9 hours ago
It's Jay's World
Some of the many frames with Jay Shah in the ICC's congratulatory video over South Africa's trophy win.
Sick bag at the ready? I may just have just seen the worst thing ever. Or maybe it was this. The cumulative message is hard to miss. You may have imagined that the World Test Championship final was a soul-stirring triumph for South Africa, a memento mori for Australia, a testament to the red ball cricket's timeless appeal, or whatever. But the ICC has news: it was all just a Trumpesque parade for ICC chairman Jay Shah, whose personal videographer was on hand to capture him receiving homage in Peckinpahesque slow motion. As one commenter put it.
Mind you, let's not forget the co-stars. No, I don't mean Pat Cummins and Temba Bavuma, diminished as they are: the ECB's Richard Thompson surely deserves an Oscar for Best Supporting Sycophant. And gosh, you must feel for Marylebone CC chairman Mark Nicholas. On the eve of the Test, he had hosted select invitees to the club's grand global conference, World Cricket Connects – an imaginative initiative, in the storied expanse of the Long Room at Lord's.
Lauding the Board of Control for Cricket in India, Nicholas had charmed Shah onto the organising committee and into delivering the opening address. You might think something a bit weird about the ICC chairman joining a committee aspiring to advise the ICC chairman, but whatever – anything's worth a shot. Then Shah pulled out.
Speakers soon began heaping up cricket's challenges: the paucity of strategic thought, the gross inequalities, the confused and distended schedule. There was lots of good stuff, in a spirit of goodwill. But the elephant in the room was….well, not in the room. Or maybe, as Andy Bull put it, the room was in the elephant. The two days of discussion were finally reduced to a terse communique.
Which says something. We might well perceive a game in crisis. But as far as the BCCI is concerned, there's nothing much to worry about. They're minting it. They're winning stuff. They run the joint and call the tune. Crisis? What crisis? How can the game be in disarray and the system be 'broken' when it works so well for the world's biggest cricket economy? That's no burning platform; that's a barbecue pit. Shah, meanwhile, is having the time of his life, cocooned in ICC-funded comfort and luxury, feted wherever he goes by a conga line of suckholes, wondering why people can't be more interigent, rike he is.
There's no mystery about where such elite shamelessness and impunity comes from – it's inherited. His loathsome dad responds to a mass calamity with a 'shit happens' shrug. So Shah's treating cricket as a vehicle for self-aggrandising photo ops is only to be expected. But that's no reason for the rest of us to collude in the fantasy that cricket is best led by a monomaniac political scion, and that the ICC's other directors aren't abasing themselves into the bargain.
This article first appeared on Gideon Haigh's Substack, Cricket Et Al and has been republished with permission.
Gideon Haigh has been a journalist for almost four decades, has published more than 40 books and contributed to more than 100 newspapers and magazines. He is also co-host of the podcast Cricket, Et Cetera.
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