It's cricket, Jim, but not as we know it....

Not for anyone in particular, this is just me venting my spleen albeit, hopefully, in a helpful if slightly critical way. All open for discussion or demolition; just wanted to say…

English Cricket (there, that’s lost a good 85/90% of readers straight away) is in a parlous state and I wanted to try and offer some advice and observations for those supposedly in charge of this game as they deliberate on just WTF they’re going to do to at least make England look like a team that turned up and where the players are all actually talking to each other.

Three things:

1) The name is ‘The England and Wales Cricket Board’, not ‘Cricket England Wales’. Apart from the second moniker not making sense, rebranding is a waste of time, effort and money, in the present circumstances as useful as rebranding the iceberg ‘coolblox’ for all the difference it would have made to the Titanic. It diverts valuable time, talent and huge sums of money, money that should be used in the raising, supporting and training of future players (and by God we could do with some right now) into the back pockets of slithey toves who, in the main, operate as a herd (herd?) flock…? Herd…OK, operate as a herd of leeches to siphon away funds (multi-millions) from organisations who can, oft times, ill-afford it. These are the geniuses I reckon are as slippery as a shit-house rat who changed the name from ‘Royal Mail’ to ‘Consignia’ and lost both the trust of the people in an organisation once trusted (in order to lubricate the selling off of RM to their mates, double-bluff, see?) and lost the business millions into the bargain (thereby making the shares worth less and so easier and cheaper for their mates to buy…cynical? Moi?) but they still get their fee. Then what happened? They’re rehired in order to change the name again…to ‘Royal Mail’. These are the very same weasels who insist that the dropping of a single letter from a masthead title will make all the difference between profit and loss (not theirs, good or bad they still get their fee). These are the shit-kickers who will alter a well known and easily recognisable logo (‘NHS’) by crossing out the word ‘Service’ (a word that means to serve…offer help to, etc, etc) and replace it with the word ‘Trust’ (see what they did there? Take away a word, ‘Service’, that has an unambiguous obligation as part of its root and add a word, ‘Trust’, whose double meaning, ‘to rely on’ – or – ‘an organisation or company managed by trustees’ is open to interpretation by the reader. The second of these definitions is their reading of it the first our reading of it, but only there to ‘keep us cuddly’). This smoke-screen created round the language by semantics means the friends of friends can slink in, buy up and take over the available healthcare of this country for a pittance, and against the wishes of the democratic populace. In the education system (there’ll be another post from me later about this very thing…bet you can’t wait) extreme military, scientific and religious doctrines and the changing of history to suit political stances and mantras (the first step to making a dictatorship is to change history) many of these doctrines pushed by fruit-loops and killers, are gaining a greater degree of entrance into mainstream schools. It would seem that all one has to do to begin the march to government sponsored, social engineering is by adding the word ‘Academy’ to a place of learning. Conglomerates, NGO’s, government departments, state-owned organisations, they employ these rebranders, PR consortiums and marketers to do these things in order to help our government (any government) soft-fuck over the populace…oh and for a fee. Bill Hicks had it right:

“Anyone here in marketing or advertising? Kill yourself. Seriously. There’s no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan’s little helpers; kill yourself; seriously. You’re the ruiner of all things good…you are Satan’s spawn filling the world with bile and garbage, you are fucked and you’re fucking us. Kill yourself. It’s the only way to save your soul. Kill yourself.”

My guess is those sentiments can also be applied to the dedicated members of the ‘rebranding industry’ too; Cheers folks! Suck it up.

The culmination of all this marketing and rebranding in rehabilitating English cricket? F.A. Zilch, Nowt, Nada. It’s gonna take hard work, intellect, a deep understanding of the sport you claim you are the best person to represent, not some reliance in the voodoo of a word switch. They’ll try to convince you that, if you wanna make summat that’s disrespectful of the people respectable, have an Awards ceremony to ‘honour’ the people who do it (to us…it’s what the Roman’s knew so well; bread-and-circuses) and use acronyms and name-brand obfustication in your company name to act as a smoke screen for your true corporate spine and core beliefs. These folk, the main thing they rebrand is the rebranding of English into a type of verbal trouser-rolling the Masonic Order would be proud of. So, for the record, stop thinking a new logo or brand name will solve the problems you all seem so inept at sorting out in the game of cricket; it’s ‘The England and Wales Cricket Board’, not ‘Cricket England Wales’; OK?

2) Like a government in microcosm where people with no track record, ability or experience in a field get to run it, the members of the England and Wales Cricket board are a motley crew. Made up of several millionaires their roster of qualification portrays a cricketing desert. Lawyers, accountants, armed forces members, trade’s union leaders, ex-coppers, social workers, marketing execs, banking CEO’s, business CEO’s, one would imagine this has little to do with the world of cricket; not so. Used to be it was and would, but, now? Now it’s not about the game it’s all about the money that’s why the corporate section is so heavily involved with the future planning of the game (done well, aint they?) In amongst these board members are few players of the game, unfortunately only at club level (although, to be fair, they do have 2 people who’ve played the game professionally…and they do have a tennis player and a bike rider so…) Looking at the make-up of this board then, all from the better end of the trench and many the result of a private education (not their fault, I know, but worth flagging up) and whose average age, I’d venture to suggest, is about 65/70 (hope I’m not insulting anyone) one wonders just what their qualifications are for running a sport that has changed out of all proportion during the last 25+ years. Personally, what with their age and front-line experience of the modern game, I’d say they were less than well suited to be put in charge; you? These people were playing the game (all but two at club level only, remember) when it was still considered a sport. When ‘walking’ was a part of the good form embedded in the game; when players would rather lose their batting or bowling hand than be found to be cheating; when you and your team’s credibility were built on the levels of good manners, trust and honesty you and the team displayed all going to made the game what it was; a representative of The Empire’s ideas of itself and it’s role in the world. ‘Play-up, play-up and play the game’ wasn’t a terrace chant; it was a foundation upon which to build successive generations. The modern game should still be formed on those ideologies, trouble is we’ve had Thatcher, the free-market economy and a ‘Fuck ’em over before they fuck you’ mantra to alter the track, and television payments and intrusion have skewed both the meanings of ‘a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work’ and ‘a fair day’s play according to the umpire’.

Neither of the preceding social or sporting policies has covered this country in glory, not on the fields of life or sport, and I’m sure a middle ground will finally be arrived at, but not as long as the retired major attitude prevails when it comes to picking those who have direct responsibility for the development of the game.

3) The continuing debate about whether Kevin Pieterson should be included into the squad, despite all the vitriol and unpleasantness that has emanated from both dressing room and biography, is a panic driven distraction that will do nothing to set England onto a team and player rebirth. Yes, he’s a very good player but you can’t have one player carrying a struggling team because the rest are, to put it politely, underperforming, otherwise it won’t be long before, IMHO, before they’d have every right to say;

‘Hang on. I’m out there knocking myself out match after match, just what the fuck are you lot doing?’

Yes K.P. can revitalise an innings that’s on the ropes; he’s also 34 so on the down slope of his career so hardly a long-term prospect for building a team around. And as for his inclusion being ‘vital’ to the England team, it all smacks of the Zola Budd syndrome to me where rules are bent, twisted and finally altered to accommodate some super-star or other who, in the end is just a person with a shelf-life, and then what are you left with? A has-been who’s siphoned away time, money and support from a corrupted system that’s now ripe for exploitation by others because…well because the rules were altered to suit a greedy minority who can only ever see winning as acceptable because they want to bathe in the reflected glory of the success of others. A way of progressing their own possibilities beyond their natural level; of a hierarchy unable to resurrect the idea that the taking part and competing well is as important as the winning; that it takes two teams to make a game memorable. Having nothing but the continued ‘match-drawn’ outcome only serves to bury the sport and so, in the end, someone’s gotta lose; how you lose, compete and shoulder that defeat is what defines you as being worthy of the epithet, ‘sports-person’, the clue’s in the name, dummy.

I wrote a while ago (2010) about football and of how, IMHO, Danny Blanchflower got it right when he said;

‘The day they take the ceiling off players’ wages will be the end of football as we know it.’

Same thing’s happening in cricket, and will in rugby too. Those marketers, advertisers and rebranders will have their noses buried deepest in the trough, and the loss of sporting behaviour by those playing the game will only bring a smile to the well-buried faces of the sport PR and management gurus. The speed with which the modern game changes will also continue to overtake the collected sensibilities of those challenged with managing this modern game; those whose qualifications, in nearly all of their cases, come from a limited (very) experience of involvement in a game they played 40 years ago; of what it actually takes to play now.

The modern game of cricket bears absolutely no resemblance to their distant, rose-scented, cress-sandwiched memories and nothing will change until and unless they cease playing their endless round of uncoordinated catch-up, undertaken in hand-wringing sessions in far-flung meeting places, step down and give way to contemporaries of the modern game; when they cease dancing to the tune of the ‘star-performer’ and realise that cricket is still a team game will the available time and effort be spread across the board; when these people have the courage and nous to stand at the front when the shit hits the fan, not hide behind the bat of a 24-year-old; not unless and until, just like in politics, the old-boy network and unattributed ‘experience’ of wearing the right tie acts as a qualification for membership to exclusive boards (rooms and gatherings that still carry on the ‘Playing Fields of Eton’ way of doing business but for all the wrong reasons) only then will we even begin to start rebuilding a team that can actually compete at cricket in any form, long or short.