Australian dispute could be just the start if ICC don’t sort out T20 issues
Derek Pringle rues the lack of festival cricket in the modern game as money dictates counties stay at their regular homes
THE ICC needs to work more closely with T20 leagues across the world – or international cricket could pay a heavy price.
That’s the warning from the head of the international player’s union (FICA) Tony Irish and comes in the light of the ongoing and seemingly escalating spat between Cricket Australia and the Australian Cricketers’ Association.
As of July 1, over 200 Australian cricketers now find themselves unemployed after their contracts expired.
A failure to find a resolution could pose serious questions – not just over this winter’s Ashes series but also over the future of the game, with Irish telling The Cricket Paper that players, rather than the governing bodies, now have the upper hand.
And he believes that if the ICC continue to take a hands-off approach to cricket’s biggest T20 tournaments, then it could
store up a whole world of pain for international cricket.
“The bigger picture is that there are alternative markets for players – the best players have plenty of option,” he says.
“The best players will be in demand across the various markets. There are markets that stretch for the majority of the year now – and there’s a lot of money up for grabs.
“International boards need everything they can to foster good relationships with their players. The whole of international cricket could be affected by this and the key here is that you need to balance international and traditional cricket with these leagues.
“There needs to be one structure and one regulatory system which balances the whole lot and that needs to be done at the global level.
“At the moment these leagues shoot up in different nations and are considered the business of that country. The fact is, though, that they’re all competing for the best players but they have other opportunities available to them.
“The boards may say that they can control where their players go during the season but if those players aren’t contracted then you can’t do that.”
With Cricket Australia’s dispute with their own players descending into acrimony, other boards around the world will be watching on nervously, knowing that similar issues could soon be facing them.
So far, however, the ICC and governing bodies for the individual full member nations have been reluctant to work collaboratively with individual T20 leagues, keeping any involvement at arm’s length. That may soon change. “The whole system for players relies on a good regulatory and contract system across the whole structure,” says Irish.
“That needs to be seen as a whole piece of work.You can’t deal simply with international cricket and let the leagues do what they want. Both are good and important for cricket but they have to work hand in hand.”
High summer used to be ‘Festival’ time in cricket, the moment when counties took the first-class game and its players away from HQ and deep into the shires they represented. It still happens at places like Cheltenham and Scarborough, but like most things that make life awkward for the money men it has declined from a heyday where over 40 alternative venues were used to one where just a handful survive today.
Festivals and the grounds used for them were mostly great fun and added spice to the season. From the pitch, crowd, dressing-room facilities, lunches and teas, they introduced an element of the unexpected which tested the mettle and adaptability of teams in a way that playing at the better known venues did not.
Along with our main ground in Chelmsford, the Essex sides of my era also played a week’s matches at Ilford, Southend and Colchester. The first two, with their cramped changing-rooms, temperamental showers and splintery floors, would dispirit teams long before they got on the field. Often, you could tell how an opponent might perform just from the nature of their whinges about the facilities. It wasn’t for nothing that our record at these places was better than good.
The pitches were nearly always more interesting, too, at Festival grounds. With less preparation time afforded them than the strips at HQ, results in three-day cricket, without the help of a creative declaration, were far more forthcoming on so called ‘out-grounds’. It could backfire, though, and in 1989 an overly dry pitch against Yorkshire at Southend, upon which Essex’s opponents won the toss, cost us that season’s Championship after the club was docked 25 points for a sub-standard pitch (we came second to Worcestershire by six points despite winning one more game than them).
Interestingly, we’d played on a worse deck against Warwickshire earlier in the season at Ilford, another dump in the eyes of most of our opponents. But we had an enlightened umpire that match in Jack Hampshire. As Allan Donald got another ball in our second innings to burst through the top and strike a young Nasser Hussain in the chest, Hampshire turned to me at the non-striker’s end and said in that dry way of his: “Don’t believe those old players who say pitches were better in their day. This is crap, but I’ve played on much worse.” As a result, it was not reported unlike the one at Southend.
If the surfaces could be a lottery at Festival grounds some, like Cheltenham, did have certain properties which could be relied upon. There, on the College’s 1st XI pitch, it was springy, tennis-ball bounce – properties which made facing Courtney Walsh, Gloucestershire’s overseas fast bowler, such a handful for most of the 1980s and early 90s. Indeed, the peril felt by schoolmasters as they are hunted down by gun-toting pupils in Lindsay Anderson’s satirical film which was filmed on location there in the 1960s, was nothing like facing Walsh there when his dander was up.
The crowd at Chelters could also be a bit fruity, especially for Sunday League matches. Once, when Essex were there, a particularly boorish section decided that Peter Such and I were clearly in a same-sex relationship, which they seemed keen to point out, in graphic detail, at every opportunity. This got to Suchy, who despite possessing effete body language, was as hetero as they come. To escape his tormenters (he was fielding on the boundary in front of them) he asked Graham Gooch, our captain, if he could be moved. Half the team urged him to not to acquiesce as they enjoyed seeing Suchy squirm, but Gooch always was a softie at heart and moved him to the more genteel area in front of the sponsors’ tents.
Not that those tents had always been without incident, most notably the occasion when David Gower, then Leicestershire captain, accepted the invitation, after heavy rain had left puddles on the outfield, to sample the Pimms within. Certain that there would be no play, most of the players from both
teams joined him only to be pressed into action, inebriated, when the sun later came out and dried the outfield well enough for there to be a 10-over slog. Gower’s immediate task was to appoint someone sober enough to recognise head from tail and conduct the toss. Somehow, after a somewhat farcical game in which the batting was more miss than hit, Leicestershire staggered off victorious. be a pain, butChesterfield, Chesterfieldmin The cost and Folkestonethe to effort experienceplacesof shiftingand like Bath Horsham,was the could nearly always among memorablea certain on generationand off the of Essex players, will forget the groundsman’s dog, Old Ben, at Hinckley in Leicester shire. So characterful was the beast that they took to calling Keith Fletcher, then in his last year as captain, Old Ben as well though, mercifully, it only stuck for a few weeks. Then there was the time, against Kent at Tunbridge Wells, when Essex players complained vehemently about the spread put on at tea. Instead of sandwiches and cake upon which to carbo-load for the final session, there was fresh fruit and vegetable batons with low fat dips. Always one of the porkier sides on the county circuit, Kent’s Australian coach had ordered the caterers to provide healthier options in order to breed good habits in his players. It didn’t last the season.
Now, unhappily, as one Essex committee man told me the other day, the Festival weeks don’t make the money they once did when, providing the weather was good, crowds would flock to see the county play. Of course, one or two clubs still take the T20 Blast to interesting places like Richmond, Beckenham and Arundel.
Yet, it is not the same as those whole weeks where, with tents and flags flapping in the breeze, you could have been at Agincourt scrapping, if not for one’s King or Queen, then at least for honour of one’s county.