Death of a Gentleman and the biggest scandal in cricket administration
Towards the end of the film Death of a Gentleman, a poker-faced Giles Clarke, the then Chairman of the ECB, looks straight into the camera and nonchalantly remarks that no one would ever be interested in a story about cricket administration. "What matters to us," he says, "is that the team is properly written about. The team is what people are interested in. The national team, the county teams. That's what people should be interested in."
Clarke's statement just provided a sneak peek into the absolute impunity enjoyed by cricket administrators in the world today. Even when billions of dollars are at stake, the men entrusted with the responsibility of running the game we love, bask in self-glory under layers of inscrutable unaccountability.
But the film did just what men like Clarke and N. Srinivasan had feared - it opened up a Pandora's box of well-kept secrets by pointing out to the fans that the real cricket is perhaps played out behind the scenes in the boardrooms away from the gaze of the media and the public eye. And it got more people interested in cricket administration to the point that the ordinary cricket fans felt cheated when they understood how the game is being run.
Journalists Sam Collins and Jarrod Kimber embarked on a vague journey to make a film on Test cricket. Without a set narrative or a script, their investigation of an apparently innocent question - 'Why is Test cricket dying?' - led them into the darkest post-lapsarian world of corporate greed that controls the game.
At the end of the day, the most telling thing that I was confronted with while watching the film was the acute imbalance of power - the untouchable impunity of some of the most powerful men who were using cricket for their own selfish interests and the utter helplessness of the ordinary fan who was to them nothing better than a consumer to be monetised.
Jarrod Kimber, celebrated cricket historians Gideon Haigh and Boria Majumdar, and former BCCI joint secretary Gautam Dasgupta all readily agreed to be interviewed for this story. Their inputs supplemented by the documentary itself helped shape a telling narrative of administrative greed that was ruining the sport we care so much about.
Test cricket on its death-bed
The documentary asserts that the game of cricket seems to be in the middle of an ideological war with the balance shifting undoubtedly from Tests to T20s. Short, glitzy and carrying with it an infinite potential for innovation, T20s have revolutionised the cricket market.
On the other hand, Test cricket seemed to be slipping into doom. Even when there were die-hard fans and players who adored the longest format of the game, the full members of the ICC seemed to be playing less and less when it came to Test cricket.
Collins and Kimber's investigation seemed to have started with an effort to understand what was killing Test cricket. Was it no longer profitable enough or was there more to it than meets the eye?
In his exclusive interview with Sportskeeda, Kimber said that he felt Test cricket was in serious trouble. "When Sri Lanka and West Indies cancel test series and other teams play one Test series and Australia haven't played Bangladesh since 2005, can you really say it isn't in trouble?" Kimber said.
"There are plenty of reasons why the administrators wouldn't try monetise it. One it's harder to promote, and two they have another product they think prints money. But there are still millions of Test cricket fans across the world, and when have they ever been marketed to, promoted or, or even just looked after. Test cricket isn't dying as much being allowed to sit in a corner on its own."
The biggest discovery that Death of a Gentleman stumbles on to was truly that it was administrative callousness that was driving Test cricket to ruination. Driven by a preconceived certainty that T20 is the ultimate source of astronomical revenues, there seemed to be an absolute lack of desire to market Test cricket.
Kimber pointed out that though he sees forgettable T20 leagues around the world, there will still be almost no advertisement for Test cricket. The irony of the matter, according to him, lies in the fact that at the end of the day, more money will be spent on zing bails for T20 leagues than on Test cricket.
Boria Majumdar agreed with Kimber that there is a serious lack of advertising and promotion of Test cricket. The amount of advertising and even journalistic attention that a tournament like the IPL enjoys is unrivalled. He also pointed out that even bilateral series now shockingly enjoy very few sponsorship bids, which hints at the declining popularity of everything else in the face of T20 cricket.
Majumdar feels that though India enjoys the financial muscle to control the game, it cannot call itself the nerve centre of cricket as stadiums were not totally filled up even in Tendulkar's farewell Test series. What seemed to be driving India and world cricket as a chain reaction, was instead its insatiable passion for the spectacle perhaps best embodied by the IPL.
How television revenue controls the game
There is a part in the documentary, Death of a Gentleman, where Andrew Wildblood, one of the co-founders of the IPL blatantly says, "IPL does not compete with Test cricket. It competes with Bollywood ... How can that possibly be bad for cricket?"
The IPL, followed by franchise-based T20 leagues mushrooming all around the world, now attracts massive corporate interest from private entrepreneurs. As Kevin Pietersen points out in the film, players nowadays have Lalit Modi to thank for having made them supremely rich. Modi, with his maverick advertising finesse, tapped into the cricket market to radically monetise the game.
But what Modi did can in a way be seen as a continuation of Jagmohan Dalmiya's move to open up cricket broadcasting in India to private players back in the 90s. In the 1990s, the Doordarshan held the sole broadcasting rights for all the matches played in India and demanded huge amounts of money for telecasting every cricket match.
Dalmiya's decision to have a broadcasting agreement with Trans World International (TWI) earned him a guaranteed sum of $550,000. Fast forward to the year 2000 and the BCCI had sold broadcasting rights for the next four years to Doordarshan for an incredible $54 million.
ESPN bagged the telecasting rights in 2004 for a staggering $300 million and in 2006, Sharad Pawar and Lalit Modi awarded the rights to Nimbus for an astronomical sum of $549 million (Rs 2,400 crores).
India's victory in the inaugural edition of the ICC World T20 in 2007 sparked interest among the Indian fans in the shortest format of the game. The introduction of the IPL, with corporate investors and huge sums of money being thrown around, changed the structure of the game. For some, the ubiquity of the brand logos, the infusion of corporate vocabulary and the lucrative prospects of selling air time to advertising irrevocably damaged cricket.
Without a ball having been bowled, the inaugural auction fetched US$ 723.59 and just ahead of the seventh edition of the tournament in 2015, media buyers predicted a Rs. 950 crore from ad sales.
The IPL made the BCCI infinitely stronger and by dint of financial muscle-flexing, it became the de facto Big Brother in the ICC, browbeating the other members into submission. A huge country with a cricket-crazy population meant an unparalleled consumer-base that contributed to astronomical television revenues.
With television revenue beginning to control the game and private entrepreneurs interested in investing large sums of money, franchise-based T20 leagues grew at an exponential pace around the world. Backed up by broadcasters and advertisers who explored every opportunity to the shortest version of the game, Test cricket was put on a path of extinction.
Cash-strapped and almost bankrupt, the cricket boards of some of the other countries which did not have a similar potential television market for cricket to tap into were already fighting a losing battle. Ireland, for instance, have been endlessly striving for Test-playing status for some time now. But the ICC has staunchly refused to include an 11th Test-playing team at a time the longest version of the game is dying a slow and undeniable death.
The interest in Gaelic football, rugby and hurling in the country meant that when Ireland played England in 2009, they failed to get a single broadcaster. No broadcaster wanted to do a deal on a match-by-match basis -- they wanted future contracts in packages which meant that Ireland needed to play more matches. That would happen only when they get inducted into the Future Tours Programme (FTP) by virtue of being a full ICC member.
In the absence of such assurances, Ireland saw a mini-exodus of talent with some of their players leaving for England to play Test cricket, the most remarkable of them of course being the current limited-overs English captain Eoin Morgan. The fact that the associate nations got an insignificant financial assistance from the ICC did not help matters -- in 2015-16, Ireland only received a meagre amount of US$ 3 million from the ICC.
The mushrooming of T20 leagues around the world has sparked apprehensions that a time might arrive soon enough when they will constitute the be-all and end-all of cricket. But even if we are moving towards such a radical re-structuring of the game, Gideon Haigh feels that it will not lead to a more equitable distribution of revenue and power.
"I agree that there will probably be more domestic T20, or at least attempts to build capabilities in it, because boards cannot go on basing their whole finances on Indian tours and ICC distributions," he said. "But as that’s going to favour the already strong, I foresee the gap between rich and poor, countries and players, widening."
Boria Majumdar feels that if that the hegemony of the cricket boards can be overthrown if the broadcasters unite against them, though that is largely impossible because of continuous in-fighting among themselves. He also added that the proposition of franchise-based cricket totally overthrowing the ICC and taking over cricket is impossible unless in the extremely unlikely event of Lalit Modi, Rupert Murdoch and Subhash Chandra coming together to establish a league.
How administrative greed took precedence over good governance
When Sam Collins and Jarrod Kimber went to interview the then ECB Chairman Giles Clarke and ICC Chairman N. Srinivasan, they seemed to be treated with a veiled derision and patronising disdain. Clarke tells them that their preoccupation with the subject comes 'straight out of a 1909 Wisden.'
Clarke tells them that cricket at the Olympics is an absolute non-starter as the ECB usually has a packed schedule in that window and he has the absolute right to put the interests of his board first.
Srinivasan in his mask of polite inscrutability makes even more outrageous statements bordering on comical absurdity. He asserts emphatically that he as well as the BCCI have been doing everything in the best interest of the game. Nor does he want to accept that he harbours a personal dislike for Haroon Lorgat.
The appointment of Lorgat as the CSA president had reportedly left Srinivasan extremely unhappy as he had had a series of administrative differences with Lorgat when he was serving in the ICC. The BCCI retaliated by threatening to pull out of the tour to South Africa in 2013-14. In the end, in a gross violation of the FTP agreement, it reduced its tour causing the CSA a loss of approximately US$20 million.
The treatment of Lorgat was symptomatic of a larger malaise -- when it came to men like Clarke and Srinivasan, they had time and again swept aside their adversaries to the point that those who served in the ICC had been silenced into timid acquiescence.
The Woolf report, commissioned by Lorgat, pointed out massive conflicts of interest asserting the fact that the ICC was being run like an elite members' club where decisions with respect to large sums of money were being made with an absolute lack of honesty and transparency. Needless to say, none of the recommendations in the report, which stressed on the need for a fairer and more independent governance in the ICC, were implemented.
Haigh perhaps raises the most pertinent question in the documentary when he says, "Does cricket make money in order to exist or does cricket exist in order to make money?" While speaking to us, he seemed to elaborate on what he meant.
"I think the game’s become confused about what it stands for, what its aims are, what matters and what doesn’t, and uncomfortable about those features that constitute its uniqueness. In the absence of any particular idea of cricket’s best interests, financial indicators have assumed paramountcy," he said.
When it came to cricket administration or even playing the game, it was very clear that greed had taken precedence over everything else. The then CEO of Federation of International Cricketers' Associations (FICA), Tim May says in the film "We know the players will go where the money is".
Two of the modern cricketing greats seem to be echoing him. Kevin Pietersen says, "At the end of the day you only play this game for a short while, so you've got to maximise your opportunities" while Chris Gayle agrees, "We have been branded as that set of players going after the money, but you have to face reality in life".
It becomes apparent during the course of the film that the ICC riddled with massive conflicts of interest was a repository of unapologetically dishonest and selfish governance. The then BCCI President N. Srinivasan, who later also became the Chairman of the ICC, stood to gain financially from his India Cements-owned IPL franchise Chennai Super Kings. It was in contravention of rule 6.2.4 of the BCCI constitution which stated, "No administrator shall have, directly or indirectly, any commercial interest in the matches and events conducted by the board."
The BCCI had its laws amended to exclude the IPL from the ambit of the law and make the ownership of the CSK possible. It is not strange to fathom why recommendations made by the Woolf report seemed absurd to people like Srinivasan and Clarke. In their grim world of uncontested dominance, laws that did not suit their personal interests were always amended because they were a law unto themselves.
As journalists Collins and Kimber stumbled onto the dark administrative underbelly of cricket with nefarious links all leading back to Srinivasan, the game they had so innocently loved began to turn into a Victorian nightmare.
Sharing with us some of their experiences, Kimber said, "We lost our press pass, we were told we were making our careers impossible. A rumour was started that I had racially abused an ICC staff member. And after the film came out, they tried to tell people that Lalit Modi had funded it. If he had, we would have stayed in nicer hotel rooms and the film would have been released in India 8 months earlier."
He also had an interesting anecdote to share about their meeting with Srinivasan.
"Srinivasan waited until our entire equipment had been put away and then took me to the corner of his massive office. He showed me his Matthew Hayden mongoose bat and then suggested I make sure I was very kind to the humble servants of the game."
By that time, it was very clear that some feathers had been ruffled in the highest echelons of cricketing governance. When Giles Clarke sees Sam Collins before an ICC meeting at Dubai, he loudly blurts out "That idiot Sam is waiting outside" oblivious to the fact that he is being recorded.
Formation of the Big Three
Almost towards the end of the documentary, Collins and Kimber felt their worst fears had come true as the ICC members met in Dubai in 2014 to agree to the Big Three administrative takeover.
The BCCI, ECB and CA now lay claims to the lion's share of the ICC revenue as it was decided that over eight years, $640 million will go to the BCCI, about $180 million to the ECB and $130 million to CA. That left a meagre sum of $68 million and $105 million for each of the remaining seven Full Members, which was from $50 to $100 million less than what they would have received before the formation of the Big Three.
The BCCI, ECB and CA felt unfairly entitled to a large part of the money as they generated the largest television revenues. Srinivasan, Clarke and Edwards then consolidated more power in their hands by the formation of an executive committee dominated by representative members from the cricket boards of India, England and Australia. Srinivasan took over as the Chairman of the executive committee with the ICC president being reduced to the position of a ceremonial puppet.
The formation of the Big Three immediately impacted the game as debt-ridden cricket boards of the other countries had to fight for survival. With the reduced ICC revenue, the other members, anxious to bring in television revenue for their boards whenever their countries played India, England or Australia, became readily compliant with the wishes of the Big Three.
The Big Three, on the other hand, established a system where it was perfectly possible for India, England and Australia to only play each other. Major ICC events were planned only to be held in these countries and the administrators besotted with a myopic sense of greed felt it absolutely unnecessary to financially preserve the associates and the affiliates. Much like what Lord Woolf had said, cricket soon formally turned into a sport of and for an elite members' club with the other members barely hanging on.
Gideon Haigh feels that this was inevitable as the administrative structures were ill-equipped to handle the finance and ambition of a few greedy administrators. "Serious money came quite quickly to cricket, and governance has been playing catch-up ever since. Cricket has no strong tradition of central control. Most of its key relationships have been forged bilaterally, and members have always fancied gaming the system to their advantage," he said.
"During the Big Three fiasco, that left no mechanisms to protect the interests of the smaller seven Test nations, who were picked off one-by-one, while the associate membership of ICC was left entirely unconsidered. Then there was the personal agenda of N. Srinivasan, who was under pressure at home with the revelations around his son-in-law, and needed a platform for re-election, which was that he would get everyone more money."
Gautam Dasgupta, former BCCI joint secretary and once considered to be the right-hand man of Jagmohan Dalmiya, minced no words while criticising the formation of the Big Three. He condemned the big brotherly attitude of the BCCI, pointing out that more revenue was being directed to the coffers of the BCCI than being used for the development of cricket in general. He also said that it is absolutely undesirable that only ten teams should play cricket and the ICC had no vision in expanding the game. According to him, the over-dependence on T20 cricket, which should exist as a necessary supplement to monetise the game, will have an adverse effect on Test matches in the long run.
Boria Majumdar feels that cricket is run like a cartel as the market is consolidated in only three countries and it is deeply unfortunate that Srinivasan wanted to take advantage of that to force the ECB and CA to form the Big Three. The worst effect was the absolute disinterest of the ICC in spreading the game as rapid, short-term gains marred the long-term objectives.
Majumdar asserted that the formation of the Big Three was one of the biggest black marks in the history of the ICC as it was a case of money taking precedence over principles of good governance. But it was possible only because under Srinivasan's dictatorship, the other members of the ICC were bullied into submission. Empowered with the gift of a large television market, the BCCI forced other members to comply, threatening to pull out of tours to their countries if they acted otherwise.
Majumdar feels that though administrative hegemony and added revenue disproportionately enjoyed by a single member is not uncommon in the history of sports, like American hegemony in the International Olympic Committee for instance, the Big Three was unparalleled because of a complete lack of protest from the other members.
And not just the other members, even broadcasters, commentators and also the players themselves failed to speak up in protest as all of them had strong contractual obligations to maintain the status quo. Jarrod Kimber says, "Cricketers, and now broadcasters, have either contracts that they need to honour, or jobs that they need to protect. So why would we expect them to break ranks?
"On top of that, think of how many commentators there are -- it's a pretty lucky career to find yourself in. So while you may owe cricket, love cricket, and have strong opinions on cricket, you don’t want to lose your job. If we want truth, commentators and current players are the least likely people to give it to us."
He however seemed to be echoing Majumdar when he said that there were not sufficient protests after the formation of the Big Three. "What should have happened with the Big Three takeover is the small seven should have banded together and spoken up as one. They didn't. And no one can afford to do it alone."
A brighter future perhaps lies ahead
Srinivasan, Clarke and Edwards, all of whom seemed to be invincible when Death of a Gentleman was made, no longer rule the sport. And in the first ICC meeting this year, it was almost unanimously decided to revoke the special status of the Big Three.
Shashank Manohar, who was the BCCI President at that time, had already expressed his displeasure at the Big Three structure and promised on taking steps towards changing it. His recent appointment as the first independent ICC Chairman for a term of two years raises hopes of good governance in the ICC.
Manohar's appointment has been almost uncontested as the other members saw a ray of hope in his purposes of changing the game for the better. Challenges abound for Manohar as quite a few ICC members need financial stabilisation and Test cricket has to be resuscitated either through more Day/Night Tests or a Test championship.
Conspiracy theories also abound that under the guise of being independent, Manohar is but a Trojan horse of the BCCI. Gautam Dasgupta, however called Manohar 'a very dynamic person' and praised him for having broken out of the Big Three structure, adding that this move has been unanimously welcomed by the other ICC members.
He also welcomed the restructuring of the ICC emphasizing that a 'uniform distribution of funds' as advocated by Manohar can only be 'for the better interest of the game'. Boria Majumdar also agreed that all the ICC members were happy with Manohar's appointment as now felt empowered to speak up fearlessly in the ICC meetings.
"Shashank as the chairman of the ICC was able to get across his vision which was that of a democracy. I am now optimistic about the ICC becoming a structure of good governance," he said.
Though it is difficult to fathom if activism always brings about the change, Majumdar feels that Death of a Gentleman played a powerful role in this regard as it sketched accurate and unflattering portraits of administrators like Srinivasan and Clarke thereby opening people's eyes.
Jarrod Kimber concedes that making the documentary was a long-drawn, energy-sapping process. "We stayed at a guest lodge in Sydney and our sound guy’s clothes came back smelling like a team of drunk elves had vomited on them. I think during the making of the film we produced three kids, moved house four times and had two marriages, and that was just amongst the three directors."