A strong sport growing stronger: a perspective on the growth, development and future of international cricket

Abstract

The essay analyses the future direction of international cricket from the point of view of a global cricket administrator. To appreciate how the game has developed from being a very English sport played mainly by the aristocracy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to its current stage of evolution, it also takes a brief look at the history of the game and its transformation from an exclusive sport to a truly global one. It traces the evolution of cricket's governing structures, the transformation of the International Cricket Council and how cricket is being promoted in countries like China which have no tradition of the game. It also outlines the development of women's cricket and the game's responsibilities to the societies in which it is played. The essay also delineates the impact of television, radio and sponsorship on the promotion of the game.

Notes

¹ See Bailey, A History of Cricket.

² All historical details above are from volumes of the Wisden Cricketers Almanack.

³ As told to the author by a former Colonial Administrator in 2006.

⁴ See, for example, Haigh, The Cricket War.

⁵ Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation bought a controlling stake in Sky in 1983 and re-launched as Sky Television in 1989, but it made heavy losses until 1992 when BSkyB (Sky and BSB merged in 1990) acquired the rights to broadcast Premier League Soccer games for US$465 million. Anand and Attea, ‘News Corporation’, 8. Murdoch has always placed great emphasis on sport. In 1999, for instance, News Corporation owned the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball club and had shares in the New York Knicks and Los Angeles Lakers basketball clubs, and the New York Rangers. In September 1998, BSkyB launched a take over bid for Manchester United, the world's richest football club, which was blocked by the British Mergers and Monopolies Commission on grounds that it was ‘anti-competitive’ in broadcasting. Rowe, ‘To Serve and To Sell: Media Sport and Cultural Citizenship’, 186.

⁶ Lord Harris, founder member of Imperial Cricket Council and Governor General of Bombay (1890–95), quoted in Roberts, ‘Cricket as Global as Honourable’, 6.

⁷ Nelson Mandela addressing the England cricket team in Soweto in 1995.