Nigel Kerner

Nigel Kerner is a journalist, screenwriter and film producer. His singular passion, however, is cricket; a sport he follows avidly from his home in Sri Lanka. In Nigel's first column for CricInfo he unveils a radical plan for world cricket, a proposal he believes can rid corruption from this once noble game. A World Cricket Fund, he argues, would give the game back to the people, ensure that all players are justly rewarded, no matter what class, colour and creed, and would allow a developmental revolution that would take cricket proudly into the new millennium.

In these days of increasing remuneration for playing a game - that once people enjoyed for the sake of the game itself - money seems to arbitrate most things. The best representatives of the game have the right to claim the highest sums they can get, because they have, to all intents and purposes, been judged the finest of their art in the world. Cricket has been the poor relation of the sporting world for much too long, compared to most of the other world sports such as Soccer, Athletics, Basketball, Baseball, Golf, Tennis, Rugby League and Rugby Union, Badminton, Horse Racing, etc. The exceptions are Hockey and Table Tennis.

Tennis, for example, proffers millions on a small number at the top, who regularly win all the major championships. A single prize of a million dollars is not unusual these days. How often have you seen just ten well known names gather all the loot? I have not the slightest resentment of this. I am arguing for a fiscally egalitarian approach in all sports, where the spectator spread allows for high financial returns.

The world audience for cricket is well over a billion people; most of them in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. You will get some idea of the true level of money in the game if each of these people pays the paltry sum of $5 a year on the game. In addition, the advertising and marketing potential is awesome. The potential financial returns are fantastic. It is here that the greatest correction of financial returns in Cricket is necessary, to bring about parity with western player counterparts.

I know who I'd like to watch play cricket. Tendulkar, Dravid, Ganguly, Jayasuriya, Aravinda De Silva, Inzamam, Lara, and company, provide the sort of talent that make for scintillating excitement, beauty of expression and sheer verve. Yet it is the 'Euroforms', with their often stodgy, less exciting, more machined and controlled game and with their much larger financial returns, that hold the order of the day. They get the results of course and have a lot to teach us on the subcontinent and in the West Indies about better marshalling of cricket resources. The salaries of many white cricketers are so much higher than those of their Asian counterparts. It is time that someone took this situation in hand, as McCormick did with tennis, and produced a fait accompli for the paymasters and TV companies and demand a correction of the situation.

It will probably take the captains of all the Test playing nations and every big name currently playing to rise up in a single chorus and demand better money for cricketers. To withdraw their services to the game with uniform and strong strike action if they are threatened with the sack for taking their stand. The anti brigade will surely hit back with sackings and suspensions. In any case, no one will like to see second level or sub-level talent representing their countries for too long. It will take nerve and great strength of character on the part of all the top cricketers to make their power felt and bring about change.

Cricket Boards around the world take most of the money and players get the most meagre amounts, comparatively. Australia has now changed this with the latest pay deal for their players. We will have the first players with Board paid salary levels above a million, albeit Australian dollars, as opposed to what they can make from outside sources and fringe benefits. It can only be good for the game. It will, I believe, arbitrate decisively to discourage corruption in Cricket, if all the Boards of the cricket playing nations pay the players' salaries, commensurate with the levels paid in other world sports, and not according to an individual country's standard of living. There must be parity. Cricket is an international sporting quantum now. Television has made it so. Its fiscal rewards must be based on an individual player's value to the world game. You would otherwise get a number '8' Test batsman in the Australian side getting, shall we say, a minimum of AU $400,000 for his batting appeal to the international public watching a Test series on world television networks, because the Australians can afford it, and a Brian Lara, getting US $60,000 for his spectacular batsmanship, in the same series, because that is all his home Board can afford.

Poll Do you agree with the concept of a "World Cricket Fund"? Choose one Yes No May be Poll Results Archive

I would like to propose that each cricket fan in the world contributes a mere $5.00(US) per year to a central cricket fund. Let's call it `THE WORLD FUND FOR CRICKET'. The resultant $5 billion collected would provide all the money necessary to provide grounds, stadiums, Cricket Academies and training and practice facilities, and the high value payments to players and support staff, in salaries, all over the world in cricket playing countries. I believe it will be one of the biggest disincentives to corruption possible. Players would have salaries commensurate with their playing prowess and level that would be the envy of other sports. I would further like to propose that, in return for this paltry sum, each contributor of $5 would get a secured pass that would admit the bearer to watch any match, at any level, anywhere in the world, any time all year round, that is controlled and contributed to by the `World Fund For Cricket'. Let's call it the `World Cricket Pass' perhaps. I venture to say that you will see the cricket arenas in every country filled with fans in almost every match. It would bring the fans very cheaply to the real magic of cricket - its match atmosphere, where it actually happens – on the ground. I see no reason why the ICC shouldn't run the whole thing. I can see very good reasons why it should be run by the official body that runs world cricket. They would be the body to allocate fairly the sum each Test playing country would get from the central fund, after deductions for administration etc - an average of $500 million dollars per Test playing country, per year, as things stand now. A mere $5, per pass holder per annum, would do all this. Imagine what a $10 contribution per year could do. I have suggested $5, because it is a sum that even the poorest person in Asia, Africa and the West Indies can afford, and I believe will afford, if he or she can watch cricket free, all year round. Further, it will give the fan in the street the right to feel that he or she is a world stockholder and trustee of the noble game. The game will, nominally, be in the international collective chargeship of the fans themselves. Where it ought to be as a world game. All this, without the extra money that will still come in from the media. This media money could be used to provide prizes of huge value per match they televise or broadcast. Giving added value and incentive to win any particular game or series.

There will be those whose greed will still prevail and still be open to corrupt practices, but the huge sum available for fair distribution, especially in the Indo sub-continental cricket arena, will act as a spur to keep cricket talent coming on in droves into the far future and, as I have said, see off the deadly plague of the bookie.

The Indian Cricket Board is the richest in the world by far and its players, pound for pound, are among the worst paid in terms of basic salary levels. It is an international disgrace and many Indians who love the game are ashamed of the situation, as they are, along with the Sri Lankans, ashamed of the endless parade of maladministration and corrupt practices ascribed to the management powers that be.

It must also be said that the so called 'old' countries' (by which they mean 'white' countries) condescending and pompous suspicion and belief that corruption is the prerogative of non-white countries has been torn to pieces with the corruption revelations of the past year.

The blast of North and Latin 'Americana' in sport, in the islands of the West Indies, is effectively reducing the power that cricket once had in the psychology of these greatly talented people, to show the world the game at its best. Soccer, American Football, Basketball, and Baseball, with the power money has in these sports to sell them to the public through television, has made cricket's impact in the Islands far less than it used to be. Many West Indian cricketing legends I have spoken with are convinced that cricket will be reduced to a small role in most West Indian Islands in the next two decades. It is true that remuneration from ground tickets alone, in this region, simply doesn't have the returns to run the modern game with all its demands. The West Indian Islands that play cricket, in particular, haven't the population bases and individual fiscal earning power to provide the 'bums on seats', to allow large sums to be paid to players from this income alone. It is true that returns from spectators alone, even in rich countries, cannot do this. The big money comes from TV and advertising and that in turn comes from goods bought by richer population bases that see the products on TV screens. But a well organised world fiscal foundation to the sport, perhaps administered by the ICC, with the sums distributed collectively, but judicially, to all the Boards of cricket playing countries, is the only answer. We sorely need an internationally administered financial set up that takes in all the Test Players from all countries as a single quantum.

Cricket is arguably the best game in the world. It tests hand and eye, muscle and bone, brain and mind, and human character traits, in combination, as few other games do. I admit my bias towards the game, but I think that any open, objective mind that knows anything about the game will admit that this is true. If something is not done to combine all remuneration from the game and treat it as a fiscal whole, the consequences to the world game will be catastrophic. The alternative is the loss of the glorious talent West Indians have for playing the game. No more Constantines, Headleys, Worrells, Weekes, Walcotts, Laras, Holdings, Ambroses and Walshes. They come through as exceptions from a huge base of cricket interest. The larger the base of interest the more likely it is that the extraordinary player emerges. Lower the interest base and the cricketing geniuses tend to dry up.

It is singularly unfair that the talent, endeavour and earning of the man in the field who does the business on the green baize, or wooden boards, to attract the TV cameras and advertisers, in the first place, is siphoned, or indeed in some instances, parasitised, by those on the fringes - who have not done anything in these terms and who then collect most of the kudos and loot, or make the important decisions. This disgraceful situation is then compounded by the shrewish feelings in some members of the public, in Third World countries. They carp endlessly on about how much their sportsmen get, when the rest of their nationals are poor and starving, or their own salaries are so meagre. What a facile stand they take. Can they not see that this is an argument for standing still? Their argument says if taken to its logical conclusion, that as long as poverty exists, and it will always exist, no one has the right to take the bull by the horns and break out, in as big a way as possible, using their own talents and enterprise. Can they not see what the slightest rational sense in them will show - that these marvellous experts of the willow and leather, or whatever, are the vanguard of their countries' pride in achievement, and thus, world notice. It brings us all pride in our nationhood in turn, showing the world the excellence in achievement that we, particularly in the so-called Third World, are capable of. That poverty is so often a terrible masque to non-achievement. That to become the best of the best, in a sport, is often the quickest way out of poverty for many. It is often much quicker and much easier than waiting for government and politicians to provide level playing fields of opportunity for the poor in the Third World to break free of their predicament.

As I have said, money alas acts as the best spur to attainment these days. I admit that judged socio-philosophically, it is a sad situation that this is so. I accept and promulgate the idea with my own children that excellence is the best end, in itself. I encourage them not to aim, or want, to beat down the other man. To want to see another man humiliated, or a nation humbled, as a means in itself of bolstering one's own ego. I encourage them to beat themselves into better and higher stances all the time. To see their own last achievement as a spur to a better one next time. To take whatever result that brings as incidental to one's efforts. To accept with humility and genuine pride one's own achievement, but with sincere commiseration and sympathy for the other man's predicament, in loss. To take it all with good nature, with humour, and never take one's own victory too seriously. In other words, to take a genuine joy in playing the game - for the game's sake and the enjoyment it gives you in taking part in it. It seems to me, that to make the competitive spirit the edge to demean - to defeat another human spirit, is the hallmark of an inflated ego, and thus most of all, the hallmark of a fool. It is all usually the symptom of an inferiority complex - not a superiority one - as one might think. The truly superior know they are so. They don't need to prove it. Most racists, ethnic and religious supremacists are simply cowards - with small minds, who do not know or believe in themselves and their own value. They have to constantly prove it to themselves, by demeaning, or discriminating against, others.

It must be said that the value of sport, in itself, comes a long way behind the things that truly ennoble the scope of humanity. The social frameworks that provide for the basic needs of our species, such as the provision of food, clothing and shelter, are of course a great deal more important than throwing a javelin, or kicking and hitting a ball. Equally, the simple man who works hard, in a humble job, that might provide a service for the benefit of their fellow man - or helps others to improve themselves - will always be set on a grander scale of moral and ethical value, than the aficionado in sport. Yet their fiscal rewards are usually poor. Alas we live in a Mickey Mouse world. A world of trite upside down values. It is true that those who represent these values reap greater financial rewards, than those that ennoble the spirit of man. Things that decorate the ego, be they the cosmetic houses, or the fashion houses, or the grand film and music entertainment houses, bring huge fiscal returns. Take film stars for instance. The people I have written scripts and screenplays for. They play imaginary roles - other people. They are alas cherished and celebrated by society, for not even being themselves. Yet they are the ones most often featured on the most powerful hailing posts of modern society, such as TV, Radio, Newspapers and all the other pulp fiction and faction modalities, such as books and magazines. It is they who are most often solicited for their opinions on many important questions. Questions most of them are ill-equipped to handle or understand. How often do we hear of the wretched lives led by them. Lives that have left a cascade of detriment, through drug or alcohol abuse and endless broken relationships. All this, while earning tens of millions, paid willingly by the public. It is a fact of life that we all have to accept, while poets, priests, philosophers and 'ologists' are left to rue and pick up the pieces of many other lives, led in imitation of such powerful, often nefarious and useless, examples to us all.

Yet sport, though it may be seen as entertainment, is a pursuit that essentially enhances the biology, mind and spirit of man to good avail. Our sporting heroes are men and women that seek the furthest edge of - on the face of it - a paltry endeavour. Yet it speaks powerfully of healthy qualities too. Of hard effort, dedication, labour, constancy, consistency, practice, and the resolution of will that is deliberately pointed and aimed at greater and greater scales of achievement. It all inherently builds standards and character.

When we finally lay the cursor of sporting worth, where do we lay it? The animal senses in humankind take so many of us on socially self-destructive paths these days. The practice of sport in general, and cricket in particular, is not of course a cure for all evils, but it is a marvellous way of re-adorning our basic urges and instincts with better personal human value. It deserves the highest rewards if it keeps man in the arenas of play, and not the arenas of war.

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