Cricket and Soccer

Today soccer world cup kicks off in Germany with whole world watching including fans from non soccer countries. Well there are hardly any non soccer countries so lets say those where soccer is not among top sports. Nine months from now another world cup will take place in Caribbean islands. Sixteen teams will be taking part and don’t be surprised if people of some participating nations won’t even follow their teams’ progress. In fact many won’t be aware that there exist a game called Cricket and their own national team is playing in the finals (a term I borrowed from FIFA).

About a decade ago ICC (International Cricket Council) started to be more professional and consciously or unconsciously started to act more like FIFA. The influence can be seen in many places. Title sponsorship was made a thing of past for cricket world cup and it’s now known as ICC Cricket World Cup much like a FIFA World Cup. A new winner’s trophy every world cup (prepared by hosts) was replaced with an ICC world cup trophy and since 1999 world cup all teams fight for that same trophy. Again it’s clearly a FIFA influence. In some ways these are important steps as all this gives a much better identity to cricket’s flagship event. But the most important change is a dream of making cricket a global sport much like soccer or football as it’s known in most of the world.

Any globalization effort demands money and an outrageous amount of it. ICC went ahead and introduced a lot of programs across the world and to fund all that they acquire complete rights of world cups (until 1996 it was host who had all rights) besides throwing up new tournaments such as Champions Trophy or a misadventure called Super series. The road could never be smooth. The result has been controversies and criticism. Controversy over personal sponsorship contracts of many leading cricketers which were in direct conflict with ICC global partners (read sponsors) is well documented. The latest was corporate sponsorship in some of India’s top cricket centers that couldn’t be honored if they were to host upcoming Champions Trophy in September. The result, these stadiums had to be missed out and remember that includes Eden Gardens in Kolkata. And certainly the most talked about controversy has been overkill of cricket, too much burdens on players.

Many leading cricket writers have criticized ICC’s global development program. Some argue that Cricket can never become soccer. It can never be popular in new places. One valid argument is length of the time a cricket game takes as oppose to most other sports including soccer. Another valid argument in favor of soccer is that it’s so cheap to play; all you need is a ball. Of course relative simplicity of soccer also helped making it the most popular sport on planet.

Despite agreeing with such arguments I disagree that ICC should not attempt to make cricket a world wide game. Will it happen in next 50 years? Definitely not. But could there be 15 test playing nations in next 50 years? Not impossible. People usually run out of patience too fast. Case of Bangladesh is prime example. Few noticed that any other new entrant would have gone through same series of defeats if they were playing as much when they first arrived on the scene as Bangladesh did. India, New Zealand and West Indies were all granted test status in 1926 and they had to wait years to even play their first test matches. If three nations as diverse as the distances between their national boundaries were made part of the elite, was it not an effort to reach out and make the game more widespread. So why is it wrong now? How long can administrators can sit and just wait for things to happen itself?

There are so many examples to observe. USA where soccer is still not very popular has its team playing in the world cup. Only a decade since they started MLS (Major League Soccer) but already signs of progress are visible. Consider China, world’s most populous nation, was a rather spent force in sports until they decided to do something about it. Today they are not just among top Olympic nations they are coming up in more and more non-Chinese sports.

Sport is part of culture and any new sports require a culture change to be very popular and it will take time, a lot of time. This doesn’t mean though efforts should be curbed. May be it’ll be much easier to spread the game among neighbors of big cricketing nations. So it could be that countries like Scotland, Ireland, Bermuda, Kenya and Nepal etc. graduate to big league before others like Canada. That doesn’t stop from planning and promoting. Almost certainly in our life time we won’t see 50 test playing nations from 6 different continents but our future generations will sure do. After all how many in 1880 envisioned even a 3rd or 4th cricketing nation.