Cricket: Well… It’s just not cricket anymore!

Location: Mohali, India

The standard of sportsmanship and gentlemanly conduct within cricket has historically been so high that the expression “It’s just not cricket” was used to describe unfair behaviour or something not in keeping with proper decorum. The game of Cricket being the high bar to which not just other sports but general social etiquette were judged.

But how the times they have changed, with the gentleman's game the prime proof of such. As more and more money flowed into sport, and sportsmen and women became celebrities in their own right, the pressure to win for your team and country or to earn the big bucks through prize money and endorsements has seen standards of sportsmanship and fair play dropping across all disciplines. And Cricket in particular has had more than its fair shares of controversies and bad PR over the last decade. As the International Cricket Board (ICC) has embraced television revenues and celebrity culture, led by the dangerously powerful BCCI (Board of Cricket Control India), player power and an abundance of global short form competitions are threatening the future of the gentleman's' game.

Players will follow the money and in the case of Cricket that money is in Twenty20.

Every test playing nation now has a Twenty20 domestic league enticing players from around the world to sign short term deals for big money. In the case of the IPL (Indian Premier League), the biggest of these events, an international quality player can expect to earn $800000 for six weeks work, which is more than twice the basic yearly salary for representing a top test nation.

The bigger issue though, is the continuous controversies within the game and the disintegration of the principles on which the sport was built.

•          The Green Shirts of Pakistan have been ripped apart by accusations of ball tampering, convictions in match fixing, forfeited test matches and in fighting between players and selectors.
•          The England Cricket Board, have never been far from controversy, including accepting millions of pounds from Texan Allen Stanford for their part in the ill fated Stanford Super Series, Stanford has since been found guilty of operating a £4.4 billion pound Ponzi Scheme in the US.
•       The Sri Lankan national side recently ended a pay dispute, centering, according the Sri Lanka Cricket Board on the players demands for a pay rise, the players claiming that they were in fact asked to reduce their salaries, eventually agreed to remain on wages of $32000 a month, with the Sri Lankan sports minister eager to point out that their salary was still roughly 400 times that of a college graduate entering government employment in Jakarta.

And In the rock and roll atmosphere of the IPL, which had its own spot fixing scandal in 2012, there have been more confrontations and suspensions than ever before in a sport that prides itself on adhering to the “spirit of the game”.

Yesterday Australia suspended 4 of their players for one game, following failure to produce a report on improvements the team could make following disastrous defeats in the opening two tests in India. While ex-players leapt to criticise the coaching staff for what they saw as a blatant over reaction. It was left to one of the four involved to showcase the difficult position international sides find themselves in.

The teams Vice-Captain Shane Watson on his way back to Australia for the birth of his first child, released a statement where he questioned the punishment enforced and mentioned plans to consider his future in the game. The money available in domestic competitions all over the world making it very easy to take a stand against the Australian Cricket Board. The moral of the story, be careful angering your work force when they can make alot more money elsewhere.

The ICC no doubt believes the sport to be heading in the right direction, but past players see no connection between what cricket will look like in 20 years and the sport they grew up playing. An institution that once set the high bar for sporting decency now looks sheepishly up not just at the bar but at most other sporting associations.

And while we can’t be exactly sure what it will all lead to, one thing is for sure, it’s just not cricket.

Football: Ferguson's tactics shown red card

Location: Manchester, England

In a contest between two of the best sides in Europe, the team from England opted to change their natural tempo and game mentality to combat their opponents’ strengths, now where have we seen that before?

When Chelsea beat Barcelona and Bayern Munich over the space of a month to win last year’s Champions League, they either “parked the team bus in front of the goal and made no attempt to get on the ball and play” or “they showed incredible backs to wall spirit and a never say die attitude”. Whichever of these views is closest to your own is likely to indicate how enamored you are with Chelsea Football club. And while Manchester Uniteds' tactical set-up and overall performance last night was nowhere near as defensive as that of Chelsea last year, the comparison is fair, the ideology the same, simply put, you play to win the game.

Not to go out in a blaze of glory, or with you head held high or any other cliché, but to win the game. All that matters is what teams name is in the hat (or correctly put, in one of those little balls, in a glass bowl, in Nyon, Switzerland ) for the next round, and you adopt the tactics that give you the best chance of being that team. For last nights' encounter, Sir Alex Ferguson moved his side away from what they do best, to what he thought they could do well enough. While selecting a starting line-up bereft of some of his best attacking players, his aim was that by adopting a more cautious approach it would cause Madrid to move away from a style of play that they had perfected in the past week.

Real Madrid came into this match, off the back of two victories against Barcelona where across 180 minutes of football they averaged just 34% of the possession yet had more attempts on goal (28 – 21), and almost 3 times as many attempts on target (14 – 5).

In those games, Madrid found a shape that was difficult to penetrate, and turned small bursts of possession into attempts on goal. Ferguson publicly branded them “the best counter attacking team in the world” and it was his fear of their ability with open space in front of them led him to leave Rooney and Kagawa on the bench, opting instead for his own counter attacking spearheads, Welbeck and Nani.

In regard to the aforementioned Nani, it this blogs position that while controversial, the red card decision was not the reason Real Madrid won the game. Being down to 10 men made it very difficult for Man Utd to attack in numbers once they had fallen 2-1 behind, but they conceded those goals due to the introduction of Luka Modric and good Madrid play rather than a numerical disadvantage. In fact it seems like the biggest affect the red card had on the game was the cover that it provided for Sir Alex Fergusons team selection and tactics. United are sure to cling to  the ridiculous notion that the final 35 minutes were likely to follow in the pattern of the first 55, and stories passed down through generations of Manchester United fans will paint Nani as a Franz Beckenbauer type defensive maestro certain to have single handedly repelled every Madrid attack had he remained on the pitch.

Sir Alex Ferguson settled on a tactical approach that owed more to minimising his opponents strengths than maximising those of his own side. An approach that he felt gave his side the best chance of winning the game. The only thing is, and it’s a kind of an important thing, they lost the game. Whether different tactics would have led to a different result is impossible to know, but it’s a question that he, his staff and Manchester United fans will be asking themselves. When you win, you don’t have to worry about those sorts of things, just ask Chelsea.

Tennis: As the Big Four are set to reunite, what chance everyone else?

Location: Acapulco, Mexico

After more than 7 months out of action with tendinitis in his knee, Rafael Nadal has taken just 30 days to re-affirm not just his position with-in the big four but his status as favourite for the French Open. His 6-0 6-2 demolition of current world no.4 David Ferrer at the Mexican Open in Acapulco has drawn attention once more to the enormous gulf between the elite and the very very good.

Now while the road ahead for Nadal will only get tougher, particularly on his knees, given the upcoming hard court stops at Indian Wells and Miami, his clay court prowess and incredible matchplay ethic will quickly return him to his place among a big four like no other in tennis history. And so what of that next level, the players just below that top 4, Ferrer, Del Potro, Tsonga and Berdych etc. who seem all to often to be competing in a separate tournament where success is a quarter final spot and consolidation of your ranking. Looking at Grand Slam record books, it would seem that for these fantastically talented sportsmen, theirs is simply a story of bad timing.

Lukas Rusol showed in defeating Nadal at Wimbledon last year that the best players in the world don’t necessarily have free passes to the quarter finals of the most important events in men’s professional tennis. This has been easily forgotten given the incredible run of the top players in the game at the highest level they compete. Over the last 7 years, Nadal has failed to make it to the last eight of a Grand Slam tournament he entered on just 3 occasions. Novak Djokovic holds the same record of 25 quarter final appearances from his last 28 major tournaments. If Roger Federer fails to advance to the quarters of one this year’s slams it will be the first time in 9 years that has happened. Andy Murray is also putting together an impressive streak of being around at the business end of slams that looks set to continue a while longer.

But what’s new I’m sure you ask, the best players get to the final stages and win the big tournaments, duh!

That is certainly true when we look at grand slam winners in past decades. 

In the 1980's 24 of the 40 Grand Slam events were won by 4 players (Lendl, Wilander, McEnroe, Becker), in the 1990's incredibly, the same number, 24 Grand Slams won by either Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi, Jim Courier or Stefan Edberg. In the 2000's it took just 3 players (Federer, Nadal, Agassi) to capture that magical number of 24 Grand Slams in that 10 year period. But even with this level of dominance by a select few, that still leaves 16 grand slams over a ten year period for the best of the rest.

But what is different about this era from those before is a lack of sporadic success from those players that make up the rest of the top 20 or 30 players in the world. Noticeably absent from the past decade is the player who while not a consistent threat to the upper echelons of the game, put it all together for 2 weeks of his career to achieve something spectacular. In the future we may see Juan Martin Del Porto in this category though he still remains likely to win further.

So far in the 2010's, with 13 Grand Slam tournaments in the books, we have 4 different champions, now obviously 33% of this decades Grand Slams represents a small sample size I agree. However when you assess that 30 of the last 32 Majors were won by just 3 men the picture is clearer. Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic have exerted a dominance never seen before, and while Federer is still in the mix up in the near future, his replacement, on a list of the 3 players most likely to win the majority of the next 32 majors is set in stone. Having waited a considerable amount of time for Andy Murray to step up from perennial semi-finalist to continuous championship contender, he is there now.

So are David Ferrer, Jo Wilfred Tsonga and Thomas Berdych ever likely to follow in the footsteps of Richard Krajicek, Thomas Johansson or Gaston Gaudio and burst through the heavily guarded gates of the grand slam champion’s pavilion for one burst of unforgettable success? This blog doubts it, Federer’s slow decline and Nadals' ailing body may open those gates slightly, but Djokovic, Murray and a fast developing crop of youngsters are ready to slam them shut again.