Entrepreneur, Visionary, Genius

With Blinkers...

    Far be it for me to pass judgement on anyone I don’t know and, in this instance, have met only once, briefly, so I won’t. Besides, he is, by popular consent, charming and personable – and he’s much cleverer than me and more successful than I have ever dreamed of being.

    Manoj Badale is the majority owner of the Rajasthan Royal. He is a businessman and venture capitalist, and evidently a brilliant one. In 2008 he assembled a consortium to buy the Jaipur Franchise in the IPL for a fraction of what other teams were sold for.

    The word ‘controversial’ appears often in literature around that period but, in this instance, you can be pretty sure that it means Badale was at least one step ahead of his rivals and several steps ahead of the BCCI, which didn’t go down well. Then Badale signed Shane Warne as captain and they won the inaugural tournament. The man knows what he’s doing and what he’s talking about.

    This conflict was well illustrated again last week when Badale warned everyone, with admirable honesty, that we should expect much less Test cricket to be played in the future (no breaking news there) but also claimed that he enjoyed the longer formats of the game.

    “It is a difficult one for me because Test cricket is what you grow up on as a fan and I haven't missed the first day at Lord's for however many years, it is still my preferred format”, he said on a BBC podcast.  “But it is not about me, it is about what the 10-15-year-olds in India and across the world are thinking”.

    And there you have it. The future of the game is in the hands of children, not grown-up billionaires making an awful lot of money from T20 Franchise cricket. Badale has a theory about how to save Test cricket: “We can make it …more of an event.  We should have it at the same time every year, played between a small set of nations that can actually afford it and Lord's becomes like a Wimbledon, an event that is the diary”.

    Guess that rules South Africa out. A fortnight of Test cricket each year, presumably between England, Australia and India. Badale is a straight-talker, even if his interest in the matter is heavily vested.

    Badale was born in India but went to Cambridge University where he studied economics. He spends more time in the UK than India and knows where and when to be seen. Note that it is the “first day at Lord’s” which he never misses, not “the Lord’s Test match.” It is not, perhaps, Test cricket which he enjoys, the contest, it is the ‘occasion.’

    Entrepreneurs like Badale are prepared to take risks and invest heavily, but they have only one measurement scale for success and it appears on the bottom line. His group have, after all, invested in the Paarl Franchise in the SA20 tournament and do not expect to see a significant return on that investment for at least five years. But it is all about money.

    Badale cannot be faulted for this view. He may sound a little condescending about countries which cannot ‘afford’ Test cricket, but he has an economics degree from Cambridge and an understandable philosophy which prescribes that operating a business for many decades which doesn’t make money, doesn’t make sense. If Test cricket is one of those businesses, do away with it.

    It would be intriguing, genuinely, to hear more about Badale’s ‘annual fortnight’ of Test cricket. How would that work? If he was prepared to expand it to, say, 21 days, then perhaps England, India and Australia could play each other in a Triangular. And if he was prepared to push it to a month, perhaps a fourth team could be invited once every three or four years. But doubling the Badale Test window might be asking a bit much.

    There are other scales by which to measure Test cricket’s success, but they are more subjective and less clinical than cash. ‘Enjoyment’, ‘pride’ and long-term ‘satisfaction’ are difficult to quantify. So is the concept that success in the Test match arena contributes to the making of successful T20 cricketers. All those qualities that players and coaches talk about learning in first-class and Test cricket are hard to stack up against hundreds of millions of dollars.

    When Brendon McCullum was appointed England’s Test coach he spoke about the importance of ‘having fun’. He said it was central to his coaching philosophy, which sounded a bit whacky. Nonetheless, playing upbeat music on a ghetto-blaster during (reduced) net sessions and having plenty of golf time led to England transforming from dull also-rans to world-beaters in six months.

    Then, a few days ago, McCullum was interviewed on SEN Radio about the likelihood of the world’s best players being signed by IPL Franchises on multi-year, multi-tournament deals with their countries having to ‘loan’ them back for World Cups and, less likely, bilateral series.

    “That’s inevitable,” McCullum said. “They’re not going to turn down huge contracts for more money and less work. What we need to do is make sure the players want to play for their countries, to remember how much they enjoy playing international cricket, how much fun they have doing that.” The man is a bloody genius.

    Like Badale, McCullum is several steps ahead of the game. Although I suspect that McCullum, unlike Badale, is able to call upon a variety of scales with which to measure the success of the game. He did, after all, play first-class and Test cricket in Dunedin in eight degrees with 180 spectators. And loved it.