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Christopher Martin-Jenkins is a journalist, author, and broadcaster.
The year 1963 was a momentous one in history: the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas; a new Pope in Rome; and in England the Great Train Robbery and the resignation of Harold Macmillan following a scandal involving a member of his cabinet, the Minister of War, John Profumo. In cricket a simple experiment at county level changed the sport for ever, at every strata from the school playground to the international arena.
There was nothing new about a game of cricket scheduled to begin and finish in one day. At school and club level indeed, a single afternoon always was, and still is, usually the only time available. The real novelty of the rules which applied to the new knockout competition was the limitation on the overs for each side. The drawn match was eliminated. Instead of a captain being able to declare his innings closed at or soon after the halfway stage of a match, both sides were guaranteed the same amount of overs.
The 1963 experiment, the catalyst for all the changes that followed, was a knockout competition consisting of matches of 65 overs a side for the 17 counties who played professional cricket. The idea of a match beginning and finishing in a day proved immediately attractive to spectators, who knew that thereby they would be sure to see both sides batting and a guaranteed result.
Crowds, which had declined from the post-World War II high of 2 million a year for county cricket to an overall attendance of 933,000 paying spectators in 1962, flocked to support their teams in the knockout cup. The excited atmosphere, which was only a more genteel version of the one which traditionally attended the FA Cup Final at Wembley, was unmistakable on the day that a full house at Lord’s witnessed Sussex beating Worcestershire in the first final in September. By the following year the Gillette razor blade company, which had patronised the experiment in a low-key way in the first season, had its name attached to the competition officially. Cricket had had its private patrons for many years, but now for the first time it was linked to a commercial sponsor and before too long money from businesses like Gillette, and from the television companies who covered the game, became its lifeblood.
Ted Dexter, one of the great England batsmen of his generation, captained Sussex in the first final and wrote 18 years later in a foreword to Gordon Ross’s The Gillette Cup 1963-80: “I still own the leather toilet case presented to the players at the first Gillette Cup final. It represented my first tangible encounter with commercial sponsorship and, as an amateur, it was rather pleasant to get something for nothing. Sussex won that first final much against the run of play, but at least the game was being taken seriously by that stage of the season. Earlier it had been treated with a cross between mild amusement and palpable disdain by the old school players.”
Dexter went on to explain how his field-placings, designed primarily to prevent boundaries, and his injunction to his bowlers to “pitch it up and bowl straight” had stood the test of time. Indeed they have. By 1996 bowlers were still aiming for the blockhole, especially towards the end of an innings, but defensive field placings had to some extent been countered by regulations first developed in Australia: for the first 15 overs of 50-over matches only four fielders were allowed to stand outside a circle thirty yards from the stumps. Two of those inside the circle also had to be no further than 15 yards from the stumps, standing still until the ball was bowled.
These were artificial restrictions for a necessarily artificial game. They pointed to the two worst aspects of one-day cricket: first, its stereotypical character, by which players tend to play to a formula and the result of games can often be predicted half-way through the innings of the side batting second; secondly, the emphasis on defence in the field. The original object of cricket was for batsmen to hit the ball and bowlers to hit the wicket. In the limited-over game, however, the bowler’s first duty is to prevent runs being scored and a return of no wicket for 30 from 10 overs (the maximum number of overs allowed for any one bowler in a 50-over match) is theoretically more helpful to his side than one of 5 wickets for 40. In two-innings cricket this yardstick of a bowler’s value to his side would be a complete absurdity. Nothing so aptly demonstrates the difference between the “pure” game and the one-day version.
Imperfect the formula may be, and the intensive nature of the one-day game altogether less subtle and ultimately less satisfying than that of the two-innings match with its slow rhythms and continual ebb and flow, but the fact is that both the time-scale and the often hectic excitement of these matches has proved ideal for the second half of the 20th century. Spectators not party to the more sophisticated patterns of a complex game are delighted with the instant entertainment offered by matches in which skilful players look urgently for runs from the first ball and fielders fling themselves about fearlessly in their attempts to stop them.
By 1972 county cricketers in England were playing in no fewer than three different one-day tournaments: Benson & Hedges were sponsors of a second knockout competition; Gillette, believing that the British now associated their name with cricket instead of razor blades would before long be handing over to NatWest Bank; and a Sunday league offering matches of only 40 overs a side had, since 1969, been offering hectic entertainment which did wonders for the finances of the county clubs and attracted schoolchildren in a family atmosphere.
The rest of the world had noticed. In the 1970-1971 season a scheduled five-day Test match during England’s tour of Australia was rained off in Melbourne and when the rain finally stopped a one-day international was played instead. A crowd of 46,000 attended and enjoyed themselves; not least, perhaps, because Australia beat England by five wickets. Soon one-day internationals became regular features of major cricket tours everywhere. What was more, it was realized that the shorter the duration of a match the greater was the potential for sides of lesser ability or experience to upset theoretically stronger opponents. Thus, nations who had not hitherto dreamed of playing against the likes of England, Australia, or the West Indies, began to do so.
Sri Lanka were the trail-blazers for emerging cricket nations. Their participation in the first World Cup in 1975 showed what they might one day achieve by scoring 276 for 4 against Australia. They did not win that match but 20 years later they won the sixth World Cup, a tournament that generated profits of more than $50 million, by beating Australia in the final. Earlier in the same tournament Kenya defeated the West Indies and a side representing the United Arab Emirates was an unlikely participant too. Officials of the International Cricket Council (ICC) began to talk of the game’s “globalization”.
The greatest reason for the commercial success of one-day cricket was that its length was ideally suited to television. Its potential was first spotted by Kerry Packer, the Australian media tycoon who took on the cricket establishment in 1977 when the Australian Cricket Board refused to give his Sydney-based station Channel Nine exclusive rights to the coverage of Test matches. Incensed that the ACB was rejecting his offer of far more money than they had ever made from television rights, Packer’s reaction was to lavish his money, for hard-headed business reasons, to the best players of several nations instead. They were offered immeasurably more than they had dreamt of earning from cricket hitherto to play in international matches for the benefit of Channel Nine and its viewers.
During the bitter civil war which split world cricket in the next two years Packer proved that matches played under floodlights at night in coloured clothes would be a further highly successful exploitation of the attractions of one-day cricket. The consequence was that between the first official one-day international in Melbourne in 1970 and September, 1996, 1,116 such games were played round the world, Australia staging more than any other.
The ICC recognized no need to put a cap on the proliferation in these games, although the very volume of them meant that they were here today, gone tomorrow; often very exciting at the time, but forgotten almost as soon as they were over. Despite the threat that glitzily marketed one-day internationals might eventually swamp the five-day Test match, wherein the skills of cricketers were tried in a much more profound and often far more interesting manner, the ICC were talking of holding World Cups once every two years rather than every four.
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Cricket, History of
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