Death of a Gentleman

Some four years in the making, this is a powerful, if somewhat scattershot indictment of the governance of international cricket. With even some of its staunchest supporters calling for four-day matches, Test cricket is clearly approaching a crossroads. But journalists Sam Collins and Jarrod Kimber suggest that the direction currently being plotted by the International Cricket Council (ICC) is ruinous in the extreme, as it benefits India and its servile acolytes England and Australia above everyone else. According to Kimber and Collins, the villains of the piece are Giles Clarke, the chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), and N Srinivasan, the former president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) who is now the chairman of the ICC and the managing director of India Cements, which owns the Chennai Super Kings, a team in the Indian Premier League that pays such huge sums to the world's best players that they would rather play Twenty20 on the subcontinent than represent their countries in the far less lucrative Test arena. Collins and Kimber seek to capture the allure of Test cricket by following late-blooming Aussie debutant Ed Cowan. But their primary focus is on the game's politics and the decisions being taken behind closed doors in Dubai that seem designed to hobble a sport that has never been more popular. Ultimately, the pair fail to nail the conspiracy they suspect the ICC, ECB and BCCI are perpetrating, but they ask enough awkward questions to disconcert all cricket lovers.