The first question a fan might ask is which form of the game is the most important?  The mind says Test cricket must have primacy.  It is the form of the game that is the most challenging and stimulating to play, and the biggest test of a player’s overall cricket skills.  Hence the name “Test” cricket.  But Test cricket has no defined Championship, merely a rolling calendar of bi-lateral contests some of which are hardly contests. So the heart is not really willing to concede that Test cricket is the most important format.

OK, so then the World Cup and mini-World Cup a.k.a Champions Trophy is the premiere format, right?  Well the most recent World Cup was a fiasco of monumental proportions and the Champions Trophy has turned into a political football (pardon the cross-sport analogy) and has been punted to next year, as if somehow miraculously twelve months from now Pakistan will become any safer than it is today, and the international cricket calendar will suddenly align perfectly and a nice window will open up for the event to be contested.  In reality there is no such window, and BCCI has already announced that October 2009 is absolutely NOT OK for them and they will be hosting Australia, who are quickly replacing Pakistan as the most hated cricketing rivals for India, in another seven match ODI series that reeks of overkill in the name of a few dollars more.  Of course this begs the question then why did BCCI agree to allow the football to be punted to next October in the first place?  Maybe because that is how Indian politicians (who now dominate BCCI) react to any crisis.  Their motto is when there is doubt, conflict, or controversy,  postpone, adjourn and punt, and hope it all can be finessed or fudged away.  

Speaking of windows being opened we come to the latest version of the game, the quasi-international, quasi-national, but essentially local club level tournaments such as the ICL and IPL.  Until a couple of years ago if you expressed the opinion that a match between a Jaipur club team and a Kolkata club team would garner an audience of more than a dozen fans you would have been laughed off the stage.  But throw in a bit of Twenty20 hitting combined with short boundaries and shorter skirts, plus some big names from international cricket, and a healthy dash of marketing, whether it be the chintzy ICL marketing, or slightly more sophisticated Bollywood style marketing of the IPL, and you have a cricket circus and money spinner the likes of which Kerry Packer, the original circus master, could not have dreamed of. 

The most recent addition to this Three Ring Circus version of cricket, is the Texan billionaire of West Indian descent who has been throwing his money around his native Caribbean like Santa Claus.  In about a month or so, an English cricket team will play the “Stanford All-Stars”, a group of players from the West Indies, for a winner take all prize of Twenty million US Dollars.  Can there ever have been a more meaningless match played for more money than this?  This junket makes the jaunts to the desert oasis called Sharjah, where at least benefit purses of $50-100 thousand were provided to some deserving and needy retired players, seem almost uplifting and noble. 

So what is a cricket fan to do?  Pull his hair out in frustration? Go with the flow? Pick one format and follow it? Choose a player to follow him through all formats?  Or just pull a Cybil and put on a different personality for each different format?  

Cricket is at a cross roads, or more like at a traffic circle with about 8 different avenues leading off it.  Where the game ends up is anyone’s guess and the average cricket fan must feel like he or she is cursed by the old Chinese rebuke: “May you live in interesting times.”

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