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THE 20th-century music critic and cricket correspondent Neville Cardus said that he ‘should challenge the Englishness of any man who could walk down a country lane, come unexpectedly on a cricket match, and not lean over the fence and watch for a while’. What would Cardus, who wrote so evocatively of the sport, make of the modern game?
The ninth ICC T20 World Cup starts this week. The first, in 2007, was seismic, for India won it. Indian appetite for the 20-over version, previously meagre, became ravenous and, as a result, the Indian Premier League was created. It is now one of the world’s richest sports tournaments, with the most recent set of television rights sold for $6 billion.
The game’s international governing body, the ICC, has increased the frequency of its world cups, justifying this move as earning money to grow the game. However, 38.5% of the ICC’s latest distribution went to India, already far and away the richest cricket board. As Lawrence Booth, the editor of Wisden, notes: ‘An annual handout of $230 million is chicken feed for India; for everyone else, it is unimaginable riches.’
Happily, there is a glorious cricketing world away from this, to be found on English club grounds and village greens, where certain fixtures are prized by players for the beauty of the setting and the quality of the teas (any sport that stops for afternoon tea is surely a meritorious one)—some English County Championship sides still play some fixtures on marquee-
