Amid saliva bans and format-flipping, cricket still plays host to the virus of money

There is no doubt Covid-19 has taught the world many more important lessons than have been learned by the game of cricket, but the reshaping of the game has nonetheless been fascinating to watch over the past 18 months.

Playing in empty stadiums and not being permitted to apply saliva to the ball sounded like fundamental shifts at the time they were announced, as did not being allowed to high-five or hug your teammates while celebrating, but they are inconsequential now.

What really matters is money and that’s where the game-changing moderations to previously accepted normals have now been adopted. Scheduling of fixtures has been done months if not years in advance for more than a century. These days they can be changed at a few days’ notice.

Ground staff, it was believed, needed at least a fortnight to prepare a match pitch and the venue administrators needed at least as much time to organise the logistics of catering, ticketing, security and broadcaster requirements.

It was all a big deal and contributed to the “impossibility”, for example, of rescheduling a fixture at a day or two’s notice from an area with a dreadful weather forecast to one with no rain forecast. There are suitable, alternative international venues in most cricket-playing countries. There is a good chance, in future, that they will be placed on standby for the really important games.

Live crowds remain a vital ingredient of professional sporting competition and television broadcasters have even offered incentives for fullhouses in the past because they greatly enhance the product and consequently the revenue they can generate. But they will still pay for a bare cupboard.

Spectators who question the quality of the facilities at many sports stadiums around the world may not realise that they are in direct, inverse proportion to the likelihood that people will attend. In other words, male cricket spectators at most Indian cricket venues are lucky if there’s one urinal per thousand of them and good luck finding something to eat. Administrators know that spending money on spectator comfort is unnecessary because they will come anyway.

In countries where fans need to be enticed and persuaded to attend, the quality of facilities makes a difference but a few thousand more in the stands is rarely the bottom line materially compared to the broadcast revenue. Sports events are no different to any other commodity they are bought in bulk and bundled with “lesser” events that may otherwise have been commercially unviable.

If all of the events are not delivered, the broadcasters demand refunds or substantial discounts on future purchases. Fans are nice to have, but not essential. For the first time ever, we now have evidence of that.

But even greater changes have taken place in the way players and coaches think about their conditioning and preparation for a game, or series. Almost all of the old perceptions about fitness and match-readiness have been questioned and disproved. As, indeed, have the modern era “rules” about the need to shift gradually between the game’s different formats in order not to play slog-sweeps during Test matches or, indeed, forward defences in T20s.

Gone, too, are pre-Test “tour matches” in which visiting teams would play two or even three county, state or provincial teams ahead of the Tests. In truth, most of them had become loss-leading relics of a bygone era decades ago but now they have been dispensed with altogether and that is the way it will stay for all but a handful.

A couple of decades ago SA’s national selectors had a rule which stipulated that no player could be chosen for a national team if they had not played at least two domestic games beforehand. That changed to one game when international fixture lists became busier and was eventually dispensed with when it became obvious that the country’s best, multiformat cricketers would be lucky to play any domestic cricket during a summer.

Two of New Zealand’s starting XI had not played a single red-ball match since June before tackling India in two Tests over the past fortnight. Off-spinner Will Somerville managed an inglorious return of 0/257 in the two Tests while left armer Ajaz Patel claimed 17 wickets in all, 14/225 in the second Test including all 10 wickets in the first innings. It adds weight to the argument that a couple of long net sessions may do as good a job as practice matches.

England will select star allrounder Ben Stokes in the first Ashes Test in Brisbane on Wednesday despite playing his last competitive match, in any format, on July 26. The Australian players from the states still imposing draconian Covid-19 protocols have played just one game each.

When the king demands 1,000 sheaves of wheat during a famine, it is not the job of his courtiers to question, but to deliver. When India asked for their tour to SA to be delayed by a week and rearranged, the hosts, naturally, complied. What once could not be done, is done.*