Cricket podcast: The state of the game today - listen here

The Times cricket writers' World XI

A meeting of four Times cricket correspondents, who between them have more than half a century of experience of covering the sport for this newspaper, is a pretty special gathering. In this comprehensive extract from the resulting podcast, Patrick Kidd gets the discussion under way by asking John Woodcock how the game today compares to the way it was when he became correspondent in 1954.

John Woodcock What I miss most is the tranquillity. It had a certain charm that it doesn't now. I'm worried that the game is being taken over by strength rather than deftness. I'm not sure that some of the lovely touch players I first watched would be anything like as effective now.

Then, all I had to do was write about cricket. The first political issue I had was whether it would be proper for Len Hutton as a professional to go to Australia as the captain. After that there was nothing until South Africa and apartheid a long time later. One simply wrote about what was going on on the field because it wasn't covered by television much, and not to any great extent except in this country on the radio.

PK Alan, 34 years later when you took over from John, cricket had been through several changes. How did you find the state of the game?

Alan Lee The first Test I did for The Times was the Australia Bicentenary Test in Sydney in 1988. Almost the first thing I had to write about was Chris Broad knocking his stumps down after he'd got out. That was the sort of thing we had got used to in an age of scrutiny of everything that went on on the field. My first tour was in 1976-77 as a freelance to India and I think that was the watershed, the last tour on which players and press intermingled without suspicion.

PK Christopher, when you took over in 1999, after a long period in journalism elsewhere, England were the worst side in the world.

Christopher Martin-Jenkins That's a good example of the exaggerations that take place as a result of the way that journalism has changed. These days it tends to be all disaster and tragedy on one hand and triumph and elation on the other. Of course the truth is somewhere in between.

The real change over my career is television and the intimate coverage it now gives. In the early days of televised cricket, if there was a dodgy umpiring decision they would have very quickly passed over it. The commentators certainly wouldn't have referred to it. Now it is analysed in the finest detail and it has altered the way people write about the game as well as the way the public see it.

PK Mike, as a former England captain, did you take on the role of correspondent with a different view?

Mike Atherton Certainly. I had a jaundiced view of the relationship between players and the media from my days as captain, but in fact, since I stopped playing, I've almost put aside all the memories that I had as a player. I now feel that I am two different people. The person who played the game, I can't really relate to in any way, shape or form. I think I've come in at a point when cricket is at a critical juncture: the Twenty20 revolution, the increasing amounts of money in the game. It is a fascinating time to be writing about the game.

PK Do you find that combining writing with broadcasting creates a time problem?

MA Well, Christopher did it and John Arlott did it. Doing television is slightly more time-consuming, but the newspaper deadlines have changed and that was something I was worried about, but so far it has proved to be all right.

AL You might not have got round to drinking quite as much wine as Arlott before writing your intro, Athers.

CMJ As a former captain, I wonder what your view was of that New Zealand incident with Ryan Sidebottom crashing into Grant Elliott and Paul Collingwood appealing for a run-out. I wonder what your attitude might have been if you were captain.

MA It would be different now, of course. At the time if I was a 25-year-old captain of England I might have done the same as Collingwood. When I took over there was Graham Gooch, Mike Gatting, there were some senior players around who would have put a hand on the shoulder of a young firebrand captain and said this is not on.

AL That incident reflected the way we have moved on in the way that different parts of the media report. Here we had pertinent questions asked and that would never have happened before the days when television set the agenda.

JW One would have written about it but one's readers wouldn't have had the benefit of seeing what happened. Therefore you would give your own impression. I saw the same thing happen once with Wally Grout and he didn't take the bails off.

AL But you wouldn't have led your piece off with the incident.

JW I doubt it, because I was never a proper journalist. I was really just a cricket writer.

MA In those days, you had unfettered access to the dressing-room.

JW Yes, but I never did go into the dressing-room because I didn't want to. The only occasion was when I was very ill in Australia in 1954-55. I didn't write about the Test at Adelaide and Len Hutton and Geoffrey Howard, the captain and manager, came to my hotel on their way to the ground on the second morning and said, “You're coming to watch the Test from the dressing-room”. And I said, “No I'm not”, but anyway they came to get me. I watched it all from the dressing-room and was privy to everything that happened. But one had sailed out with them, one got to know them so well and [they] became great friends, which didn't make it easy to be critical of them.

AL In the mid-1970s that was still encouraged. I remember my first Fleet Street boss, Reg Hayter, said I had to spend time in the dressing-room and Middlesex and Surrey welcomed me in. That all changed with Kerry Packer. It brought a new style of journalism, a new type of cricket and was the start of TV calling the shots.

MA With the advent of Botham as the first modern celebrity that led to change.

AL That brought the tabloid journalism that was becoming rife in football and other areas into cricket. Then we had misbehaviour on tour that previously went unreported getting into the papers, hence the distance that grew between players and press.

MA Players now all have agents, PR people and will often only speak if they are plugging a product.

AL Players don't want the press around in case things are reported. A lot of people knew that [Phil] Tufnell had issues on that tour of Australia under you, Athers, but it didn't get out.

MA That was a remarkable instance of something not being reported. It only came out when Tufnell did a piece himself for one of the Sunday newspapers when he spoke of being “institutionalised” for a night. When Duncan Fletcher asked the press to respect Marcus Trescothick's privacy in India when he had the first of his breakdowns, that privacy was respected until everyone got peeved when different explanations were offered for why Trescothick went home. You need to be fair both ways.

PK How will the game change with the Indian Premier League?

AL Inevitably, when you are talking big sums of money, things are going to be different. If we talk of Flintoff and Pietersen being offered one and a half million to play in the IPL, then with that will come all sorts of difficulties and restrictions. The game is going a long way from when I started.

JW Packer was a war between Packer and the establishment. That was entirely different from what is going on now, which is a sort of tidal wave. Packer was in it all for himself. Cricket benefited in some ways - he introduced day-night cricket and undoubtedly the players were underpaid before him - but at the same time he brutalised the game and did more harm than good. As for Twenty20 cricket, I live opposite a school and see them playing a type of Twenty20. They talk at the top level about there being certain strategies and subtlety but at every other level it's rubbish.

CMJ Twenty20 is the social fashion of the moment. As cricket it is more or less rubbish. I accept that it is exciting to see sixes hit and it gives bowlers new ways of finding slower balls, but I think [Matthew] Hoggard summed it up in The Times when he said my good balls get hit for six and my bad balls get wickets.

AL Had I been correspondent when Twenty20 was invented, I'm ashamed to say I'd have written that it would be a failure and the players wouldn't buy into it, but they did. The problem is overegging it. I feel we are going to play too much Twenty20.

MA I was quite positive about the first Twenty20 game that I saw. It brought in a different nature of crowd and was something to reinvigorate county cricket. Had I been a cricket administrator I'd have left it at that and wouldn't have promoted it to international cricket. Maybe that is naive, but it seemed to me that it was perfect for reinvigorating domestic cricket around the world. I am worried about its impact now that it has been taken to the highest level and the money that is on offer, which is out of kilter with what is offered to Test cricketers.

CMJ There is a simple answer and that is that those running the game need to show statesmanship and reward quality more highly than the flash fashion of the moment. We need Test-match prize-money to be considerably higher than for Twenty20 and the same in the County Championship, which needs at least £1million for the winning team.

AL There is no statesmanship at the ICC because they are being led by India, where the market is Twenty20, where rich people only want to put money into that form of cricket. This is taken to its most ludicrous extreme by Allen Stanford, where players are offered enough money to retire on for one game.

JW I don't know whether it can last.

AL There is a huge worry that the ICC is now in thrall to India and in awe of it and wants to take no decision that could upset India. The irony is that they were one of the last to be seduced by Twenty20 and virtually had to be persuaded to play.

MA I think the ICC has had its day. It doesn't have the moral authority after its decisions on Zimbabwe in the past two years and is riven by self-interest and compromise. That cannot be the best way to run an international game. We need to put in place as much of an independent board as possible.

PK Another thing under threat is the County Championship.

CMJ I have a great unease about the number of players who are non-England-qualified in it, but if you take a stronger line on that we have got to have a base of first-class cricket, two-innings cricket that is tough, high-quality and interesting and prepares players to play Test cricket.

MA It behoves the big clubs to produce their own players. If they cannot, English cricket is in trouble. As a corollary, if you are going to have the likes of Leicestershire, Northants, Derby, the only way they can be competitive is by having overseas or Kolpak players or cricketers from other counties. They don't produce enough of their own. So I'd question whether there should be 18 counties. I don't see why Leicester and Derby, essentially satellite towns of Nottingham, should have their own county. There are too many clubs and too much cricket. Reduce the number of sides and streamline the amount of cricket, and you'll have stronger cricket.

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