Going their separate ways
International cricket might be doomed to second-class status – thank goodness rugby’s not heading that way yet
This weekend’s a treat for South Africans brought up on the colonial diet of cricket and rugby. The national teams for both codes are in action, and in both cases, it’s the middle leg of an entertaining campaign full of intrigue.
The Test cricket side is in Manchester, taking on England in the second of three matches. They’re one-nil up after a surprisingly dominant performance at Lord’s. That game begins today (Thursday) at 11am UK time.
The rugby crew finds itself in Adelaide, where they’ll play Australia in a stadium rather better known for cricket and Aussie Rules. (See gratuitous shot of its famous scoreboard, from my last trip there in 2012.) Saturday’s game, which kicks off at the unusual daylight hour of 3pm local, heralds the start of the Australian mini-tour: the second pair of matches in the Springboks’ Rugby Championship campaign. The third and final brace will be against Argentina.
Both set up as mouthwatering prospects, even for neutrals. The Rugby Championship is wide open for a change, with all four teams taking a win each over the first two weekends. As for the Test at Old Trafford, the world is itching to see how the Stokes-McCullum England responds to its first setback.
It’s easy to lose oneself in the splendour of the entertainment that awaits. In seeing questions of selection and strategy answered at the highest level there is. In watching the mini-contests play out and the psychological pendulum swing back and forth. These games are loaded with storylines before a ball is bowled or kicked. Add the decades of history – Stokes played that innings three years ago today, by the way – and you have international sport at its best.
But that’s where I start to get sad. Because I can’t shake the fact that only one of these fine sports is going to be serving up country versus country contests on any regular basis going forward. Only one of these sports will continue to promote international competition as its pinnacle and lifeblood.
As cricket plunges towards the football model, where international play must squeeze in between a powerful, wealthy set of club leagues and heroics for your country are simply a bonus, I count my blessings that rugby has not followed suit. But weekends like this one are on borrowed time. Because in a year or two or five, my options following the rugby Test may be to watch made-up sets of ringers trade sixes in yet another pulsating local white ball league or do the gardening.
Well, at least my courgettes will get more attention than they will this coming Saturday.
Okay, there might still be Test and/or international cricket played in England for a while yet. Whether it features the best players, or anyone but Australia and India will be available as opposition, is open to question. But the squeeze on the international game has unstoppable momentum that’s been discussed enough in recent weeks. For example by my former colleague Neil Manthorpe, here.
They say you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. Well, not all of us need to wait for that moment. I grew up in isolation South Africa. We didn’t have international sport; I had to make do with worshipping Western Province. I was eleven years old when we gained re-admission to the global arena, and seeing South Africa play against Australia in Australia at the 1992 Cricket World Cup was a mind-blowing trip into a parallel dimension. That morning, the entire nation stopped chewing its breakfast to have a look at this otherwordly phenomenon that was international competition.
Thirty years later, Cricket South Africa just declined an invitation to play a handful of One Day Internationals in Australia. Cricket economics have developed in such a way that you cannot blame CSA: it needs to focus on its domestic T20 league to ensure the future of the game in the country. But still, the former pariah volunteering to go back into isolation? It’s the saddest of ironies.
Rugby doing it right?
But enough about cricket’s depressing slide into a dystopia in which the Grantham Guavas versus the Salisbury Sausages is supposed to get the pulse racing. Rugby hasn’t gone mad just yet – hurrah!
Is this by accident or design? I strongly suspect it’s the former. Would the game’s custodians have been able to push back the tide if a rugby juggernaut equivalent to the Indian Premier League had come along? A big-money Sevens tournament, perhaps? I’m surprised that hasn’t happened already, to be frank. Sevens seems the perfect rugby equivalent to T20 cricket: short, entertaining games tailored to the modern attention span. And to players who want to cash cheques without taking too many hits.
Perhaps rugby can count itself lucky that it doesn’t have an India. Though some countries are better-set financially than others, there isn’t one that has exponentially more money than the rest. One that can basically set up a league designed to make itself even more dosh, buy off the stars needed to make that happen and force the international game into the margins.
But maybe the reason there’s no India and no hideous, artificial Sevens club bonanza being played in Malaga is because rugby fans won’t buy it. If Fiji or Namibia (just plucking names from the sky here) launched a random league in which players could earn truly ridiculous money to turn out for whichever meaningless team they’re told to, would rugby people watch it? If we take stadium attendances as a yardstick, it’s clear that rugby fans are not like English Premier League, Indian Premier League or NFL/basketball/baseball fans. The only way you’ll get capacity – or even close to it – at a large stadium is to stage a Test match, dripping with trappings like anthems and hakas. (I took the photo below at the Brisbane Bledisloe Cup encounter in 2012.) The drop in attendances for anything else is dramatic.
Maybe that drop is a little too dramatic in some cases – healthy domestic leagues are vital as long as they know their place and represent real communities that are smaller than countries. And some clearly aren’t healthy. But at least comparing a desolate New Zealand NPC stadia to a packed All Blacks game, or considering the fact that the Home Nations stick mostly to smaller grounds unless it’s an international, tells you that the rugby public has its priorities straight. (This even seems to apply in Sevens. Country versus country Sevens is the only version of the game anybody knows anything about, right?)
If only hardcore rugger fans are interesting in anything less than country-versus-country, that makes destructive club leagues a lot harder to get off the ground.
It's almost certainly a help that there’s never been much of a gambling culture around rugby. That reduces the extended greed factor that fuels so much of the lamentably uninteresting cricket going on around the world. If you stand to make a buck, you could get mighty passionate about the fortunes of the Alice Springs Armadillos or the Garden Route Badgers (one of these names is not made up, believe it or not). But most rugby spectators aren’t betting: they’ll watch because they’re interested. Either in a team to which they have a geographical connection, or simply for a riveting game between quality outfits at the highest level there is.
And since countries have more people in them than cities or provinces, it stands to reason that more people will have an interest in a national team than a given local/club side. And so the international game gets the big crowds and big viewerships. It becomes the biggest stage with the most meaning. It’s where players want to get to and where they want to achieve.
It all sounds rather a lot like common sense when you spell it out like that, doesn’t it? And yet, just as football managed to defy reason decades ago, now cricket is doing the same.
I still don’t think rugby’s administrators have made a concerted effort to prevent the sport from going down the same path. I hope it’s a fact that they haven’t had to; that common sense is actually common amongst rugby aficionados, and that they’re smart enough not to be led down the garden path by a few fireworks and some cringeworthy animal logos.
But I certainly hope the powers-that-be are going to learn every possible lesson from watching the hideous beast that has its hands around the neck of contests like England versus South Africa cricket Tests, and is tightening its grip. If it gets hold of rugby too, the sport’s bosses will have no excuses.