C.L.R. James’s classic book Beyond a Boundary portrayed, arguably better than any before or since, the relation between cricket and anti-colonialism in the Caribbean. One wonders how the Trinidadian Marxist critic, known to his close friends as Nello (a diminutive of his middle name, Lionel), would have reacted to Mello, the mascot of the Cricket World Cup (CWC), held for the first time in the Caribbean this year.1 Mello—who, according to the International Cricket Council (ICC), which governs world cricket, embodied “a lifestyle rather than a particular country or single culture”—was to be found inside all the stadiums at “Mello Zones,” where branded refreshments, merchandise, and entertainments were all on offer.
In a 2004 discussion of James’s work in these pages, Hilary McD. Beckles reminded us that Caribbean cricket has long involved much more than sport.2 It has reflected both the region’s colonial history and its postcolonial aspirations; indeed, cricket’s political potential was most profoundly demonstrated in the West Indies, which first competed in a test match in 1928. Roughly from the 1930s to the late 1980s, cricket represented an avenue of social mobility in a rigid social order, and its relative autonomy as a form of popular culture allowed things to be said in the language and literature of the game that colonial authorities could not fully censor.
But in today’s phase of globalization, commodified culture, and growing inequality, Caribbean cricket’s meaning and political potency seem unclear. As the journalist and broadcaster Darcus Howe reflected, “The collapse of our team since [the 1980s] mirrors the breakdown of Caribbean society.”
“The pride we felt in the post-independence years has disappeared,” Howe continued, adding that his teenage godson, who lives in Trinidad, doesn’t play the game. “Cricket gives him no sense of racial identity in the way it would have done 20 years ago,” he said.3
These questions came to a head during 47 days in March and April, as the various Caribbean countries that compose most of the West Indian “imagined cricketing community”— Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, St. Kitts and St. Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago—co-hosted the CWC. With 16 teams competing and nine countries co-hosting, it was the biggest CWC ever.
The West Indies, represented in the CWC by a single team popularly known as the Windies, was awarded host status in 1998. In the following years, CWC promoters championed the event as an opportunity to boost Caribbean economic development and deepen the region’s integration—in addition to featuring a rousing series of games. Since the quadrennial CWC began in 1975, the Windies have won it twice, including the first competition.4 But this was in the 1970s and 1980s, when they were the force to be reckoned with in world cricket. According to rankings compiled before the 2007 games began, the Windies were languishing in eighth position.
Commentators like Howe have identified many reasons for cricket’s decline in the Caribbean, including the changing attitudes of youth, incompetent cricket management, greedy players, inter-island rivalry, cable television showcasing the alternative attractions of more U.S.-based professional sports like baseball and basketball, and economic recession.
Some hoped staging the CWC in the Caribbean might determine whether its decline is permanent or cyclical. How the West Indian team would do on its own soil has been pondered ever since 1998. Would the traditional carnival atmosphere of so-called calypso cricket return and lift the team to victory? History was not on their side. No host nation playing in its own country has ever won the CWC, and this year was no exception. The Windies won only one of their six games in the Super Eight knockout stage, confirming pretournament rankings. By the end, the Windies’ Australian coach had resigned, and team captain Brian Lara, the “Prince of Port-of-Spain,” had announced his retirement. The tournament favorite, Australia, completed a remarkable winning run of 29 World Cup matches to take the trophy for the fourth time (and the third time in succession).
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Few teams can ever aspire to “punch above their weight” in terms of population size and GDP so consistently as the West Indies once did. Yet professional cricket has changed greatly since the Caribbean’s heyday. In the last 20 years, the ICC has increasingly integrated the sport into a global sport-media-advertising-tourism complex, in which the aim is not merely to sell all manner of commercial products—from sponsors’ goods and services to branded merchandise—but also to showcase the attractions of host cities and regions to global television audiences and thus help to attract tourism and investment.5
Nowhere was this more apparent than at the CWC 2007 opening ceremony, which took place at the newly built Trelawny Stadium (which cost $30 million) in Jamaica’s Montego Bay. The $2 million, three-hour media spectacle had the theme “Caribbean Energy” and attempted to reflect the Caribbean’s diverse cultures and passion for cricket. The event featured more than 2,000 singers and dancers, and the music ranged from calypso and ragga to dancehall reggae and soca, with performances from, among others, Sean Paul, Buju Banton, and Jimmy Cliff. Some of the game’s all-time Caribbean greats, including Gary Sobers, gave speeches, generating nostalgia for the good old days of West Indian cricket.
Yet the game at the highest level is now almost unimaginable without commodified relations of cultural production, involving a focus on celebrity players, branded mascots like Mello, event-related merchandise, and entertainment. This is both an attempt to retain an audience and to generate revenues supposedly required to develop the sport. As a media spectacle, the CWC has changed its format to accommodate television and other media requirements, with the ICC selling broadcasting rights underwritten by a major contract with the Global Cricket Corporation (GCC, co-owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation).
In this economically driven relationship, the media require exclusive coverage, and advertisers and sponsors require guarantees against being ambushed by competitors’ guerrilla marketing. Hence CWC officials tightly enforced restrictions on unlicensed merchandise and the consumption of refreshments from nonsponsors. In 2000 GCC agreed to pay $550 million for TV, Internet, and sponsorship rights for both the 2003 and 2007 CWCs and other ICC competitions through 2007. It then sold packages to other media companies around the world, including several Murdoch-owned TV channels in New Zealand, Australia, and the United Kingdom. As the ICC’s official “commercial partner,” GCC also sold sponsorship packages for the event to “global partners” Pepsi-Cola, Hutch (an Indian mobile phone company), Hero Honda (an Indian motorcycle and scooter company), and LG electronics, as well as to official “sponsors” Indian Oil, Cable & Wireless, Visa, Scotia Bank, Johnnie Walker, and Red Stripe. With Guinness also enjoying “pouring rights” at all World Cup venues, the drinks conglomerate Diageo had three brands firmly associated with the event.6
Before the event, officials predicted it would attract a TV audience of 2 billion in 200 countries.7 If accurate (and this is a major if), this would place the CWC on par with the Winter Olympics and the Commonwealth Games in terms of scale, scope, and reach.8 At the time of writing, it is too early to say if this audience size was actually accomplished. Certainly crowds in the stadiums were less then anticipated. Ali Bacher, organizer of the 2003 Cricket World Cup, told Reuters that high ticket prices and strict regulations had led to small crowds at many of the 2007 matches.
With the typical involvement of several multinational sponsors and the exclusion of many locals from the event, it seemed a form of economic recolonization was taking place. Tickets for the England-Ireland match in Guyana, for example, cost the local equivalent of a month’s wages. “When the overseas visitors didn’t come because India got knocked out, we saw the problem,” Bacher said. “Ideally, you want the local people to come and enjoy the World Cup, but most of them can’t afford it.” It was “a pity that more of them could not get to see the matches which were being played in their own backyard,” Bacher said.9
Through TV coverage, the CWC presents the host region on a world stage and promotes it as a tourist destination. But mounting good programming has been one of the main restrictions on increasing commercial income for cricket in the Caribbean. Even with nonstop coverage, an event so long—the Super Eight competition extended the event by almost a month, in an attempt to maximize the price of exclusive broadcasting and sponsorship rights—risks creating apathy toward day-to-day outcomes. Shortly before the final game, ICC chief executive Malcolm Speed admitted to the BBC that the CWC had been too long. “We’ll seek to reduce this 47-day World Cup by seven or 10 days, and hopefully we’ll get it down to somewhere between five and six weeks next time.”10
In addition, coverage of events in developing nations is always prone to negative responses when something goes wrong; indeed, maintaining a good image can be difficult, as the much publicized death of the Pakistani team’s coach made clear.11 This, together with the restrictions on crowd behavior—banning big baskets of food, large radios, musical instruments, flags, and nonsponsors’ alcohol from the stadiums—affected the atmosphere and contributed to poor attendance, which in turn led to dismissive headlines in the U.K. and Caribbean media: “World Cup Killjoys?” “Weep for the Ghosts of Calypsos Past in This Lifeless Forum,” and “Everything’s Banned at the Accountancy World Cup.”12 Inflexible holiday packages for tourists contributed to fewer numbers arriving from the United Kingdom, and the surprise early exits of India and Pakistan meant that fewer fans from those countries made the journey as well.
The infrastructure and facilities built for the event appeared to many people as more a form of monumentalism than a contribution to the communities where they were built. The building or refurbishment of 12 stadiums at a cost estimated at between $250 million and $300 million—equal to or more than the entire cost of staging the previous CWC in 2003—raised familiar questions about the likely impact these facilities will have for nonelite use after the competition. Another estimated $200 million to $250 million was spent on hotels, roads, transport, security, and infrastructure. (Still, in Antigua, officials at the new Sir Vivian Richards Cricket Ground suggested that it might be used by visiting Major League Baseball teams, contradicting the stated aim of developing cricket.)13
Much of the funding—and, indeed, the labor—to build these stadiums came from abroad. Taiwan put money into Warner Park, built for $8 million, on St. Kitts. The Indian government contributed to building Guyana’s Providence Stadium, constructed by the Indian firm Shapoorji Paloonji Company at a cost of $25 million. Money and labor from China helped build stands and pavilions in Grenada and Jamaica, as well as Antigua’s stadium, and most funding for the reconstruction of Queen’s Park Stadium in Grenada came from China. It was reported in 2006 that the Chinese workers associated with the project had “worked night and day to play ‘catch-up’ ” after the disruption caused by Hurricane Ivan.14 The Trinidad and Tobago Express reported in February that disgruntled Chinese immigrant workers, contracted through the Shanghai Construction Group to work on several projects, including the refurbishment of Queen’s Park Oval, protested over their 12-hour workdays and monthly wages of less than $450 per month.15
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So why—despite the unpredictability surrounding major international sports mega-events and the West Indian team’s decline—did the organizers promote the CWC? The arguments for hosting it, as with most sports mega-events today, were articulated in terms of economic and social benefits, whether in terms of the boost that sports victories can bring to the population, or the supposed benefits to the community of enhanced sports facilities.
The warm word legacy figured heavily in official CWC 2007 discourse. Several expected legacies were declared long before a single ball was bowled. Politicians and organizers spoke of a more unified region, an improved security system, and even “a net profit in the tens of millions.” More concretely, they predicted new industries, infrastructure, and jobs; public revenues from fees, taxes, and tourist spending; and improved facilities for local communities. The prime minister of Antigua said $28 million would be spent on infrastructural improvements and $300 million in total across the region on the new and refurbished stadiums. About 100,000 tourists, spending up to $250 million, were expected. Owen Arthur, prime minister of Barbados, anticipated growth in financial services, insurance, real estate, and most significantly, tourism, which he said would grow from 8.5% to 50% of the Barbadian economy within five years.
Moreover, Caricom leaders thought they had found an opportunity through the CWC to further kick-start the process of regional integration, which has proceeded slowly. The host countries (along with Suriname and Belize) looked forward to greater cross-border cooperation as a precursor to a trade bloc similar to the European Union. To this end, they created a special four-month “single domestic state” visa to facilitate easy travel between the host nations. The region’s leaders hoped this would lead to closer security ties, airline amalgamation, regional stock exchanges, and a currency union as a means of better competing in the global economy. An economic boon would come, they said, through expanding tourism after the “circus has left town.”
This strategy of hosting events, sporting and otherwise, has become popular among “semi-peripheral” or emerging countries because it offers two prospects difficult to obtain any other way: the ability to respond to external pressures for global competitiveness (at the risk of heightening internal inequalities) and a chance to reinforce collective identity (at the risk of damaging international reputation if things go wrong and the foreign media negatively report the event). The organizing committee saw hosting the CWC as exactly such an opportunity.
But research on sports mega-events throughout the world has demonstrated that the benefits of staging them tend to be overestimated and the costs underestimated.16 It is too soon to conclude definitively about the CWC 2007’s impact across these diverse areas, but it is clear that the organizers’ objectives were beset by the same contradictions that have confronted many previous hosts of events this big. Before the opening ceremonies, stadium construction proceeded behind schedule, hotel prices soared, and ticket sales were sluggish. Although the temporary single domestic space came into operation, easing travel between the islands, it was not without incident; applicants from Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, for example, had to submit applications for a visa to the Trinidad and Tobago embassy in New Delhi, India.17
Greater security was evident, including support from Interpol and intelligence officers from the United Kingdom, South Africa, France, Canada, and Australia. But the tighter arrangements surrounding the stadiums and the clampdown on guerrilla marketing contributed to the antiseptic feel to many of the matches. The hoped-for return to the heyday of “calypso cricket”—played with an exuberance to excite the already passionate fans—barely surfaced, and the Windies’ failure to compete beyond the Super Eight stage was a great disappointment.
It is often the case with mega-events that those distinctive characteristics of a sports culture in one place are either legislated away or become a refashioned part of the media-tourist spectacle. And, as nearly always, the number of attendees was much less than heralded. The media televised scenes of empty seats in the modern and refurbished cricket stadiums, and reported the impact that overzealous security and inadequate accommodations had on the CWC “experience.” All of this reinforced the impression that, as one dissenter put it, the CWC’s most likely legacy will be one of debt.18
John Horne teaches the sociology of sport and leisure in the School of Education at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He is the author of Sport in Consumer Culture (Palgrave, 2006) and co-edited (with Wolfram Manzenreiter) Sports Mega-Events (Blackwell, 2006).
- The event’s official name was the International Cricket Council Cricket World Cup West Indies 2007, or ICC CWC WI 2007. I will use CWC 2007 hereafter.
- Hilary McD. Beckles, “The Caribbean, Cricket and C.L.R. James,” NACLA Report on the Americas 37, no. 5 (2004): 19–22.
- Darcus Howe et al., “The Power and the Glory,” The Observer, March 4, 2007, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329729923-103977,00.html.
- The Women’s Cricket World Cup first took place in 1973, although it was not until 1993 that a West Indian team participated in that competition. They have never finished higher than fifth place.
- John Nauright uses a phrase similar to “global sport-media-advertising-tourism complex” in “Global Games: Culture, Political Economy, and Sport in the Globalized World of the Twenty-First Century,” Third World Quarterly 25, no. 7 (2004): 1325–36.
- In December 2006, ICC’s television rights for the next eight years were sold to ESPN-Star, a joint venture between Murdoch’s Star network and ESPN for an estimated $1.1 billion, twice the amount paid for the previous period. This figure is considerably less than the $ 1.5 billion paid by Murdoch’s Sky Sports for the three-year rights to broadcast live English Premier League soccer, but by cricketing standards it is a major development. The question remains: How will the companies involved attempt to recoup their outlay for securing exclusivity?
- Chris Hawkes, Cricket World Cup 2007 Guide (London: Carlton, 2007), p. 8.
- According to Maurice Roche, major international sports mega-events can be classified by scale, scope, and reach. First-order events include the Summer Olympic Games and the FIFA Football World Cup Finals. Next are the second-order games like the Winter Olympics, the UEFA football championships, and the Track and Field World Championships. Finally, third-order events include the Asian and Pan-American games, the African Cup of Nations, and the America’s Cup sailing event. The CWC remains outside the first order, although serious consideration of scheduling some of the CWC 2007 matches in the United States, Canada, or Bermuda indicates the ICC’s ambition to spread the game to larger, more lucrative markets. Maurice Roche, Mega-Events and Modernity (London: Routledge, 2000).
- Reuters, “Bacher’s Blast at World Cup Organisers,” April 26, 2007, http://in.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=sportsNews&storyI….
- “Speed Admits World Cup Too Long,” April 26, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/ sport1/hi/cricket/6597869.stm.
- See Paul Dimeo and Joyce Kay, “Major Sports Events: Image Projection and the Problems of ‘Semi-Periphery’: A Case Study of the 1996 South Asia Cricket World Cup,” Third World Quarterly 25, no. 7 (2004): 1263–76.
- The Nation, Barbados, May 31, 2006; The Guardian, April 5, 2007; TimesOnline, March 29, 2007.
- Agence France Presse, “Speed Has Grounds for World Cup Optimism,” April 30, 2007, http://uk.sports.yahoo.com/30042007/3/speed-grounds-world-cup- optimism.html.
- Michelle McDonald, “Grenada Gets WC Venue Thumbs-Up,” May 9, 2006, http://caribbeancricket.com/news/xxxx/xx/xx/2062.
- “Chinese Protest Over Short Pay, Job Loss,” Trinidad and Tobago Express, February 9, 2007.
- See the contributions to John Horne and Wolfram Manzenreiter, eds., Sports Mega-Events (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).
- Martin Williamson, “World Cup Visas Could Be ‘Total Debacle,’ ” January 9, 2007, http://content-uk.cricinfo.com/wc2007/content/story/275895.html; Cricinfo staff, “Pakistan Fans Facing Visa Problems for World Cup,” January 25, 2007 http://content-uk.cricinfo.com/ci/content/story/277636.html. Similarly, New Zealand applicants had to send their requests for the visa to offices in Sydney, Australia.
- Susan Gordon, “Cricket World Cup 2007 Financing Unclear—JCC Businesses Predict ‘Legacy of Debt,” Pan Caribbean News, January 17, 2007, www.gopancaribbean.com/pancaribbean.dti?page=news&pan=1&id=1148. This is also the conclusion of a recent report from the IMF, which says, “The net effect of the CWC could well be negative in light of its heavy fiscal costs and the already high public debt burdens in the region.” Quoted in Sir Ronald Sanders, “Cricket, IMF and Windies Pride,” April 20, 2007, www.bbc.co.uk/caribbean/news/story/
2007/04/070420_20april07.shtml.
