Lord’s non-event highlights global game’s growing crisis

The great and the good were gathered in the Long Room last Friday, drawn together by the landlords of Lord’s, Marylebone Cricket Club, for the inaugural World Cricket Connects symposium.

This day-long talking-shop was the brainchild of MCC’s incoming chairman Mark Nicholas – who happens to be one of the most passionate and engaged cricket fans ever to have been drawn into the sport’s administration. Unfortunately, the club’s subsequent summary of the event might as well have been drafted by the ECB’s former chief executive, Tom Harrison, for all the grimly capitalist realpolitik with which it dripped.

If it wasn’t Greg Barclay, ICC’s chairman, being quoted as “highlighting the unsustainable pace of the current cricket calendar”, it was Manoj Badale, Rajasthan Royals’ owner, cautioning that the sport must be “relevant and accessible to the next generation”. Andrew Strauss, former England captain and allround ECB grandee, believes that “growth should be a priority”; Mike Baird of Cricket Australia advocates “learning from other sports’ marketing and grassroots investment strategies”.

All of which, and more, was a lot of hard yakkity-yakka to fit into one day’s chat, although that is not to denigrate the effort or the enterprise that went into organising such a gathering in the first place: “All good things start with rhetoric,” as a former ECB executive once told me in relation to cricket’s racism crisis, the point being that gathering in a room to exchange platitudes is probably an improvement on not gathering in a room at all.

But in throwing open its opulent doors to the (mostly) men who control the purse-strings, Lord’s couldn’t help but frame itself rather as Davos does each year in inviting a bunch of plutocrats to pontificate on the climate crisis. All the while, the world burns with increasing vigour, as West Indies have spent the past two days proving in their own increasingly forlorn traipses through that same Long Room.

For this week, we have again witnessed what happens when sport is reduced to mere product. West Indies versus England at Lord’s has been an obligation to economics rather than an essential stirring of the soul, and with the best part of three days’ worth of refunds in prospect, it’s been spectacularly unsuccessful on that front too.

If you’re really in the market for “grassroots investment strategies”, then a genuine appeal to the emotions remains an unimpeachable recruitment tool. It also happens to be the very reason why West Indies in the 1980s and 1990s became the most compelling drawcard the sport has ever seen, and if for some reason you still need convincing on that front, Brian Lara has the summer’s most compelling autobiography to plug.

That’s not to say that West Indies have lacked the requisite passion in this week’s performance. On the contrary, they fought and they fell with the bat, while their reward for a genuinely spirited bowling display – in which none of England’s five very well-set batters could reach three figures – was merely to hasten Friday morning’s inevitable denouement. If nothing else, the raw joy of Mikyle Louis’ run-out from deep point evoked the same pride and togetherness that recently powered their white-ball squad’s home campaign in the T20 World Cup, not to mention that startling victory in Brisbane back in January.

Ah yes… Brisbane. Maybe, just maybe, West Indies can bounce back at Trent Bridge next week, just as they did after their ten-wicket drubbing at Adelaide in January; just as they did at Headingley in 2017, after a similarly sickening loss at Edgbaston. But even if they can, it’ll prove nothing other than the superhuman resilience of the men who make it happen. No team in elite sport should be expected to perform miracles simply to stay competitive.

For this pattern of anti-competitiveness has been abundantly clear for years. Only last summer, Ireland rocked up to Lord’s for a contest of even less context, coming as it did only days before their (failed) attempt to qualify for the 2023 World Cup, a campaign upon which their entire financial viability seemed to have been staked.

Moreover, the pattern endures, even after the most vivid jolt to the sport’s economic model that could ever have been conceived. Last week, while recalling the circumstances of the 2020 England tour, which took place in bio-secure bubbles in the midst of the Covid outbreak, CWI chief executive Johnny Grave pointed out that the experience had reminded the ECB that “you can’t play against yourselves … you need to have opposition”.

And yet, that’s not really the takeaway from two unnervingly dislocated days at Lord’s. From the pensioning-off of James Anderson, to Ben Stokes’ revealingly long-range focus on Australia, to a batting display – in bright sunshine, on a flat and unforgiving surface, and broadly stripped back of any Bazball fripperies – that smacked of a dress rehearsal for a first innings in Adelaide, England have gone through the motions of this match with diligent professionalism but with tangible dispassion.

For if this is the look and feel of Bazball 2:0 – the “refinement” of which Brendon McCullum spoke after India, then caveat emptor for the rest of the summer. Speaking before the Test, Stokes was audibly exasperated when it was put to him that England’s failure to get over the line in their last three Test series might put a new emphasis on winning at all costs, but nothing about the way they’ve gone about this contest would debunk that notion.

As Stokes himself put it, however, criticism along such lines is “a bit uncalled for”. The team’s evangelistic tendencies, lest we forget, came as a reaction to the very same atrophy that has rendered this contest, and too many like it, so unappealing. But they came across as too preachy, and they failed to seal too many positions of dominance along the way – including, in incredible scenes at Wellington last year, the second Test against New Zealand: a team that McCullum appeared to suggest, during MCC’s meet-and-greet last week, might not make the cut if Test cricket was pared back to just six teams. But whatever, boo to fun: back to the bottom line we must go!

Does any of this matter to the men who call the shots, or is Lord’s just a happy backdrop for gatherings of the rich and famous? Among them in the Mound Stand today, as it happens, was Jacob Rees-Mogg, the recently ex-MP who is presumably familiar with hollowed-out husks of once-proud institutions. As with last week’s Long Room event, the glut of popped corks that littered the outfield by the close of play told a story of greater contentment than the state of play should warrant.