Excluding Pakistanis would put Hundred at risk - no one will stand for it

When the story broke, it was in the realm of the hypothetical. This is the first year of private ownership in English cricket and the auction has not yet happened. Nonetheless, that the ECB felt the need to send letters to the new owners reveals an underlying concern about trends elsewhere, as the influence of the IPL owners has spread through other parts of the game. Once a domestic Indian competition only, the IPL is now much more than that.

When the IPL was established almost two decades ago now, the likely effects on Test and international cricket were clear (to me at least); that the increased choice for players and skewed incentives would likely lead to franchise and T20 cricket dominating in time, with Test and international cricket set to decline. The wider effects — the way that subcontinental politics could come to influence domestic cricket in other parts of the world — were harder to foresee.

That’s because in the early days of the IPL, franchises were losing money and the copycat tournaments took time to arise. It was only after successive television contracts for the IPL came to dwarf TV deals for international cricket — thus giving these owners huge surplus funds to spend elsewhere — and after other countries began to want to copy the IPL with franchised competitions of their own, that the opportunities for these owners in the broader cricket ecosystem began to grow.

Now, every franchise in South Africa’s domestic competition, for example, is run by IPL owners, as is all but one in the UAE’s ILT20. Those tentacles have also spread to competitions in the Caribbean and America and, last year, to the Hundred, when four of the nascent franchises were sold to those with IPL connections. The Big Bash League in Australia is considering private investment, and the opportunity may arise there soon enough.

All this coincided with other factors that have gradually changed the landscape: in 2008, the moderate Manmohan Singh was India’s prime minister; since 2014, with the ascent to power of Narendra Modi and the BJP, India has tacked politically to the right; there has been a gradual hardening of relations between India and Pakistan, following the terrorist attack on Indian soil in 2008; and there is an increasingly close nexus between the ruling party and the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), through the father-son relationship of Amit Shah, minister of home affairs, and Jay Shah, formerly the president of the BCCI and now the chairman of the ICC.

The effects of the coalescing of all these factors is plain to see. No player from Pakistan has competed in the IPL since Azhar Mahmood in 2015. Recently, amid worsening relations between India and Bangladesh, the Kolkata Knight Riders franchise was put under heavy political pressure to rip up the contract of Mustafizur Rahman, the only Bangladesh player in the IPL, and it duly obliged. Elsewhere, for example, no Pakistan player has played in South Africa’s franchised competition since its inception four years ago.

This, then, is the background to the concern about whether such considerations will be in play now that four Hundred franchises (Manchester, Leeds, Southampton and the Oval) are owned, or part-owned, by those with IPL connections, and whether the subcontinent’s geopolitical tensions will come to bear on the domestic game here. What other countries do with their domestic competitions is none of our business; it is a very different matter close to home.

It goes without saying that there should be no barrier to players of any nationality being signed in the Hundred. Though the competition stands apart from the rest of the domestic calendar as part privately owned now, it remains under the jurisdiction of the ECB and, independently of them, the game’s regulator and, obviously, is subject to the laws of the land.

Since the 1960s the identity of English domestic cricket has been synonymous with overseas players of all nationalities, in both the amateur and professional game. Ever since Khalid “Billy” Ibadulla signed for Warwickshire in the mid 1950s, many of Pakistan’s greatest players have enriched our game: Zaheer Abbas, Sadiq and Mushtaq Mohammad, Sarfraz Nawaz, Majid Khan, Imran Khan, Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis, Saqlain Mushtaq, Mushtaq Ahmed and many, many more have thrilled crowds here.

The complexities of potential arguments around the issue ahead are not hard to imagine, though. Overseas slots are limited and owners can reasonably argue the whys and wherefores of any selection, or non-selection, on cricketing grounds. The ECB’s statement implicitly recognised this when it said selection will be based “solely on cricketing performance, availability and the needs of each team”. There is a lot of scope there.

Ownership is complex, too, at the Hundred franchises. Who is calling the shots? At the Oval, for example, Surrey retain a majority 51 per cent stake, yet Reliance and the Ambani family, who are their co-owners, will likely run the cricket operations. Already the name has been rebranded to MI London, washing away any reference to Surrey or the Oval in an instant. A recent story in India put one of the Tech Titans (who co-own the Lord’s franchise) in the running to buy the Rajasthan Royals franchise in the IPL.

It is a wait-and-see situation, as the owners will be judged on actions as well as words. Should a clear trend emerge over time that suggests exclusion on grounds of, say, nationality, race or religion, it would be a fundamental threat for the competition: supporters, broadcasters, sponsors and, one imagines, players would not stand for it. So it is in the interests of owners, who have shelled out a considerable amount of money in the hope for a decent return, to ensure the competition is open to all — which is exactly what they, along with the ECB, were keen to stress on Tuesday.

So far, much of the comment around this story has understandably focused on the damaging potential for exclusion. But there is also the potential for inclusion, for the Hundred to chart a different path. Sport remains a vehicle for bringing people together and offering a welcoming hand across whatever divide exists.

I’m writing this column in Colombo where, almost to the week 30 years ago, in 1996, leading players from India and Pakistan — Sachin Tendulkar and Wasim Akram among them — came together to play in the same team in a show of solidarity for Sri Lanka, which was reeling from a bomb attack on the city. What if, in time, players from Pakistan and India, played together again? A naive and unrealistic hope maybe right now, but one worth clinging to.

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