Commonwealth Games can give cricket's lingering Olympic dream a much-needed boost

JAMES COYNE: The ICC appears to be kicking the Olympic can down the road, so the world game needs the women’s T20 at Birmingham 2022 to be a success

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Pep Guardiola amused some football journalists a few days ago.

He was talking about an Instagram Live session with Virat Kohli. The world’s best-paid cricketer and, by common consent, the best batsman across the formats, struck Guardiola as “a serial winner”.

The Manchester City manager was honest enough to admit that when he spoke to Kohli he had never seen a cricket match, or really knew much about the game. But Pep said he would like to go India one day and to see an IPL match if he could.

Liverpool counterpart Jurgen Klopp sometimes takes his dog for a walk around the outside of Formby CC’s ground on Merseyside and was once captured on Twitter chatting with the club president Charlie Mills.

I’m told that John Curtis, former England football correspondent for the Press Association, and a long-time reporter on Worcestershire cricket, was often bending Gérard Houllier’s ear about going to watch some cricket when the Frenchman was Aston Villa boss.

As cricket fans, we’ve probably all done it: we meet someone not from ‘a cricket country’, especially when they are interesting, open-minded kind of person, and we try to convert them, basically.

We have a lot of work to do, though.

Spain, Germany and France are three European sporting powerhouses where cricket has made next to no impact on the vast majority of the population.

Of course, it’s wonderful that Germany are on the climb through the European cricket stage, boosted by significant immigration from Afghanistan and Pakistan. And there’s plenty of clubs on the Costa del Sol and in the south of France where Brits or immigrants from South Asia have based themselves. (The digital hits for The Cricketer.com in Spain and France are pretty impressive.) 

But it’s deluded to claim that cricket has made enough of a cut-through among people not already steeped in the game. Annoyingly, it tends to be viewed by many people either as an expression of a certain perception of Englishness, or that sport taken very seriously in India and Pakistan.

And I write this as someone obviously obsessed by cricket and its presence around the world, as befits someone who has a Global Game column for The Cricketer magazine and co-edits Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack’s Cricket Round the World section each year.

^{The 1998 Commonwealth Games was a star-studded event}

Right about this stage someone usually mentions the Olympics. And with good reason. If cricket were to become an Olympic sport, the money that would start flowing towards Cricket España, the Deutscher Cricket Bund and Association Française de Cricket from central government and the private sector would be considerable. No wonder that Olympic inclusion has been the first subject raised by the Associate nations at every ICC Annual Conference since 2009.

Long before Spain, Germany or France would actually come close to qualifying for an Olympic cricket competition, you can bet the game would be a lot more visible. Instead, the biggest nations of world cricket are effectively turning down free money for the other 100. It’s utterly galling.

As Lawrence Booth memorably put it in Wisden 2015: “Even if you mock the idea of a Test match in Beijing, it’s a curious form of leadership that stops the dream being financed by someone else.”

This has been an issue ever since the ICC, under the presidencies of Jagmohan Dalmiya, Malcolm Gray and Ehsan Mani, welcomed scores of new Associate and Affiliate nations to membership in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It’s doubtful that they were thinking about the Olympics when they did so, although Mani might have been.

The ICC make their serious money from the major tournaments they organise and then sell to the broadcasters – World Cups and Champions Trophies in particular. The ICC’s problem with the Olympics is they would be ceding part of their precious schedule to an entity that they don’t own.

But there had been some hope, after the partial dismantling of the Big Three heist, that the Olympic stance might have been softening. The ECB and Cricket Australia were believed to have dropped their major objections to the Olympics elbowing in on their lucrative schedules.

And in August 2019, chairman of the MCC World Cricket Committee Mike Gatting sounded optimistic that one of the last big roadblocks had been removed: “We were talking with Manu Sawhney, the ICC chief exec, and he was very hopeful we can get cricket into the 2028 Olympics. That's what they're working towards at the moment and that would be a huge bonus for cricket worldwide, it would be fantastic.

“It's two weeks [long], that's a good thing about it, it's not a month, so it's one of those [events] where scheduling for two weeks should be fine once every four years once you do the first one. You're going to have – one hopes – a four-year period, once you know you've been accepted into the Olympics, that gives you a chance to actually shape your two weeks, so it's not as if it is butted into the schedule.

”I think the next 18 months will be very interesting as to how we do that. One of the problems has been negated, where the BCCI is now working with NADA, the drugs agency, which it wasn't previously a part of. That will help a long way towards the sport being whole, which is what we need it to be to apply for the Olympics, both men and women to play and all countries to comply.”

But, over those 18 months, not much appears to have happened. Certainly, that was the implication of an interview on the Emerging Cricket podcast in which the ICC’s head of global development, Will Glenwright, admitted the subject of the Olympics hadn’t cropped up at ICC Board level for more than a year, and that accession was but “a long-term ambition for the sport”.

It should be stressed that Glenwright doesn’t sit on the ICC Board. The interests of the board (made up primarily of the Full Member nations’ representatives) and ICC staff don’t always converge. No one is doubting the drive and determination of Glenwright and other ICC Development executives.

^{Is there any willingness from inside the ICC or major nations for cricket to enter the Olympics?}

Glenwright confirmed that even T20 would probably be too long a format for the Olympics, as over a short and intense period such a tournament would start requiring multiple grounds. That infrastructure isn’t really there at the next three host cities: Tokyo 2020, Paris 2024 and Los Angeles 2028.

LA, though, does have the Woodley Park complex, and USA Cricket last week officially threw their weight behind cricket being in the 2028 Games. They might well say, as Ray Kinsella did, “If you build it, they will come”.

100-ball cricket is T20 as near as makes no difference, so unless there’s some serious lateral thinking – and my colleague Nick Howson has posited in recent days that it is simply a matter of time before there are dedicated Super Over tournaments – the right format surely has to be T10. That’s the length Dan Weston’s European Cricket Network have been playing over the last two summers, to some success and with TV coverage on FreeSports.

T10 might not be the format of choice for those of us enraptured by a twisting Ashes series or a heartstopping 102-over World Cup final. But 90-minute matches might just be palatable for worldwide audiences attuned to football.

Either way, the chances of cricket entering the Olympics in time for LA 2028 appear to be ebbing away by the week. Especially since it’s touted that, after the Covid-19 pandemic, the 2032 Olympics (wherever it may be) will be under some pressure to significantly reduce costs. Hosting a bunch of cricket squads and their hangers-on in the Olympic village is an expensive business.

So you get the sense that the women’s tournament at the Commonwealth Games at Birmingham 2022 is going to have to do some seriously heavy lifting to get the Olympics show back on the road.

Birmingham 2022 is expected to have a global audience of 1.5bn – with the caveat that those who do tune in from outside the Commonwealth (exactly the sort of new fans I’ve been talking about) may not be quite as invested as they would be in an Olympics, where their own athletes would be competing. Even so, it’s still screened around the world.

The last time cricket featured in the Commonwealth Games, back in 1998, a 50-over men’s tournament was won by South Africa, who beat Australia in the final, with both sides at near full-strength. New Zealand took bronze.

It’ll be just a women’s tournament this time, as the men’s Future Tours Programme was deemed just too lucrative and complicated to unpick. Just the 24 years on from 1998, when a “third-generation” format was mooted for the next Commonwealth Games, they’ll be playing T20 at Edgbaston.

Then, as now, cricket was inserted into the Games to get eyeballs in the subcontinent. And yet India and Pakistan could not quite make their minds up about whether to focus on the 1998 Games or the Sahara Cup in Toronto (the one where Inzamam-ul-Haq was famously called “a fat potato” by a fan and he climbed into the stands to accost him). Sachin Tendulkar flew halfway round the world to play in both tournaments.

^{Women's T20 will fly cricket's flag in 2022}

World cricket could seriously do with all the leading nations taking this more seriously this time. The ECB have pledged to, even though the match dates are going to be mighty close to interfering with the second season of the Women’s Hundred. The ECB say they will do their best to avoid that.

Because, basically, the Commonwealth Games needs to do two main things. First, be enough of a success on its own terms that it survives to the next Games – unlike last time when the 2002 Games was in Manchester and they still couldn’t get cricket on the roster.

And two, it needs to be enticing enough to effectively force the ICC into action over the Olympics.

Like the 1983 World Cup and the 2007 World Twenty20, an India gold medal would probably help, as before both those two successes, the BCCI had been lukewarm indeed about one-day cricket and T20.

So it possibly doesn’t augur well that India has never bothered to send a team – men’s or women’s – to the Asian Games or South Asian Games when cricket has been in both of those events before.

This is all at a time when cricket is managing to break into a number of other multi-sport Games… just not the big one.

It’s going back into the Asian Games in 2022, in Hangzhou, China. And if that sounds unlikely, just bear in mind that both Guangzhou, China (2010) and Incheon, South Korea (2014) built international-standard stadiums from scratch in order to host those tournaments.

Cricket’s already a staple of the Pacific Games, where Papua New Guinea usually win gold. And the current darlings of the Associate women’s game, Thailand, won the women’s tournament at the Southeast Asian Games in 2017. Cricket returned to the South Asian Games in 2019, helped by the fact that Nepal were hosting. The ICC are in talks about cricket entering both the Pan-American Games and the All-Africa Games.

All these appearances might be viewed a little dismissively from the vantage point of a Test nation, but even if they mean little to us, you have to remind yourself of the funds that start flowing to the participating nations, especially the Associate boards working on a shoestring. But, as Glenwright himself admits, it’s the Olympics that’s “the game-changer”.

So India desperately needs to bury any remaining issues about losing control of their players for a few weeks every four years; much the same goes for other Full Members with residual concerns.

Because, yes, there’s a bit in every cricket fan who almost revels in the game’s obscurity; the fact we understand and cherish it where to others it’s a mystery.

Grim though it is to admit it, this is actually about future prosperity. The world game has reached the point where the finances of many Full Members are in dire straits and reliant on a tour from India, where the game would be foolish to be turning down the prospect of new income streams. It won’t solve all of cricket’s myriad problems, but the Olympics would deliver cricket to eyes it simply cannot reach any other way.

Who knows, maybe Guardiola might have already seen a bit more of our compelling, unique sport, and a bit more of Kohli’s sublime batting, if only his country’s administrators had paused to consider the bigger picture.