Uneasy truce getting weaker between cricket’s cultural blocks

As I type this I have just returned from an early morning walk through the bylanes of Varanasi heading towards the Ganga. I looked at the scene through the eyes of a visitor and found the filth unbearable. And then I looked at the devotees there and they didn’t seem to mind things at all.

The filth didn’t come in the way of their faith. So too it is with the situation in our part of the world where we have a comfort factor with events that might cause others to back away. And as we are now discovering, the uneasy truce we had, the shifting common ground, is getting weaker.

As someone who is going to work on the Champions Trophy I would dearly love to see the world’s best teams at full strength. Contrary to what some others think, I quite like the Champions Trophy because it is a concentrated tournament with the world’s best playing against each other in equal conditions. But I can see why no administrative body can force its players to travel to a place they feel uneasy about, even though, as someone who has lived on the sub-continent all his life, I am aware that things are often projected to be worse than they actually are.

I am afraid this stand-off is going to continue, maybe even get worse, in the violent times we live in. The two cultural blocks in world cricket exist in two completely different milieus and if anything, in an era when the world is getting flatter, and geographical boundaries are disappearing in the intellectual world, it is only going to get worse. Cricket needs to find a solution where one team does not constitute 12.5% of the total. If two countries come together they represent, effectively, a quarter of the cricket playing world! Everybody can hold everybody else to ransom!

The only option before us, and I am guilty of repeating what I have said before in these pages, is to have more teams, so that the reluctance of some teams doesn’t create an emergency. We need to have fifty-sixty teams, across the world representing cities with windows put aside for international cricket. And so, the moment four teams have a problem, they can be replaced by four others. My gut feel is that teams may not threaten to pull out if they know they’re dispensable.

At the moment we are in a joint family where if two brothers out of four do not get along, it leads to a tense household. And just as the joint family system broke up leading to nuclear families the moment it became economically viable to do so, so too it will be with cricket. For let’s face it, if it made economic sense, England, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa would be very happy to co-exist by themselves just as India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka would. Thankfully that hasn’t happened, and is unlikely to in the current way of life.

The change has to happen in the mind. That is what the internet did, that is what digital music did, that is what automation did long ago. It started with the acceptance of changing times and that is what cricket needs to do; to look beyond narrow constituencies towards a world with fewer, different boundaries. Let’s move on. Our game is stronger than the petty regionalism we seek to confine it to. Let’s create a world with fifty teams.