Of the myriad disappoints humans come across in life, few linger as potently as the current vision of an old, beloved memory, the moment when nostalgia finds a real, physical release.
That old home that is now just a house. The bands that helped you grow up? They reform and to the injury of making you feel old, they add the insult of sounding older. And the films of your youth, back in those reboots, each containing within the admission that we cannot think anew, so we rehash. Is there not a central defeat in all this?
The point is made brilliantly, if with extreme morbidity, in one episode of “Black Mirror”, the darkly, only optionally comic and slightly futuristic, UK series.
A boyfriend dies tragically; his grief-stricken partner subscribes to a service that allows her to speak to him on the phone (his voice and manner rebuilt from his online footprint); a more expensive service allows her to recreate him physically. Soon enough she realises it is not, and never can be, the same.
See more: Check out all of the National's Masters Champions League preview coverage and reporting
If this is too trepidatious a way to think about the Masters Champions League (MCL) then it is only because on the other side of every nostalgic high awaits a dose of realism.
Admittedly, though, if ever a sport was a platform for the self-inflicting pain of nostalgia, then cricket is it. Nothing is ever as good as it once was. All golden ages are those that have passed. Greatness exists as a past tense.
So the MCL would seem ideally placed to benefit. Cricket has never taken a seniors circuit seriously other than isolated efforts, potted randomly across its space and history; there have been, for instance, plenty of India-Pakistan veteran series.
Suddenly over the last year, it has been alerted to its potential. The All-Stars matches in the United States in November were, in all the years of this sport, the first real high profile, well-organised attempts at establishing a regular if rolling circuit.
The MCL has taken the next step and it is a big one, a first attempt at establishing a calendar essentially for cricket’s veterans.
These are not just exhibition matches anymore; this is a league, which introduces instantly a degree of competition beyond what has gone before, and with more players and more teams: the MCL will tell us how much value cricket really puts into nostalgia.
And clearly, judging by how the MCL has come about, there is value. Six business franchises have bought into the idea and felt fine with spending over US$4 million (Dh14.6m) at a players’ auction.
On Monday the league also announced that it had secured global broadcast deals to beam the league live in a number of major cricket territories.
They already have a major broadcaster in place for the biggest market of them all – India.
That says that even in a fairly saturated market, with one form or another of cricket on uninterrupted almost through the year, broadcasters think this could work, or that it is at least a pie in which a finger can be tentatively dipped.
Everything else will depend on, as Paul Collingwood noted, the participants themselves.
“It’s up to us as masters cricketers to go out and entertain,” the Capricorn Commanders captain said on Monday, when asked if such a concept could work.
“We’re in the entertainment industry. I still think we’ve got a lot of skills to go out there and perform and entertain people. To get a group of guys together who have played fantastic cricket through their careers and to get them together now, in a great country, in these conditions, in a great stadium, these are exciting times, a new challenge.
“This is obviously the first year and hopefully there’s many years to come.”
Which takes us to what may well become the central dilemma for the league. This is not, in the truest sense of the concept, a masters’ league, not as it is done in other sports and not as long as it has active cricketers playing.
Forget whatever concerns the ICC (International Cricket Council) and its Full Members may have with that for now – that is also, to some degree, merely the enduring and preening self-importance of bureaucracy. Consider, instead, a matter that those involved have raised.
Everyone will be competitive there is no doubt, but imagine Saqlain Mushtaq bowling to Michael Carberry; the former stopped playing internationally in 2004 and competitively in 2008, while the latter is very much active.
That, and several similar match-ups, will not only be a challenge for teams, but in their potential for lopsided contests, one for the watchability of the league itself.
“I was chatting to Saqlain, who retired a long time back in 2004, but is still doing his coaching and bowling with kids,” pointed out Virender Sehwag.
“He is bowling fit and he is getting ready for the [first] game, but it is difficult particularly for these kinds of players to stay 20 overs and bowl four overs. That’s a difficult challenge.”
It might be, Sehwag said, that these guys have to miss a few games. Conversely, Collingwood is optimistic about his side because they have a number of currently active players.
Does this not dilute the MCL’s own premise? Is it a league for retired cricketers? Sure it is. But viewed from another angle, it is also in danger of becoming just another Twenty20 league for players not good enough for international cricket but not retired either.
And, with no disrespect intended, how many people are really reminiscing about the days of Richard Levi and Krishmar Santokie when, one, them days are not yet over and two, them days were not that great in the first place?
If the MCL can iron out this wrinkle, then there is the example of tennis to aspire to. A hugely successful and competitive veterans circuit, set up by Jimmy Connors, has been running since 1993.
But it was John McEnroe who transformed it and gave it meaning, unable even in retirement to restrain those fierce urges that created his legend.
He played up the reputation of “SuperBrat” and recreated his rivalries with Bjorn Borg and Connors around the world – and taking it around the globe might be something for the MCL to look at.
Others followed McEnroe’s lead, and the circuit found the precise, delicate balance it needed, between competitive and exhibition sport.
And tennis found that rubbing the likes of McEnroe and Borg and McEnroe and Connors together, even when they were past it, still generated a spark.
Not of the same intensity as before but a spark nonetheless. Another thing about humans – if you show them a spark, they will watch.
osamiuddin@thenational.ae
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