A dangerous initiative

The invention of this new class of ICC-owned matches, such as the ones proposed between Australia as World Champions vs the Rest of the World, is intended to establish a new sort of contest that can only and exclusively be organized by the ICC. Increasingly, the ICC is not satisfied with servicing and facilitating Test cricket because Test matches are basically owned by national boards. Super Series matches, on the other hand, can only be organized by an supra-national organization like the ICC. The ICC wants to play impressario, it wants to produce and direct.

The latest circus organised by the ICC is an inter-continental series of one day matches between Africa and Asia. These will be played in the second half of August either in South Africa or India. They will be officially recognized as one-day internationals for the purposes of career records and statistics.

This is a bad and dangerous initiative. National Boards should make it plain to the ICC that Test and one day matches between national teams are the ICC's ultimate product. The health of inter-country cricket is, or should be, its reason for being. The ICC should do nothing to sponsor contests that purport to be equal to grander than such contests. To describe a match between a world XI and a national side as a `Super Series' Test is plainly wrong. That the ICC is willing orchestrate a fraudulent clash of continents and then see it into the record books should alarm everyone who wants to make sure that cricket doesn't go the way of WWF.

Official international matches should be played between national teams, and no contest organized on a different or supra-national principle should be given the status of an international contest. This includes not recognizing individual performances in such matches as Test or one-day international performances. Plainly put, a five wicket haul or a century in a `Super' Test or inter-continental limited overs circus should not count towards a players Test record, simply because such a contest is by definition not a match between two nations.

The ICC recently gave a Tsunami relief match between an Australian team and a World XI, official ODI status. It then moved to give Super Series contests, both one day and five day matches, Test and ODI status. Bill Frindall and other statisticians sensibly argued that ODI and Test match records should not be corrupted by performances in contests that are essentially exhibition matches without the national or (in the case of the West Indies) regional identities that give Test cricket its justification and meaning.

These interventions by the guardians of cricket's statistical soul thwarted, for the time being, the ICC's attempt to fudge the distinction between exhibition matches and bona fide Tests and ODIs. But the ICC's website did everything it could to blur the distinction. In the section of the website dealing with the Johnnie Walker Super Series, under the rubric, `Playing Conditions', the ICC wrote: `The one-off Test match will be played over six days. The match will not have official Test status.'

If the match had not been accorded official Test status, the official website of the ICC, the governing body of cricket, shouldn't have called it a Test match. If the ICC was using Test as a kind of shorthand, it should have used it inside quotation marks to indicate that the Super Series six day match wasn't actually a Test match. The moral of this story is that bureaucracies like the ICC have a life and a logic of their own, quite distinct from the agendas of their constituent members.

The ICC will always strain to expand its jurisdiction, to make itself indispensable to the organization and conduct of international cricket. Given the peculiar nature of international cricket, this institutional will to power will sometimes threaten the bilateral foundation of the game. Cricket's public opinion and the national boards that make up the ICC will have to make sure that this bureaucratic urge is held in check.

Cricket needs an International Cricket Council that acts as a clearing house for business that can't be dealt with bilaterally: the organization of the World Cup, the creation of a fair annual calendar for Test cricket, deliberation on knotty problems like chucking. An ICC that sees itself as the supremo of world cricket, or as a federal government for cricket with its own cadre of officials and its own repertoire of matches, will do more harm than good. International cricket is a dinosaur amongst modern sports.

Like that living fossil fish, the coelacanth, it is an evolutionary miracle that Test cricket exists at all. There is a limit to which it can be taught `modern' ways and too much meddling with its environment could kill it off altogether. The ICC and its marketing men seem to think they can improve upon international cricket: they should to be told categorically that they can't. A modernizing ICC could do worse than imitate Google, that most modern of companies, which takes its motto from a cardinal teaching in clinical medicine: Primum Non Nocere: First Do No Harm.