The Marylebone Cricket Club? More Like the Marylebone Commercial Corporation

The MCC's Twenty20 proposals shamelessly advance the wealthier city elite ahead of the smaller first-class counties and risk a schism in the game
If you ever wonder about the prime role of the MCC, its own website is eager to remind you. "Today, MCC's role remains as relevant as ever," it says. "From guarding the game's Laws to safeguarding its Spirit, and from promoting cricket to young people to looking after Lord's, MCC is committed to the good of the game." Noble sentiments – sentiments that are also promoted, the website reminds us, "in the annual Cowdrey Lecture - part of the Club's worldwide campaign to ensure that a great game is always played in a truly sportsmanlike way." Archbishop Desmond Tutu gave the lecture in 2008 and his condemnation, albeit in passing, of Robert Mugabe "terrorizing his own people" helped to set the agenda for their cricket team's demotion. But that was then. This is now. The MCC will be forever mistrusted as putting commercial ambitions ahead of communal aspirations after its links with a proposed Twenty20 format for the English Premier League that would create a schism in English county cricket, one which shamelessly advances the wealthier city elite ahead of the smaller first-class counties. The MCC, under its Australian chief executive, Keith Bradshaw, is increasingly the Marylebone Cricket Club no longer but the Marylebone Commercial Corporation. With every year its paternalist behavior gains a harder, commercial edge. Much of this might well be necessary, advantageous even. But the day that the MCC gets the balance wrong is the day that it loses its proud claim to be the custodian of the game. It becomes just another company jostling for commercial gain. It is perilously close to that today. Bradshaw was just one of two men who put his name to the breakaway EPL proposals, along with David Stewart, the chairman of Surrey. The leaked proposal will be formally considered at an ECB board meeting on Tuesday and has no chance of adoption. But it is naïve at best, disingenuous at worst, for Bradshaw to present his advocacy of a nine-team EPL as just an independent opinion, and one not necessarily shared by the MCC. Bradshaw owes his position as an independent director of the England and Wales Cricket Board to the fact that he nominated by the MCC, not because of his impressive CV as a partner in a firm of leading accountants. Any proposal he makes is automatically assumed to be MCC policy, yet he has not even discussed the matter within the MCC committee. If he has an independent view, he might be well qualified to make it, but it is questionable whether he is entitled. His job is to dutifully explain the MCC's position. He has come close to misusing his role in a way that risks undermining the image of the MCC forever. Furthermore, Bradshaw's favored world of franchises and shareholder profits – however appealing some may find it - is directly opposed to the view held by Giles Clarke, the elected chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board, who believes that all 18 counties must have a role in the future. It will be widely interpreted – however unfairly – as an MCC challenge to the ECB's authority to run the game. It might not be intended as a rebellion – the ECB did invite suggestions after all - but it sure as hell sets the seeds for it. If bodies don't constantly develop they atrophy, but the MCC's ambition to regain its influence in the world game has a hint of overreaching ambition. It is possible for the MCC to present itself as an independent moral voice, it is equally possible for it to become a successful commercial entity. It is virtually impossible for it to do both. The Bill Gates Foundation is an impressive body, yet it has yet to persuade many of the honorable intentions of Microsoft. Interestingly, Archbishop Tutu's Cowdrey Lecture finished with these words: "Cricket reminds us that we are made for togetherness. We are made as those who are going to have to turn this world and make it something that is more compassionate, more caring, more loving, more gentle, and you here are part of God's team plan, collaborators to help God bring about a realization of God's dream. Could we have any higher aspiration, not only for cricket but for the whole of life as we humans experience it in community, that we live our lives in the Spirit of Cricket?" It hardly fits with Bradshaw's vision of a nine-club franchise. Presumably, he had nodded off at the time.