The Shashank Redemption - Why not make administrators our role models?

ROB STEEN in Cricinfo

By putting a stop to the brief reign of the Big Three, Shashank Manohar has managed to do something that defied criticism © Getty Images


I simply couldn't believe all the filth which came out of their mouths. All day long. And to anyone. It was hilarious but unrepeatable, and because I wanted them to treat me as one of the lads, I accepted it.

You really know how to control a match buddy. It's a f***ing joke.

Two snapshots of sport in 2016, both from Australia, the nation that, some might say, put the "tit" in competitive.

That first reverberant sound bite emerged last week from England wicketkeeper Sarah Taylor, semi-fondly reminiscing about her recent experiences as the first woman to play the highest grade of male club cricket for Northern Districts in Adelaide. Somewhat unsurprisingly, she discovered that her ears and sensibilities were not going to be spared. As Bryan Ferry so eloquently put it, "Boys will be boys will be boys-yoy-yoys…"

The second, decidedly unsound bite came during last month's Australian Open, when that gifted but very naughty overhead smasher Nick Kyrgios hit fresh heights in his impressive assault on John McEnroe's all-time record for sporting officials harangued, abused and ridiculed. Indeed, at the end of the match in question, Kyrgios approached James Keothavong, the latest object of his loathing, and told the British umpire he was "a terrible referee", thus achieving the notable double of being at once searingly honest and hopelessly wrong.

What distinguishes the verbals encountered by Taylor from those delivered by Kyrgios, of course, is that the former occurred during a match that was not covered by the all-seeing, almost-all-hearing broadcasters. What further unites them is that the rules of the respective games, at amateur and professional level alike, empower the enforcers to penalise the offensive offenders. It is in the now-histrionic court of public approval that things get messy.

Naturally, there are those - almost invariably the sort of folk who claim to have first-hand memories of the '60s but were already too old to join in the fun - who will assure you that bad behaviour during a sporting contest is a strictly late-20th-century curse, triggered by the advent of unseemly rewards and the TV-fuelled obsession with personalities and controversy. This is, of course, absolute rot.

For no justifiable reason, playing sport for a living - unlike acting or singing or dancing or painting - means not only having to behave yourself, but being seen to behave yourself.

Ask Colin McDonald. Roused by Mike Atherton's recent contention that Fred Trueman and Brian Statham were England's No. 1 all-time co-manipulators of the new cherry, the dogged former Australia opener recently reflected on the might of Frank "Typhoon" Tyson: "I will never forget the remarks made by my opening partner Jim Burke during the 1959 Adelaide Test after a Tyson bouncer: 'If you bowl another one of those I'll knock your block off with this bat.' 'Will yer?' replied Frank. Not wishing to enjoy being the recipient of a similar delivery, my pleasant rejoinder to Tyson on his way back to his mark was 'Well bowled.'"

In emailing those wincing reminiscences to the Times, McDonald perhaps unwittingly highlighted the preposterousness of what might best be termed the sporting contract - that timeless unwritten constitution that obliges professional sportsfolk to seek victory at any cost but behave like a pre-pubescent Mormon; the same unwritten constitution that simultaneously obliges our competitive artists to remember, above all, that it's only a blimmin' game.

For those who regard ungentlemanly conduct as perpetually indefensible, last week's Under-19 World Cup game between West Indies and Zimbabwe in Chittagong proffered much to get high and mighty about. With one over remaining and the Zimbabweans requiring a further three runs, Richard Ngarava was "mankaded" by Keemo Paul, sending waves of disgust rippling around the planet.

Indeed, it says all too much about cricket's self-deluding self-image that a photograph of the incident made its way onto the English sports pages even though not one of Blighty's nine national daily papers sent a correspondent to the tournament - thus missing the lethally precocious magnificence of Alzarri Shaheim Joseph, a skyscraping Antiguan beanpole who seems destined to put Kemar Roach and Jerome Taylor to shame by becoming the millennium's first great lean, mean Caribbean pace machine.

In principle, this column agrees wholeheartedly with Tony Cozier: the notion of being honour-bound to deliver a pre-emptive warning is more than a little stupefying. For one thing, it's not as if we expect batsmen to stick their hand up and inform the bowler they're about to suddenly take guard the other way round. For another, baseball, cricket's uppity younger brother, has always been more clear-cut: if a runner is caught straying off base while sneakily seeking a head start, he's out and that's it. No ethical posturing or accusations of moral bankruptcy here. In fact, such dismissals are so common they have their own incriminating name: "picked off".



If Ched Evans wins his appeal and is re-signed by Sheffield United, will he be greeted with apologies? © Getty Images


Should we be perturbed that teenagers such as Paul appear to be every bit as prepared as their elders and alleged betters to seek any legitimate advantage available rather than concern themselves with something so nebulous as "the spirit" of the game? The opposite conclusion should be drawn: their priority is to demonstrate that they are capable of making the leap from outstanding amateurs to - at the very least - competent professionals.

For no justifiable reason, playing sport for a living - unlike acting or singing or dancing or painting - means not only having to behave yourself, but being seen to behave yourself. On and off the park. Why rugby flankers or NFL tight ends - whose job is to disrupt the opposition by virtually any means necessary - should be expected to be angels beyond the touchline is utterly beyond this column's ken. Since successful athletes tend to peak in their late 20s, all this column can say is that when it was that age, it was about as mature as day-old cheddar. Then there are the stresses and strains of doing one's job in public, unaided by an editor or body double, never mind in the incessant glare of the octopus otherwise known as the media. Shouldn't compassion be more prevalent than self-righteous, hypocritical indignation?

This is not to say there are not intensely problematic cases. Nor decry the many Sheffield United FC fans - among them the Olympic heptathlon champion Jessica Ennis-Hill, whose name was removed from a stand at Bramall Lane after she, along with many others, threatened to end their loyalty should the club re-sign the convicted rapist Ched Evans. Nor fault Atlanta Falcons for releasing Michael Vick in 2009 after the quarterback had spent 21 months in jail for running a dogfighting ring. Vick, though, rediscovered his mojo by kind permission of the Philadelphia Eagles. As for Evans, who has always maintained his innocence, his case has been referred to the Court of Appeal. What happens if the verdict is reversed? Would United re-sign him? Would (anti) social media resound with apologies?

"I'm not paid to be a role model. I'm paid to wreak havoc on the basketball court." Thus, in a largely forgotten 1993 commercial, stated the NBA star Charles Barkley, hitting the nail squarely on the head. "Funny how big shots accept all the trappings of role model-dom - especially the residual commercial cash - before they renounce their broader responsibilities to society," retorted Phil Mushnick in the New York Post. Meanwhile, in Sports Illustrated, Barkley's fellow NBA alumnus Karl Malone jabbed hard: "Charles... I don't think it's your decision to make. We don't choose to be role models, we are chosen. Our only choice is whether to be a good role model or a bad one."

Begging to differ was the Boston College sociologist Michael Malec, former editor of theJournal of Sport and Social Issues. "In essence Barkley is correct. If you want to emulate what he does on court, you've got a wonderful model there. That doesn't necessarily mean he ought to be a model as a father or husband."

Time, then, for a radical rethink: if we really must have role models, should we not look to the administrators, the purported adults? Plainly, suggesting even a tiny proportion fit the bill is tantamount to proposing that the next best option is Robert Mugabe (the current No. 1 global dictator, according to Forbes magazine, just ahead of Bashar al-Assad). Fishing a good guy out of the alphabet soup containing such toxic ingredients as the ICC, IOC, IAAF and FIFA, is akin to locating a needle in the Pacific Ocean.

Tim Wigmore was spot on when he pointed out that, before India - with a little help from their equally greedy, yellow-bellied pals in Australia and England - started muscle-flexing in earnest, the ICC was scarcely a model of enlightened governance. On the other hand, quoting the questionable wit and dubious wisdom of Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama's former chief of staff ("Never let a serious crisis go to waste") was perhaps not the wisest choice.

Emanuel, after all, "seems committed", attested that zealous American scourge of bad sports Dave Zirin, "to win the current spirited competition as the most loathsome person in American political life". As mayor of Chicago, Emanuel demonstrated how the profits generated by spectator sport can distort social values. Having overseen the closure of 54 schools and six mental-health clinics under the justification of a "budgetary crisis", he handed over $100 million-plus to DePaul University for a new basketball arena.

What, then, of Shashank Manohar? In terminating the mercifully brief reign of the "Big Three" with suitable prejudice, he should be feted as the first major sporting administrator in recent memory to do something that defied criticism. Nonetheless, there are no fewer than three Ranji Trophy sides in his own state. As reader Jose P observed in a comment: "The diversity, and complexity of the well-entrenched multiple power centres within the BCCI structure, is a thousand gordian knots knotted into a more complex humongous knot."

Still, let's be generous and optimistic out there: anyone for the Shashank redemption?

Cricket - It's all in the angle

Jon Hotten in Cricinfo

How hard is it to deal with a ball that comes at you from "out of the umpire"?  © AFP

Enlarge

Imagine the scene: David Warner and Chris Gayle are invited to face up to the world's fastest female bowler. Their challenge is to do what they have done to many of the great male bowlers and hit the ball over the boundary. They not only fail to do so, they miss every ball in the over. Waiting in the pavilion, Kevin Pietersen refuses to come in rather than be embarrassed out in the middle.

As David Epstein describes in his wonderful book The Sports Gene, something roughly equivalent to the above did take place in baseball, and it may contain some valuable information for the development of bowlers.

Back in 2004, some of America's top MLB sluggers were invited to the annual Pepsi All-Star Softball game in California to face the fastest softball pitcher in the world, Team USA's Jennie Finch (a few months later, Finch would win an Olympic gold medal at the Athens games).

There are some key differences between baseball and softball. The softball itself is bigger, and the pitcher's mound is 43 feet from the batter's plate, as opposed to baseball's 60 feet six inches. Finch's fastball travelled at around 65mph, meaning that it arrived at the batter in around the same time that a 95mph fastball took to cover the longer distance. And to a top baseball slugger, a 95mph fastball is all part of the day job.

In practice at the All-Star game, Finch threw four pitches at Albert Pujols, a legendary hitter. He missed every one. During the game itself she struck out Padres outfielder Brian Giles and Mets catcher Mike Piazza.

Word spread. Finch took part in a TV show, This Week In Baseball, and struck out lots more top players. Then she met Barry Bonds, seven-time National League MVP, at a spring training camp. She threw 12 fastballs past him before he managed to connect, and he succeeded then only because Finch told Bonds where the pitch would go.

Another baseball legend, Alex Rodriguez, refused to face her at all.

So what was happening?

The key difference was the angle of Finch's delivery. She propelled the softball not in the slingy overarm style of the baseball pitcher but by raising her arm high above her head and then swinging violently downwards in a wide arc, eventually releasing the ball from somewhere around her knee.

A baseball, or a softball, travelling across their relevant distances and speeds, takes around 400 milliseconds to reach the plate. Because at least half of that time is required simply for the body to initiate any kind of muscular action, the batter is not simply watching the ball and then hitting it. There is a large measure of anticipation involved.

Over the course of a career, a baseball slugger has seen many thousands of fastballs, and in doing so has built up a kind of mental directory or template of what one looks like. Thus, as the pitcher's arm comes over, he already has lots of other occasions to compare it to, and the body reacts accordingly.

As Epstein points out, once the template is removed - as it was by the new angle of Finch's delivery - the batter is simply trying to produce an almost-impossible physical response.

Research has shown that the same is true in cricket - a batsman facing fast bowling is picking up a complex series of clues from the bowler's approach and delivery stride that aid in hitting the ball.

The other day in the Big Bash, Andre Russell was bowling to Luke Wright when the ball slipped from his hand and flew at shoulder level towards the batsman. Wright managed to lay his bat on it - actually it flew over the boundary - but his shot was a desperate swing, and his head was averted as he made contact.

The rarity of the beamer means that it doesn't fit into the pattern of the many thousands of other quick deliveries that Wright has faced up to, and so requires a different "template" to deal with. He was fortunate that Russell does not bowl at express pace. Bret Lee's accidental beamer to Shane Warne in the MCC game at Lord's last summer badly injured Warne's hand.

The information emanating from baseball isn't just about beamers and other fluke deliveries, though. It made me think about the low arm of Lasith Malinga, and how hard batsmen - especially those facing him for the first time - find it to pick up a ball they describe as "appearing from out of the umpire".

This is just a small change of angle compared to a baseball pro facing Jennie Finch, and yet it is hard for batsmen to have any sort of pattern recognition. Shaun Tait had a similar effect.

In a format like T20, where a handful of deliveries can have a big impact on an innings, it would be no surprise as the game develops to see bowlers introducing more radical changes of arm angle alongside other deceptions.

How do you play cricket without becoming a machine?

The challenge for most cricketers- and other sportsmen - is to retain their personality while getting better at the game

Ed Smith

September 26, 2012

Comments: 25 | Text size: A | A

	Afghanistan haven't yet had the joy ironed out of them by the cricket grind © Getty Images  Enlarge
Related Links Series/Tournaments: ICC World Twenty20 Teams: Afghanistan

"The challenge is to play cool without being cold." That was the assessment of the great jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. What he said of playing jazz is also true of playing cricket. A sportsman cannot be at the mercy of his moods and emotions. And yet sport becomes dull and lifeless when it is drained of warmth and spontaneity. Sportsmen must search for the right emotional bandwidth: they want enough coolness to feel in control, and yet sufficient rawness and authenticity to feel excitement.

There is no doubt where the Afghan cricket team lies on that continuum. They are joyful, volatile, emotional, unpredictable and deeply expressive. That is why they are wonderful to watch and have lit up this T20 World Cup, even without winning a game. Their performance against India was deeply moving because you could see how much it mattered to the Afghan players. Every six was joyous, every fielding error was agony.

These were not the learnt, mannered responses of professional sportsmen playing to the gallery. The Afghan cricketers have not yet learned how to hide their feelings. In time, they will become more controlled and clinical. But hopefully not too much. Indeed, we can all learn something from the spirit and the naturalness of the Afghan cricketers. Joy - even vulnerability - has its practical uses, too.

There is a counter argument to my view, of course. Some argue that sport is not about self-expression or enjoyment at all, but rather resilience and reliability under pressure. I've never seen this view better expressed than by Chad Harbach in his excellent novel about baseball, The Art of Fielding. (I make no apology for quoting it at length):

The making of a ballplayer: the production of brute efficiency out of natural genius […] This formed the paradox at the heart of baseball, or football, or any other sport […] Baseball was an art, but to excel at it you had to become a machine. It didn't matter how beautifully you performed sometimes, what you did on your best day, how many spectacular plays you made. You weren't a painter or a writer - you didn't work in private and discard your mistakes, and it wasn't just your masterpieces that counted. What mattered, as for any machine, was repeatability. Moments of inspiration were nothing compared to elimination of error […] Can you perform on demand, like a car, a furnace, a gun? Can you make that throw one hundred times out of a hundred? If it can't be a hundred, it had better be ninety-nine.

It is a wonderful passage, full of insight. But while I agree with many of the steps, I cannot follow all the way to Harbach's final conclusion. Sport is not quite about the elimination of human individuality, or the progress - if that is the right word - towards machine-like efficiency. True, a good player cannot be too vulnerable, he cannot allow his human weaknesses to surface so often that they undermine his performance.

But nor do the best sportsmen, I believe, allow themselves to lose touch completely with their human dimension. We must think carefully before trying to turn ourselves into machines: we may find we lose more than we gain. There is a balance to be struck: between naturalness and pragmatism, between voice and efficiency, between joy and control. Crucially, that balance is different for every player (and every team).

Inevitably there are outliers on that continuum - some players are exceptionally self-denying where others are extraordinarily natural. Rafael Nadal's game is based on the fearless elimination of error, the repeatability of relentlessness. In contrast, Roger Federer's is freer and more intuitive. Federer has said how he cannot bear to "play the same point twice". He needs to be trying something new, at least to some extent, in order to fully engage his talents.

	There is a balance to be struck: between naturalness and pragmatism, between voice and efficiency, between joy and control

It is a myth that sportsmen can simply choose to adopt the best strands from the personalities of other players. Instead, they must search for the right balance that suits them. The natural, laconic David Gower would not have benefited from trying to become more like the dedicated professional Graham Gooch - nor vice versa. The quest for self-improvement must be tempered by the retention of authenticity.

The same balance applies to teams as well as individuals. Every team has an instinctive personality, a natural temperament. The challenge is to develop and strengthen that collective personality without losing what makes it unique. Over decades as a rugby fan, I have noticed that France play best when they keep their innate flair but harness it within collective discipline. They are much less successful when they rely too much on flair or when they travel too far in the direction of self-denial. To win, France must be France - they cannot pretend to be England.

This logic has consequences for the way we think about getting better at sport. Development - for both the individual and the team - is only partly about honing skills and perfecting techniques. Perhaps the bigger part of the story is learning how to be yourself. This can become harder, not easier, with experience, which explains why many players do not improve with age, but regress. The more they try to become machines, the worse they become. That is why the art of coaching - yes, the art, not the science - is at least as much about understanding people as it is about imparting technical knowledge. What kind of player might he become, what kind of person?

Where does all this leave Afghan cricket? Yes, they need to become more consistent. Yes, they will need to become better at controlling their emotions. Yes, their techniques will have to become more polished and reliable.

But all those things must be developed within a context of remaining true to themselves. They should not lose sight of the spirit and innocence that makes them such a compelling team to watch, and such a dangerous team to play against. In the lovely phrase of ESPNcricinfo writer Sharda Ugra, they "bring to a somewhat tired global community the fresh, bracing air of the mountains".

Afghanistan's cricketers are so refreshing because they aren't like everyone else. It would be a shame if they merely become part of the crowd.

What's so wrong with negative fields anyway?

When England set cautious fields they are called tactically naïve; but they win

Ed Smith

July 4, 2012

A month ago, I had one of the most interesting conversations I've ever had about sport. It was in a tiny restaurant in Paris with the brilliant football writer Simon Kuper. The subject was how Spain became the world's dominant football culture.

Spain have now won Euro 2008, the 2010 World Cup and Euro 2012. They are also currently world champions at Under-19 and U-17 levels. The Spanish way - high skill, brilliant passing, and little focus on physical size or brutality - has mastered the world. Not only are Spain serial winners, they have also set football's philosophical agenda.

Our conversation in Paris began with football, but I realised afterwards that the question applied to all sports. How do games evolve? Can original thinkers change their sports forever? Is intelligence - or better still, insight - the most underused resource in sport? Can you think your way to success?

Kuper explained to me that the origins of modern football began with a single inspired insight by the superb Dutch player and coach Johan Cruyff. Like many great ideas it sounds obvious but it is actually profound. The pass, that is what really matters in football. The precision, the perfection of the pass. Everything else - the arm-waving, the brave running around, the passionate sweat and tears - is peripheral. Being better at passing is what wins football matches.

Prompted by Cruyff, Barcelona set up La Masia academy to educate players about the pass. When you watch Spain mesmerise opponents, you are watching an idea brought to life. There is a bloodline that runs from Cruyff - via Pep Guardiola - to Xavi, Iniesta and Fàbregas, the champions of Europe, champions of the world. One idea changed the game forever. Spanish dominance is not just based on skill. It is founded on brains.

Yet the most interesting part of the story is the resistance to Spain's success, the refusal to follow the logic that has created it. Throughout Euro 2012, English pundits continued to accuse Spain of being "boring". The English old guard even condemned Spain's selection and tactics. How risk-averse, how stupid of Spain not to play a centre forward at all? Well, Spain won the final 4-0, without playing a centre forward for much of the game. Their first goal was brilliantly set up by Fàbregas, a midfielder picked instead of a regular centre forward. Stupid Spain, boring Spain? Behind the insult, observe the anger. When a pack of conventional thinkers are confused, they lash out at what they don't understand.

We see the same criticisms thrown around in cricket, the same reluctance to accept that new thinking might lead to better results. Here is an example. Pundits often ridicule captains for setting "negative" fields. The assumption is that it is always a "positive" move (i.e. that it will lead to more wickets) to have more slips and fewer fielders saving the single.

But what is positive, what is negative?

When I was a player, I often liked batting against very "positive" fields. Because I liked to bat at a reasonable tempo, feeling that the scoreboard was ticking along. Many players have a natural tempo, a pace of scoring that makes them feel they are in control. In a perfect world, of course, batsmen should be able to defend for hours without worrying about the scoring rate. But most batsmen are human beings.

	I would much rather bat against an egotistical captain trying to impress the crowd than an unobtrusive captain trying to stop me batting in the way that suited me

That's why I often found it easier to score runs against flashy, "positive" captains, who were always trying to set eye-catching "aggressive" fields. While they were arranging catchers in apparently original groupings, runs flowed from the bat. I would much rather bat against an egotistical captain trying to impress the crowd than an unobtrusive captain trying to stop me batting in the way that suited me.

Now I've retired, I can reveal an effective and underused tactic: stop people scoring (whatever the type of match) and you'll probably get them out. This has become even more relevant to Test cricket during the era of T20 cricket. Batsmen have become increasingly used to hitting boundaries in Test cricket because T20 has changed the way people feel about their natural scoring rate. That's why Andrew Strauss is unafraid to have more fielders saving one and fewer catchers in Test cricket.

When England set cautious fields, they too are called "tactically naïve". And they win. When Spain don't play a centre forward, they are called boring and tactically naïve. And they win.

It is time to revisit some definitions. What are tactics but tools for winning sports matches? And since when was it naïve to play to your strengths?

A case study of thinking and winning is the story of the Oakland Athletics in baseball. Thanks to the book, and now film, Moneyball, it is has become one of the famous stories in sport. As with Cruyff's insight about the pass, the over-performance of the Oakland A's began with a single insight. The best way to approach winning a baseball match is not thinking about scoring runs. It is to focus on getting on base. A run is usually the by-product of getting on base. Runs are hard to predict; getting on base is much easier to assess and calculate. So the Athletics focused on the tractable, controllable parts of the match, ignoring the headline-grabbing end-product.

In 2002 the Athletics unveiled their new strategy. Guess what: the pack of baseball pundits and insiders didn't like it. They accused the Athletics of wrong-headedness, hubris and over-intellectualism. Undeterred, Oakland won a record 103 matches out of 162.

Conventional wisdom moves at a glacial pace because people become attached to ideas that are no longer relevant. Military historians say that generals are always preparing to fight the war that has just ended. So it is in sport.

Boring Spain, naïve England, wrong-headed Oakland? I prefer the idea that sport is always evolving, with new ideas driving the pace of change.

Former England, Kent and Middlesex batsman Ed Smith's new book, Luck - What It Means and Why It Matters, is out now. His Twitter feed is here

In the Premier League the endgame of rampant capitalism is being played out

An unsustainable system where the rich win and the poor go to the wall. We see it in English football – and beyond

• 
• • Jonathan Freedland
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 18 October 2011 21.30 BST
  • larger | smaller

Illustration by Belle Mellor
It's a newspaper convention that the front and back pages are a world apart, as if news and sport inhabit two different spheres with little to say to each other. Indeed, it used to be an article of faith that "sport and politics don't mix", with the former no more than a form of escapism from the latter. And yet the Occupy Wall Street and London Stock Exchange protests that led the weekend news bulletins might not be entirely unrelated to the Premier League results that closed them. For the current state of our football sheds a rather revealing light on the current state of both our politics and our economy. Or, as one sage of the sport puts it: "As ever, the national game reflects the nation's times."
What that reflection says is that Britain, or England, has become the home of a turbo-capitalism that leaves even the land of the let-it-rip free market – the United States – for dust. If capitalism is often described metaphorically as a race in which the richest always win, football has turned that metaphor into an all too literal reality.
Let's take as our text a series of reports written by the sage just quoted, namely the Guardian's David Conn, who has carved a unique niche investigating the politics and commercialisation of football. Conn elicited a candid admission from the new American owners of Liverpool Football Club, who confessed that part of the lure of buying a stake in what they called the "EPL" – the English Premier League – was that they get to keep all the money they make, rather than having to share it as they would have to under the – their phrase – "very socialistic" rules that operate in US sport. In other words, England has become a magnet for those drawn to behave in a way they couldn't get away with at home.
Start with first principles. Of course, inequality is built into sport: some people are simply stronger or faster than others. What makes sport compelling is watching closely matched individuals or teams compete to come out on top.
But a different kind of inequality matters too: money. A rich club can buy up all the best players and win every time. That's the story of today's Premier League, as super-flush Manchester United sweep all before them, challenged only by local rivals Manchester City – now endowed by an oil billionaire – and Chelsea, funded to the hilt by a Russian oligarch. This, then, becomes a different kind of competition, a battle not of skill, pace and temperament but of pounds, shillings and pence. The clearest manifestation of that came at the close of the transfer window, when the biggest teams splashed out millions to buy the top talent. It means the half-dozen top sides, already at a different level from the rest, soared even higher towards the stratosphere and out of reach – in just the same way that the super-rich float ever further away from everyone else, the 1% in a different league from the 99%, as the Occupy protesters would put it.
Nothing you can do about that, says dogmatic capitalism. You can no more stop the richest teams dominating football than you can prevent the fastest sprinter winning gold. That's the force of the market, all but a law of nature.
Except along comes American sport to show us another way. First, there are those rules on revenue-sharing that so frustrated Liverpool's new owners. All the money that, say, a baseball team makes – from tickets, TV rights and merchandise – is taxed by the major league that runs the sport and spread around the other clubs, so that the richest cannot dwarf the rest. That isn't because the titans of Major League Baseball have read too much Marx. It's because they understand that their sport is worth nothing if it stops being a real competition, if only a handful of the wealthiest teams ever have a chance of winning. Redistributing the wealth around the league ensures their sport doesn't become boring. It does not level the playing field, but it comes very close.
The proof is in the stats so beloved of sporting obsessives. Over the past 19 seasons, 12 different teams have won baseball's biggest prize. In the 19 seasons since the Premier League was created, only four teams have won; Manchester United alone have won the title 12 of those 19 times.
It's not just revenue-sharing that ensures true competition. In American football and basketball a salary cap applies, limiting how much each club can pay in wages and thereby preventing the richest teams making their domination permanent by snapping up all the best players. (A "luxury tax" performs a similar function in baseball.) In the same spirit, teams in all major US sports submit to a "draft", in which they take turns picking from a pool of newly eligible players, so that the equivalent of Chelsea or Manchester City can't gobble up all the fresh talent, but instead have to let the Blackburns or Wigans have a go.
Put like that, it seems fantastical. Who can imagine Old Trafford voluntarily snaffling less of the pie, so that clubs in smaller cities with smaller grounds, and therefore weaker gate receipts, get a look in? And yet English football used to work just like that. When the founders of the Football League gathered in a Manchester hotel in 1888, they fretted over how they might ensure that a fixture between, say, Derby County and Everton remained a real contest. They agreed the home side should give a proportion of its takings to the visitors, a system that held firm till 1983.
Clubs shared the TV money when it came too, spreading it around all 92 league clubs. But the big teams always resented subsidising the minnows; indeed, the Premier League was formed out of the biggest 20 clubs' express desire to keep Rupert Murdoch's millions for themselves. That TV money is at least partly spread throughout the Premier League, but now there are noises about ending even that small nod towards wealth-sharing, so that the biggest half-dozen teams can keep every penny for themselves.
Not for the first time, it's fallen to Europe to act. Upcoming Uefa "financial fair play" rules will require teams to live within their earnings, which should put an end to the sugar daddy handouts of Man City and Chelsea. But that 2014 change will push clubs to maximise their revenue, which is bound, in turn, to mean even less sharing. Football will still be a game determined by who has most money.
There are three consequences of this strange gulf between our rules and those across the Atlantic. First, football's most storied clubs have become attractive to foreign tycoons who sniff a licence to print money, unrestricted. Second, we've established a model that is inherently unsustainable, involving colossal debts that cripple all those without a billionaire to bail them out. Since 1992, league clubs and one Premier League team – Portsmouth – have fallen insolvent 55 times. Third, we risk killing the golden goose, turning an activity that should be thrilling into a non-contest whose outcome is all but preordained.
Hmm, a system that sees our biggest names falling to leveraged takeovers – think Kraft's buy-up of Cadbury – thereby selling off the crown jewels of our collective culture in the name of a rampant capitalism that is both unsustainable and ultimately joyless. That doesn't just sound like the state of the national game, that sounds like the state of the nation.