The Cricket Et Al Solution

GH on the parlous state of cricket's Fourth Estate

This weekend tweet by Jim Maxwell attracted more than 100,000 views, and who hasn’t at some stage in the last few years felt the same?  You flick through a newspaper - usually one you’ve found in a cafe or a reception area - searching fruitlessly for cricket content.  Nothing; or, at least, nothing much of any great depth; everywhere else you look, expanses of football, of various codes.  

Of course, the two are not unrelated: the fact that there’s nothing to read in a newspaper you’re no longer in the habit of buying.  Here are two graphs from the recent Digital News Report by the University of Canberra.

You’re part of these changing media consumption habits; and so am I.   We’ve all acculturated the idea of a default price of media content of zero.  Advertisers have followed our eyeballs online.  Ownership has concentrated, facilities have been rationalised, and the process is irreversible. Jack Williams of the Herald and Weekly Times used to say that the only truly free newspaper was a rich newspaper.  There aren’t any.  Newspapers in Australia are worseningly straitened.  So, no, they can barely afford to do more than cover the basics.  Newspapers in Australia are also driven by analytics.  So, yes, they mindlessly churn out footy hot takes and clickbait, for which some residual demand, amplified by sport radio, remains.  

The other change is that the volume of cricket has grown exponentially.  Test match cricket in this country is still guaranteed reasonably broad coverage.  But how to report Australian white ball  fixtures, the Big Bash League, the burgeoning women’s calendar?  Answer: you can’t, except during the occasional spasm of spare capacity.  Even Cricinfo covers the Sheffield Shield in only token fashion, first-class cricket being a second-class media citizen all over the world.

When I began writing about cricket, back in the Pleistocene, every metro daily had a designated cricket writer, and sent them on most every tour in addition to supporting them through the home season; many other journalists followed the seasons, writing cricket in summer, football in winter.  Some of the most prestigious names had been on the road for decades, such as Phil Wilkins in the Sydney Morning Herald, Peter McFarline in The Age, and Mike Coward of both. There remained ex-player columnists of repute like Bill O’Reilly and Ian Chappell; Peter Roebuck introduced ‘cricket writing’ to the sphere of cricket journalism; Mark Ray introduced cricket journalism to the genre of cricket photography. Their inheritors included the likes of Pat Smithers, Martin Blake, Malcolm Knox, and the perdurable Greg Baum, Robert Craddock and Malcolm Conn.

That still made us a smaller community than England, which seemed so lush and leisured by comparison.  I remember attending the 2005 dinner of England’s Cricket Writers Club with my countryman Alex Brown when we were both contributing to The Guardian.  There seemed hundreds of writers round scores of tables.  ‘We could hold our dinner round a table in a Chinese restaurant,’ said Alex, exaggerating only a little, and not for long.  Because our ranks have slimmed since.  Ex-player columns have almost disappeared. Crash and Baumy are all-sports columnists these days; Knoxy contributes on anything and everything as a side hustle to his fiction.  Dan Brettig, as Jim observes, is the Nine stable’s only dedicated cricket writer; the entirety of News Ltd, owner of two-thirds of Australia’s metro mastheads, is served by Dan Cherny and his predecessor Ben Horne (now part-time). 

They’re all excellent, by the way; the next generation, as it were, of the likes of Nine’s Tom Decent and AAP’s Scott Bailey, not to mention the Cricinfo pairing of Alex Malcolm and Andrew McGlashan, also set a high standard. But the days, as little as ten years ago, when The Australian were sending Pete Lalor, Wayne Smith, Andrew Faulkner and myself to Test matches are long gone. The national broadsheet not only no longer has a cricket writer; now than Pete and I have been deprogrammed from the cult, it no longer has a sport section to speak of, relying mainly on a rattle-bag of group copy.

One gain is a phenomenon undreamed-of when I began - that of media content generated by Cricket Australia.  Louis Cameron, Andrew Ramsey and Laura Jolly go well here.  But that, the colourful stylings of Geoff Lemon and Bharat Sundaresan besides, is really that. Not much for a sport that still preens as our premier national pastime.  Stretched over so much more cricket than of yore, it feels skinnier still.

That is unhealthy, for many reasons.  Fewer voices make for narrower range and shallower depth. Even if there are ever many more ways to access cricket, mainstream coverage of the sport now resides mainly in the hands of those either selling it, the broadcasters, or exploiting it, the gaming giants. With the best will in the world, that’s hardly a formula for independence and pluralism; rather does it conduce to news by press release and views by consensus. It is a don’t-rock-the-boat world even when that boat is listing disturbingly, and perhaps even sinking. 

The foregoing is the rationale for Cricket Et Al.  We’re live and ad-free; we’re doing this because we love cricket rather than because we’re flogging it to you or want you to bet on it; we’re also into Et Al, because man cannot live by cricket alone nor woman neither.  Above all, Pete and I are friends before we’re colleagues. Everything’s on a handshake; nothing’s been planned.  It will probably be a bit of a shambles, at least to start, because anything is that involves two dishevelled, middle-aged technophobes who think that a night discussing their top ten live albums is time well spent.  But Sam is calm and practical enough to help us out, we have a podcast to sustain, and the stylish artwork of Fisher Classics to inspire us. Choose from a range of subscription options as we couch surf the country, packing our own muesli and aeropress coffee, in the name of fun and cricket. Jim’s a subscriber already, by the way.