Death Of A Gentleman: A Response

Sam Collins and Jarrod Kimber’s Death Of A Gentleman (henceforth Death) is, in their own words, a story “about people, about power, about greed, and about the endless pursuit of more.” What started out as a story about Test Cricket became, in the process of its making, a story about the (mal)administration of the game. There is much in the story that will aggravate you if you are a nouveau riche admirer of the paradoxically nationalistic de-nationalization of the game via the IPL and its many imitators.

I watched the film as an unabashed supporter of the view that the point of the ICC is twofold. First, to run the game so that there are more competitive teams playing Test Cricket than before. Second, to invest in new countries and grow the game so that more people around the world learn about it and play it. The game needs to make money to serve these two ends and to ensure that players make a decent living (I don’t mean incomes comparable to those of top club footballers). This, in my view, sufficiently describes the budget and the purpose of the ICC.

The film wants to interrupt the relentless, totalizing logic of profit. The many sides of the argument are presented fairly. The film is at its best when it is allowing its informants to speak for themselves. It is at its most limited when engaged in its many allusions (cinematic or otherwise), especially the one about cricket being “a gentleman’s game”. It is debatable whether the ICC, in any of its forms, has ever been interested in running a gentleman’s game, except perhaps during the short interlude after India led a revolt against the veto. Has cricket (the sport in general) been the “gentleman’s game”? Most certainly. But I wonder if even this is exclusively true of cricket in the sense that Collins and Kimber use the word “Gentleman” (as opposed to “Gentleman” in Gentlemen vs Players which refers to a gendered social class). But that is a separate debate. For now, lets accept the trope about the “gentleman’s game”.