If you’ve ever come across a 1939 novel called The Amazing Test Match Crime, you’ll know it’s one of the most bonkers cricket books ever written. It is a spy-parody-caper, in which a cartel of super criminals called things like The Professor and Sawn-off Carlo plan an extravagant international heist during a crucial Ashes game. It was the first thing that came to my mind when the news emerged last week that the England and Wales Cricket Board had met with a shadowy organisation called X.
X, as it turns out, are the secretive R&D arm of Google, the shiny, happy Doodle-makers who exist to make the world a better place and definitely aren’t a frighteningly powerful mega-corporation that knows every bad thing you’ve ever done online. The details of the meeting remain classified, but it is thought the discussion involved using new technology to prevent rain interrupting games – perhaps through the repurposing of the stratospheric balloons that X have been developing to bring wifi to remote rural areas. (See? They’re definitely the goodies.)
It is, on the face of it, an uneven match-up. X are helping to bring us driverless cars and have worked out how to store renewable energy in salt; the ECB invented The Hundred. X creates technologies “that aim to improve the lives of millions, even billions, of people”, which suggests they may not have been completely accurately briefed on the current viewing figures for English cricket.
Some may even wonder whether the ECB got the meeting under a false premise. Is it possible that X saw their trademark applications for the Leeds Superchargers and the Trent Rockets and assumed they were experimental technology patents?
Still, it shows a charming ambition on the part of English cricket I can’t help but applaud. Maybe it is because I can’t quite muster the cynicism that others feel towards the much-maligned Hundred or because the game’s growing self-confidence is quaintly out of step with its reality, like Buzz Lightyear’s self-appointed mission to save the galaxy from the Emperor Zurg. England’s director of cricket, Ashley Giles, recently said that reinventing the sport for a new generation was not about “what people want but what people need”, which at a time of impending Brexit and climate catastrophes seems a tad like overreach.
As it is, I’m enjoying cricket’s reinvention as a sport that is prepared to travel to the very edge of its comfort zone (and beyond!). After all, plenty of us who sucked lemons at the notion of Twenty20 are now addicted to its fizzy brand of pop cricket. I haven’t forgotten that when I came to the game in the 1990s there were many fans who still sighed tragically over the invention of “pyjama” cricket, a full two decades after it had proved quite a good idea.
For more than a century, our game has clung to tradition with a tenacity that would have impressed a few cardinals at the Vatican. Now, after 100 years as a byword for a notional golden age of conservatism, it has fallen hard for modernity and it’s keen to make up for all those wasted years. Weaning the game off tobacco sponsorship was the work of decades, but it seems to have taken minutes to rebrand the bowling speedometer as “Delivery Speed” and convince Uber Eats to put their logo on it. Or to turn drinks breaks into hydration intervals.
Administrators can no longer afford merely to be in touch with the zeitgeist – they need to be ahead of it, tapping into new audiences and potential markets with the help of a panel of futurists and, possibly, Ian Ward in a VR headset. Cricketing shibboleths are being discarded: even Test matches are no longer assured of their once-irrefutable status as the most important form of the game. Ed Smith, England’s chairman of selectors, has argued that Test cricket should stop concerning itself with mainstream popularity and let itself become the collector’s vinyl to T20’s Spotify playlist.
So it is no great surprise that the ECB are seeking out Google’s top boffins. They have already made it clear in the language they use that they’re keen observers of Silicon Valley, even if it’s just the box set version. Last month, the ECB chief executive, Tom Harrison, shrugged off criticisms of The Hundred with the words: “It’s the same every time there is something that disrupts.” I like to imagine he immediately headed home on a Lime scooter to watch a TED talk.
While it is fun to imagine how the meeting might have progressed, it’s even more exciting to consider where it might lead. What could the Googlefication of cricket ultimately look like? I picture the years skipping by in a Russell T Davies montage. 2020: the ECB moves its offices into the underground tunnels beneath Lord’s and begins work on an algorithm that will help spectators select the optimum time to go for a pee break. 2022: MCC announces that 3D-printed bats are now legalised for use. 2025: Chris Gaffaney is the first umpire to volunteer for a bionic ball-tracking implant.
Honestly, I am impressed the ECB even got through X’s front door (if they have a door; it’s probably a space elevator). According to its mission statement, the company exists to have a “10x impact on the world’s most intractable problems”.
It’s mind-boggling to think that these now include the fact that it sometimes rains when there’s a cricket match on. Especially when other sports – rugby, tennis – have solved the same issue with the staggeringly 21st-century invention of the roof.
