Cricket365

Musing The Week's Media

Friday 9th May 2008

With Friends Like These...
The wire was alive this week with stories of England players turning down the Indian Premier League in order to fight the good fight for Queen and country.

Indeed the Press Association deemed each 'revelation' of an IPL offer so newsworthy that snaps were sent through as soon as the news broke.

The quotes were much the same, with Ravi Bopara, Sajid Mahmood and Luke Wright all saying how tempting those bundles of cash were but vowing to push on in their bids to crack the England side.

'Saj Mahmood?' you ask. Indeed, we were equally flummoxed, until his claim was later blown out of the water by Lancashire:

"Sajid has never been offered any form of Indian Premier League contract," a statement said.

"He had a vague inquiry a couple of months ago, which was never pursued further."

Nothing like your own club to shoot you down...

If It's Good Enough For Sunny....
Cricket365 are often asked: wouldn't you rather do something positive rather than sitting in your ivory tower sneering at the outside world through some self-satisfied media lens? What self-respecting fan of the game chooses such a course?

Guardian, May 7: Sunil Gavaskar has resigned as chairman of the International Cricket Council's cricket committee after being forced to accept that his media work created a conflict of interest. "It is clear I cannot combine both roles and therefore I am relinquishing the chair," Gavaskar said in a statement released by the ICC.

What Does It All Mean (Median and Mode)?
Michael Vaughan appeared in grateful mood after new Times correspondent Michael Atherton gave a (to us) disappointingly uncritical interview last week.

He said of the MCC amendment on bat manufacture: "I have got one of Atherton's old bats and if he was around today he would be averaging in the mid-40s rather than 39."

Not for the first time, this demonstrated an inability to see the implications of a media platitude.

As Gus Fraser wryly pointed out in the Independent, "The downside of Vaughan's assessment is that most of England's batting line-up, who take pride in telling everyone that they average over 40, would only be averaging in the high thirties if they were playing a decade or so ago."

Fraser rather generously omitted to add that the captain's average (42.47) would be the hardest hit by this re-calculation - putting Vaughan's legacy at a John Crawley sort of level.

And The Winner Is...
Free-sheet Sport is this week only too happy to reveal twice, in stories four pages apart, that the Sports Industry Awards has named it 'the UK's best sports magazine'.

Nice to be valued and so forth of course, but the SIA describes its mission "to recognise and reward the best the sport business has to offer in marketing, PR, sponsorship, new media, publishing, advertising and design."

Journalism is not an influential element, hence Sport's success: their 'coverage' embraces all six of those tenets in a 'mail order catalogue plus interviews' approach that promotes big business and flawed stars unquestioningly.

Perhaps the closest they come to upsetting an interviewee is not in asking awkward questions but in asking any at all.

This week's cover story on Ryan Sidebottom makes clear that the bowler hates the media spotlight, but new England kit manufacturer adidas were obviously persuasive at the recent launch.