With the arrival of a new form of cricket, will 2019 be the last gasp of the ancien regime in its ancestral home?
Is cricket’s cup half-full or half-empty? Was 2018 a good or a bad year for a sport that perennially feels itself to be in football’s shadow? The England men’s team did very well after some early hiccups and ended up beating India at home and Sri Lanka away. The level-headed and infectiously enthusiastic Joe Root is now firmly established as captain, and his retiring predecessor Alastair Cook is being tipped to be the first cricketer to be knighted since Ian Botham in 2007. The England women’s team were demolished by Australia in the recent Twenty20 World Cup and the team is in transition, but women’s cricket around the world is booming.
Thanks to the riches of the Indian Premier League, elite male cricketers have never been better rewarded – 20-year-old England all-rounder Sam Curran has just netted an £800,000 deal to play for Kings XI Punjab in the IPL – and some of the money sloshing around may even find its way into the women’s game and grassroots cricket. So far, so good. But there was also a downside to 2018: the ball-tampering scandal in a Test against South Africa in Cape Town that laid low Australian cricket and led to captain Steve Smith and two other players being suspended; the trial of England’s most charismatic cricketer, Ben Stokes, who in August was found not guilty of affray after a brawl at a Bristol nightclub; the continuing questions over the future of Test cricket as it tries to compete with the growth of T20 – only England and Australia attract large attendances for Tests, and the once-mighty West Indies are now virtually irrelevant as a Test force. Somehow cricket manages to be superficially buoyant and dramatic, while beneath the surface facing an existential crisis over what it is and what its future should be.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2ENue5w
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