Greed the only reason for Indian T20 game

Greed: an excessive desire to posses wealth, goods, or abstract things of value with the intention to keep it for one’s self.

In today’s modern world, it’s a very important concept considering it was greed that led to the collapse of Bear Sterns which was the prologue in what has become the Great Recession. Greed is also the salient factor that led Greece to borrow way more than it possessed on the back of the euro. As a result, after everyone realised how big the shit-pile actually was, their economy has contracted quicker than a bowl of ice cream in the Karoo and it’s a matter of when the country defaults, not if.

Greed (in the form of cheap credit) also led to the collapse of the New York stock exchange in 1929, and the Great Depression that followed. Greed has crippled South Africa’s public service, as officials use the levers of power to line their own pockets at the expense of everyone else but those within their cabal. Greed destroyed modern journalism, with companies buying newspapers and news sources not so they can feed the public what they should know, but what the public want to know.

Hence, in South Africa, our media culture is a never ending train trip of paranoid fear-mongering bad news, because it just sells better. The rise of greed is capitalism’s central character flaw, since more, more, more, lies at the heart of what capitalism is all about. If you aren’t growing in capitalism, you’re fucked.

So it was with little surprise, and with much scorn, that Cricket South Africa (CSA) and the BCCI (Board for the Control of Cricket in India) have decided, in their money-grubbing wisdom, to schedule a single T20 international between India and South Africa at the Wanderers on March 30.

Clearly, the fact that South Africa end their three Test tour of New Zealand (all back-to-back) days before and India would’ve just wrapped up their Asia Cup campaign, with the next meaningless edition of the Indian Premier League following on its heels, means little to the administrators. Screw the players, so long as we can make a quick buck. Flying from Cape Town to London for a quick coffee makes all the sense in the world as long as there is a fat cheque waiting at the table.

In retrospect, how is it that many cricket fans in South Africa were actually surprised when it emerged that several officials, including CSA CEO Gerald Majola, allegedly took way more money than they should’ve, and decided to not tell anyone? In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. CSA are beginning to pull this nonsense more regularly, and clearly the more time they hang around the BCCI (an organisation that has squandered more cricketing resources than the Chinese have clean air in their pursuit of economic growth), the more greedy they have become.

Majola (who should’ve done the honourable deed and fallen on his sword over the IPL bonuses) has stated that Jacques Kallis was to be honoured at the match, like Makhaya Ntini was in Durban against the same opposition. While Kallis definitely deserves such an honour, somehow it feels the idea was a secondary one versus filling the CSA coffers at the end of the season. Such a move isn’t surprising coming from the BCCI, and is becoming less surprising more and more from CSA.

Supposedly it’s also going to become an annual event.

“The point, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all its forms…greed for life, greed for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind…” Michael Douglas’s character Gordon Gekko said these words in the film Wall Street 25 years ago.

Now, more then ever, it is essential to recognise it in all its forms. Players and boards are richer then ever. At the same time, the essence of cricket, one of the most inspiring past times known to man due to the amount of inward self-discipline required to master it, is suffering from a shortage of that very notion, as it is short-changed for a McDonalds burger and an iPad.