the ICC want to embrace electronic umpiring — which they do, not least because the errors of their sanctioned umpires have been shown up by television — they should pay for the equipment themselves and for the travelling crews of officials and technician­s required to operate it.

Or take a leaf out of Major League Baseball’s book and send all referrals to a team of officials stationed remotely expressly for that purpose, and who keep track of 15 games a day that start up to seven hours apart.

The ball-tampering mess Australia got themselves into at Newlands is an intriguing example of what happens when television bursts what used to be its boundaries.

That a bulletproo­f case of cricketing crookery was exposed by a sharp-eyed cameraman is, you would think, good.

You won’t find many South Africans who disagree. But they are hypocrites if they thought differentl­y when the cameras exposed Faf du Plessis committing crookery in Hobart in November 2016.

In cricket’s law, there is no difference between mints and sandpaper. Whether there should be is another argument.

Cameras are, of course, beholden to those who wield them, and the 10 000km that separate Cape Town from Bellerive Oval could be about the size of the difference between the agendas of the people who put what those cameras capture on screen.

The time has long since passed when television was part of the press corps, an era that ended when the suits hit on the idea of charging broadcaste­rs to put sport on the air.

How are we to believe that broadcaste­rs, who make their money from attracting viewers and advertiser­s to what they have already paid cricket boards to televise, are honest brokers?

The hand that feeds them is whichever bunch of suits they are in cahoots with, and they are not about to bite it.

It would, therefore, require extreme naïveté to believe anything else is the reason the home team are almost never trialled by television for ball-tampering.

That has to make you wonder how often host broadcaste­rs look the other way when a member of the team who plays under the auspices of a board who have a profession­al relationsh­ip with that broadcaste­r is spotted doing the wrong thing to the ball.

But sometimes things get complicate­d. Like they did in Dubai in October 2013, when Du Plessis was nabbed for rubbing the ball on a zip in his trousers — and South Africa’s suits threatened the broadcaste­r with the removal of access to their players on that tour as well as the revocation of the rights they already held to matches in South Africa.

That’s if they showed the footage. If they didn’t, no problem.

When Vernon Philander was found guilty of ball-tampering with the help of his fingernail­s in Galle in July 2014, it took almost 48 hours for the relevant pictures to make it to air because similar threats were made.

Only the interventi­on of Sri Lanka’s suits, who of course had the opposite agenda to South Africa’s, made that happen.

So don’t accept that what you see is what you get when you watch cricket on television. At best it’s a carefully packaged product trying to sell you stuff you didn’t know you needed. At worst it’s a deliberate­ly misleading version of what’s happening on the other side of the boundary.

There’s cricket on your television. But what else? And what’s missing?

They are hypocrites if they thought differentl­y when the cameras exposed Faf du Plessis’s crookery

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