Cricket selling its soul to sponsors

Sydney, Dec.19 : The game of cricket continues to get increasingly commercialized as can be seen by the shock man of the match announcement following the second Test between Australia and New Zealand.

Australian opener David Warner''s unbeaten 123 was superb, but it was Doug Bracewell''s 6/40 and match figures of 9/60 that won the match for New Zealand, says the Sydney Morning Herald’s senior sports writer Rohan Connolly in an article.

He reveals that the judges gave Warner instead of Bracewell the man of the match gong, and the one entity deciding on that was chief sponsor Vodafone.

According to Connolly, the phone company had commandeered (with the blessing of Cricket Australia) an important honour and turned it into a marketing tool, an interactive cricket application effectively reducing the award to a popularity contest.

It was demeaning. But less surprising given a team sponsor that seems to have made an art form of making our Test cricketers look like a bunch of tools, says Connolly.

According to him, Cricket Australia should also be lampooned for allowing itself to collude in the tacky exercise.

While CA spokesman Peter Young was suitably sheepish about the debacle, the first public response attributed to Vodafone was an assurance that the reversion to tradition would not have had an impact on the popularity of the app.

This summer''s campaign, a series of player grabs from some concocted clowning around, is no less embarrassing.

There''s Ricky Ponting telling us about ''''never being satisfied with a good score, it''s got to be a big score''''. There''s the ubiquitous Bollinger bobbing up again, despite not having played a Test since he got belted out of the park in Adelaide more than a year ago. T

What Vodafone certainly and perhaps even CA seem to have trouble grasping is that you don''t automatically become a public favourite simply by donning a baggy green cap. You need some runs on the board.