Packer turned on television to cricket’s potential

Without the rise of the Australian’s WSC ‘circus’ 40 years ago, writes Simon Briggs, we might not have the IPL revolution

he money they were getting was life-changing – so said BBC commentator Pat Murphy, speaking this week in a radio documentary about the rise of Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket 40 years ago.

Where do we hear that same phrase today? At the Indian Premier League auction. Ben Stokes collected

£1.7 million in February, and has since enhanced his value by carrying Rising Pune Supergiant to the verge of the play-offs.

The parallels between WSC and IPL are irresistible. Just as the Chappell brothers, Ian, Greg and Trevor, spent two summers playing for Packer instead of the Australian Cricket Board, so Stokes missed yesterday’s 50-over international against Ireland, and A B de Villiers has prioritised Royal Challengers Bangalore over South Africa’s upcoming Test tour of England.

TAnd then there are the impresarios who created these twin circuses, both recognisable descendants of PT Barnum himself. Packer once silenced an American blowhard at a casino by offering to spin a coin for the man’s entire $75 million fortune – double or quits. Lalit Modi, who founded the IPL in 2008, is not quite as rich. But he still possessed such a king-sized ego that he had to be visibly present at every match.

Ultimately, though, the revolution at the heart of both enterprises was televisual. Packer was a TV mogul, looking to win the rights to Australian cricket. So, while the players he recruited might have been broadly superior to the ones he left behind, his TV coverage was on a wholly different level: Dom Pérignon v Blue Nun.

For a start, WSC

Cricket and TV: the two have been inseparable since Packer’s dramatic intervention

Visionary: Kerry Packer changed the way cricket is televised was the first to introduce cameras at both ends. “Why should I spend half the game looking at the batsman’s butt?” Packer asked. And then there were the microphones in the pitch, the interviewer on the boundary and the many close-ups.

The IPL was not as radical, but it did refine the art: more graphical gizmos, plus glowing stumps and lashings of super slo-mo.

The greatest trick Modi ever pulled was to recruit Bollywood stars Shah Rukh Khan, Preity Zinta and Shilpa Shetty as team owners. Now the IPL was a showbiz event as well as a sporting one.

Cricket and TV: the two have been inseparable since Packer’s intervention.

India’s status as cricket’s oligarchs can be traced back to the moment in the early 1990s when they decided to sell the national team’s TV rights, rather than simply handing them to state broadcaster Doordarshan. For those boggle-eyed administrators, the effect was like striking oil in your own back garden.

Yet money is not everything, as the England and Wales Cricket Board has discovered since quitting the BBC in 1999.

Yes, the BBC coverage was stale and boring. But new suitor Channel Four lost interest, and when Sky took over as the sole serious bidder, the ECB’S product disappeared behind a forbidding paywall. Now we are promised that, when the franchise-based Twenty20 gets under way in 2020, at least eight games will be available free-to-air.

Will this shiny new competition revitalise British cricket?

Only time will tell. What we can say is that WSC – with its white ball, its black sightscreen, and its world-beating West Indians in their salmoncoloured pyjamas – was still the starting point for all this salesmanship. Including the essential truth that television calls the tune.