This sporting life

Twenty20 has knocked test cricket for six. How should the sport handle the wild success of the new format? Plus, how a team from Nairobi's slums saved Kenyan football
December 20, 2008
Twenty20: barbarians at the gates

"A lot of people think too much and too deeply about stuff," said Kevin Pietersen, captain of the England cricket team, when asked whether England should be playing the Stanford Superstars. Given their dismal performance, Pietersen and his team now have plenty of things to think about—not least how the global game of cricket is being transformed.

Money, of course, is the catalyst—the prize fund for England's match with the all-star West Indies side was $20m. And this is only the latest venture for American-Antiguan billionaire Allen Stanford, who founded the Superstars, built his own cricket ground and funds a Caribbean Twenty20 tournament. The ECB has its reasons for keeping Stanford happy—his eagerness to promote the game in the US for one. More importantly, English players need the opportunity to earn the kind of money on offer in Indian cricket—which they cannot do at present except at the cost of their international careers.

How did we reach such a pass? Ironically, these changes were unleashed by the Twenty20 format—invented and piloted by the ECB in 2003. The board realised that the commercial future of cricket required a format and timing closer to baseball than to a complete rendition of Wagner's Ring. It created this 20-over, three-hour runfest and the audience loved it. The English tournament, although successful, has been eclipsed. International Twenty20 began in 2005, Australia and South Africa created domestic leagues and last year the first Twenty20 World Cup saw India beat Pakistan in a thrilling final.

India's victory sparked the nation's obsession with the format. The long planned Indian Premier League (IPL), began in early 2008, breaking records for audiences, income and salaries. As the league is played from April through May, England's leading cricketers are unable to take part without giving up their places on the national team.

So huge is the demand for Twenty20 cricket in India that Zee TV, which persistently lost out in bidding for cricket rights, has created its own league, the ICL. Although spurned by the cricketing authorities, it has attracted significant government and corporate support. Now the coalition behind the IPL—the Indian cricketing authorities and new media and industrial conglomerates—is creating a champion's league between the best Twenty20 sides around the world.

Cricket has survived money and gimmickry in the past. In the 1970s, Kerry Packer's World Series brought the forces of money and television to bear on the game's insular oligarchies. Yet despite the subsequent rise of the one-day game, the introduction of night games, shirt numbers and coloured uniforms, the old political order and essential aesthetic of the game, in which test cricket remained the gold standard, were left untouched.

That's not the case this time—which brings up two questions. First, what will the fate of test cricket be? Critics argue that Twenty20 is having a negative effect on players' techniques and audience tastes, rendering the former incapable of playing test cricket and the latter uninterested in its subtleties. Test matches in India, if not England and Australia, are sparsely attended. If demand continues to decline, the format will not keep its central place in the calendar for long. Will test cricket meet the same fate as classical music?

Second, now that the world of cricket has been comprehensively opened up to (and in part sold to) serious corporate organisations, how can those parties excluded from the profits and debate at present—grassroots cricket in particular—be represented? Answering these questions may prove even more difficult than beating the Stanford Superstars.

Change we can believe in

In April, at the start of the country's football season, the Kenyan Premier League posted its fixture list on its website. So far—the season ends in late November—every match had taken place when and where it was scheduled to. You might think this is normal for a professional league, but compared to most African football, it's a huge achievement. More than that, this season has been the least corrupt in Kenyan football. Given the nation's long history of match-fixing, bribery and intimidation, this is also extraordinary.

At the heart of the sea change are the Mathare Youth Sports Association and its professional team Mathare United. MYSA is a Kenyan NGO based in Nairobi's mega-slum Mathare. It trades football coaching with kids for their involvement in social and personal development projects. Over the last 20 years, it has proved incredibly successful in both developing Mathare and producing great footballers. In 2003, together with their allies in Kenyan football, MYSA and Mathare United circumvented the poisonous and decrepit football administration and created the Kenyan Premier League. They are now footing the bill for the Kenyan national football team. And this season, Mathare United may win its first ever championship—an amazing triumph for a team truly of the slums.

If Kenyan football can be reformed, then could the rest of the polity? If the nation's worst slum can rise to the top, then, unshackled from its parasitic state, could Kenya's civil society flourish? As one son of a Kenyan says, "Yes, we can."