Ben Stokes's final text innings was embarrassingly self-indulgent. As Jonathan Riew says in a great article in the Guardian today, it "managed to capture in a single moment everything people dislike about this team".
But he also looks far deeper into what ails English cricket. So he praises Stokes's "legendary" talent, endurance, ambition and competitiveness, and says those qualities could have inspired England to big series wins if they had been intelligently harnessed:
Instead, English cricket was more interested in commodifying Stokes’s talent than channelling it. Under the directorship of Andrew Strauss in the mid-2010s, and then again under McCullum from 2022 onwards, there was a clear culture shift away from team ethic towards individual expression. Play your shots. Fill your boots in franchise cricket. Be where the noise is. Party hard.
A 2019 ECB strategy document stated that the job of the England team was to "create heroes", noting that young fans were often more inspired by individual athletes than the team they played for.
The results achieved under this new regime were impressive for a year or two, but have long been more disappointing than anything else. And, writes Riew, we have paid quite a price for those so-so returns:
Let’s consider some of the collateral damage English cricket has generated over the past two decades: the terrestrial television audience, state school cricket, the smaller counties, people who can no longer afford England tickets, an entire generation of players who were told they were a useless anachronism with no chance of making it for England. The Blast, detonated to make space for The Hundred, which has now been sold off, along with most of August.
And the future?
Once more, a new era is coming. Most probably it will be Brook, a man with no discernible leadership skills who bats like he left the oven on, but does generate excellent content.
Perhaps we may even be treated to a display of performative humility, a fleeting attempt to reconnect with the public ahead of next year’s ticket deadline. As ever, we eagerly await the next chapter. Equally, there comes a point when you run out of things to burn down.
I can claim some prescience here, for I wrote this in Liberal Democrat News back in 2004:
People think the cricket authorities are stuffy, but really they are the most shamelessly commercial administrators of all. There are now logos on the players' clothing and painted on the field of play. For the right price you could probably get your company's slogan tattooed on the President of the MCC's buttocks.
But then I suspect that goes for the British upper classes as a whole.
No comments:
Post a Comment