The Guardian view on English cricket: good times, bad times
Is cricket’s cup half-full or half-empty? Was 2018 a good or a bad year for a sport that perennially feels itself to be in football’s shadow? The England men’s team did very well after some early hiccups and ended up beating India at home and Sri Lanka away. The levelheaded and infectiously enthusiastic Joe Root is now firmly established as captain, and his retiring predecessor Alastair Cook is being tipped to be the first cricketer to be knighted since Ian Botham in 2007. The England women’s team were demolished by Australia in the recent Twenty20 World Cup and the team is in transition, but women’s cricket around the world is booming.
Thanks to the riches of the Indian Premier League, elite male cricketers have never been better rewarded – 20-year-old England all-rounder Sam Curran has just netted an £800,000 deal to play for Kings XI Punjab in the IPL – and some of the money sloshing around may even find its way into the women’s game and grassroots cricket. So far, so good. But there was also a downside to 2018: the ball-tampering scandal in a Test against South Africa in Cape Town that laid low Australian cricket and led to captain Steve Smith and two other players being suspended; the trial of England’s most charismatic cricketer, Ben Stokes, who in August was found not guilty of affray after a brawl at a Bristol nightclub; the continuing questions over the future of Test cricket as it tries to compete with the growth of T20 – only England and Australia attract large attendances for Tests, and the once-mighty West Indies are now virtually irrelevant as a Test force. Somehow cricket manages to be superficially buoyant and dramatic, while beneath the surface facing an existential crisis over what it is and what its future should be.
Next year could be the last gasp of the ancien regime in its ancestral home. England will play against Australia for the Ashes, hoping to reverse the humiliation suffered down under in 2017. The one-day World Cup, which England will be favourites to win, will be held between the end of May and mid-July. England’s women will face tough series against the West Indies and Australia. It promises, weather permitting, to be a brilliant, vibrant summer.
But what then? The so-called Hundred – a 100-ball-a-side match that can be done and dusted in a maximum of two and a half hours – starts in England in 2020. City-based franchise cricket that may in time kill off the county championship; radical rule changes (goodbye six-ball overs); a whizzy new ethos that makes every ball count and aims to win over a fresh young audience by getting at least some of the games back on live, peaktime terrestrial TV.
The need for change is clear: in 2016 research suggested that more UK children recognised American wrestlers than the then England captain, Cook; three in five children in the UK don’t rank cricket among their top 10 favourite sports; and the number of recreational club cricketers is declining. Who, after all, has six hours to play or watch cricket these days? Hence
the desire in some quarters – and crucially among administrators eager to generate TV cash and compete with the football behemoth – for the sport to morph into a form of baseball. The BBC might be much happier with a game that is played over three hours and between 6.30pm and 9.30pm – one that fits nicely into its schedules.
But will anyone keep up with 15 sixball overs and a 10-ball wildcard over? The odd over makes it harder to understand – and love. A brave, bold initiative perhaps, but this could be one of those ingenious cures that ends up killing the patient.