Book Excerpts
Saving The Test by Mike Jakeman
There is only one contender for the unofficial role of the father of modern cricket and his name is Kerry Packer. The hulking Australian has been in his grave for the best part of a decade, but his influence continues to be felt every time cricket appears on television. His World Series Cricket introduced a bewildering number of innovations within its two-year lifespan: night-time matches, a white ball, fielding circles, coloured clothing, drop-in pitches, cameras at both ends of the ground and microphones in the stumps. But more than any of these, the real legacy of WSC has been the introduction of competition to the process of awarding broadcasting rights.
Prior to WSC, cricket administration had been thoroughly resistant to commercial realities. There was no such thing as a professional Australian cricketer, for example, as wages were so low. The Australian board was happy to receive a fraction of what its rights were worth, keeping its players just out of penury, but also denying itself the opportunity to improve training, fitness and its own facilities. The situation was the same in England, where the BBC paid a meagre sum for Test coverage. When cricket was first televised in India in the 1980s, the BCCI had to pay the state television broadcaster, Doordarshan, for the pleasure of screening home internationals. Cricket was selling itself short, but Packer was the only man to realise it.
Before exploring how broadcasting revenue is changing Test cricket, it is important to realise that the explosion in the size of the television deals (which are now by far the biggest source of revenue in cricket) has come about without any direct involvement from the sport's governing body, the ICC. The ICC behaves in the same way as the boards that compose it - and undertakes the same negotiations with television companies to ensure that it receives the greatest revenue that it can for its fixtures. Deals for World Cups with offshoots of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp have brought the ICC into the same financial orbit as the largest national boards, but it still lacks the clout to assume management of television rights deals on behalf of its members.
Owing to the liberalisation forced through by Packer, the value of broadcasting deals has grown exponentially in the past 20 years. But as the negotiations have been conducted individually between the board and the broadcasters, rather than collectively, the revenue generated has become more and more unequal between countries. This has led to Test-playing nations splitting into two camps. The differences between the haves and the have-nots are huge: the BCCI is able to pull in over US$100m a year from its domestic rights deal, which is around the same as New Zealand Cricket raises for eight years of overseas coverage. The former group is able to exert a disproportionate influence over the global schedule and the teams are investing their income in coaching staff and facilities to improve their performance. The latter group is penned in, struggling with a schedule that gives its teams fewer Tests against the elite and, therefore, less of a chance to hone their skills and improve their income; they must, as a consequence, try to win matches against teams with much greater resources.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to conceive of a situation where the national boards get together and decide that, for the future health and growth of the game, broadcasting revenue should be negotiated centrally and/or divided more equitably. The current get-what-you-can model has been in place for too long now for any new scheme to be tolerated, and the ICC is too weak to intervene. But that does not mean that the main implication of this system - a gradual slide into two-tier cricket with an ever-shrinking number of competitive teams - is guaranteed. There is a new frontier within broadcasting that could come to rival or even surpass television in the revenue that it generates. It is more flexible than TV, and the devices that it requires are already in the market. All that needs to be implemented is the infrastructure. Most excitingly of all, the way in which these rights are distributed is still to be decided. The new frontier is the internet.