Sport needs conservatives, not more money-making ideas
Watching Katie Swan and Harriet Dart playing their first Fed Cup doubles, and obviously enjoying themselves no end before an enthusiastic crowd at the University of Bath, I thought again about the Tennis authorities’ stupid decision to scrap the Davis Cup as we know it, and replace it with an 18-Nation World Cup of Tennis to be played in November, with matches reduced from five sets to three. One of the attractive features of the Davis Cup has been that ties are often taken to cities and towns where people have little opportunity to watch good quality live tennis, and matches are almost always played before enthusiastic and usually partisan crowds. This will no longer be the case.
We all know why the change has been made. It’s not because a country’s best players sometimes opt out of the Davis Cup because participating would disturb their schedule. It’s because the new format will attract Big Money from television, sponsors, advertisers, and especially of course the gambling industry. No doubt other things will be done to jazz the show up and make it more of a spectacle – as is already the case with the ghastly Rod Laver Cup between Europe and the Rest of the World. As ever the aim will be to attract viewers who know little and care less about the game – all so that everybody concerned can rake the money in.
Radix malorum est cupiditas. In the last year of his life and the last days of the Twentieth Century the doyen of English cricket writers, E. W. (Jim) Swanton, said to an interviewer: “I think it’s going to be a great struggle to keep cricket anything like the game we’ve known and loved because now television has got it by the throat and we need the money.”
In 2005, half-a-dozen years later, after what was the most gripping Ashes series in England since Coronation Year, 1953, Test cricket disappeared from terrestrial, free-on-air, television. Sky outbid Channel 4 which had covered that 2005 series excellently; the BBC wasn’t – of course, you may say – interested in competing for the rights. Now ironically, Sky itself is regularly outbid for rights to major sports and its sports channels are stuffed with repeats and coverage of minority sports which, here in Britain, include American ones. The biter has been well and truly bit.
Not of course that the men and women who run sport give a damn as long as the money continues to roll in. What Swanton called “the game we have known and loved” – the traditional form of the first-class game – appears to mean nothing to the people who run English cricket. The County Championship has been pushed to the sidelines, and the consequence has been evident in the West Indies in the last three weeks where England have batsmen deficient in technique, incapable of the application and concentration required to play a long innings.
A Test team should be able to bat into the fifth session of its first innings – at today’s over-rate that’s about 130 overs; England have struggled to last for half a day – 50 overs. Never mind: the ECB’s new brainchild will soon be with us: The Hundred, a competition devised for those players, spectators and TV audiences who find what is at present the shortest form of the game, T20, a bit slow, too long drawn out, lacking in razzmatazz. Once again the punters betting on, as it were, every throw of the dice, will be allured and the gambling firms will be rubbing their hands.
All major sports are in thrall to the money men and the gambling firms. Rugby Union held out against professionalism and all it entailed longer than most. The writing was on the wall when the first Rugby World Cup was proposed. To their credit two of the more conservative unions – the Scottish and Irish – were doubtful. They could see it was going to change the game and feared it would lead at least to semi-professionalism. But they gave way, not wanting to be left in the starting stalls. Now they chase the money like everybody else. It has become unavoidable. Money talks loudly. It talks more loudly every year, and if you don’t listen to its siren call you are courting failure.
Everyone agrees that the demands on top rugby players have become excessive –or everyone at least nods the head in agreement when this is said. But, as one of my favourite Scottish internationalists of the 1980s wrote to me the other day: “Meanwhile World Rugby pursues the idea of a worldwide league – for TV megabucks apparently. It’s all about the money, and player welfare and grass roots participation are given only lip service.”
Of course one is in two minds. I regret the loss of the sort of rugby of the amateur era. Go back far enough and Twickenham, Murrayfield, Cardiff Arms Park and Lansdowne Road were free of advertising boards, while the thought of players being themselves animated billboards would have had the old blazered committeemen spilling their whisky in horror. What’s gone is gone and regret is vain. Moreover I know that, come the World Cup, I shall be glued to the screen – even though I wish the thing had never been created.
Even so, instead of administrators of every major sport galloping in pursuit of the next Big Money deal, the appointment or election of a few conservatives might now be the best thing for their sport. By conservatives I mean simply men and women capable of looking at new proposals and asking if they are either wise or necessary, people who hold that when it is not necessary to change, it may be necessary not to change. In other word what we need today are fewer visionaries with bright money-making ideas, and instead a few stick-in-the-muds ready to take a lesson from the old President of the Scottish Rugby Union who said: “When anything new is proposed, we say ‘no’. Then we go away and think about it and come back and say ‘no’ again.”
Sadly they don’t make men and women like that now – or, if they do, they’re not allowed into the committee-room.