Money talks, but taking Saudi sportswashing cash would be putrid self-interest

Cricket has been getting excited. The Indian Premier League’s on; the Ashes impend. But that’s not the cause of the excitement. What cricket really gets off on these days is money.

And about the prospect of ­petrodollars from Saudi Arabia, some are virtually tumescent.

Yes, Saudi Arabia, that famous cricket destination, reportedly fantasising of an all-star T20 league in cahoots with the Board of Control for Cricket in India, with favourable mentions from the usual not-at-all-self-interested suspects. If it’s good enough for Formula One, association football, and golf …

Cricket has already partaken of Saudi largesse: the International Cricket Council last year signed the state-owned oil giant Aramco as a sponsor. And Riyadh’s commitment to sports washing their putrid autocracy, and cricket’s too-much-is-never-enough craving for cash, do seem eerily aligned.

First a caveat: this story’s spread testifies mainly to the bullshit, avarice and credulity in which the game these days abounds.

Saudi cricket is barely even a thought bubble. It would need to clear monumental administrative, infrastructural and knowhow hurdles.

But it does raise an interesting question which, sooner or later, will need addressing: with whom should we play cricket?

Cricket Australia recently took a position on this, declaring ­Afghanistan beyond the pale, the Taliban having pulled up women’s cricket there by its sadly shallow roots.

As previously stated, I disagree, nor do I favour the International Cricket Council further sanctioning Afghanistan. Such action would cause very minor discomfort to the Taliban at great cost to the benighted people of ­Afghanistan, for whom cricket ­offers some minuscule relief from their travails.

Connection is better than no connection; bridges are better than walls; every possibility should be exhausted before the abandonment of a cricket public, especially in a country that until two years ago was an ally we had spent 20 years defending from the Taliban’s predations then unceremoniously abandoned.

I’m bound to say that this is not a position I enjoy arguing, because it’s impossible to feel other than enormous sympathy for those ­Afghan women deprived of the ­opportunity for play cricket.

But it also feels like first world amour propre to expect 21st century sports equality in a country led by medieval theocrats at the point of a gun, while the right to cricket seems pretty low on the list of deprivations that the country’s women endure.

If Afghanistan had a women’s cricket team, would it then be okay that girls can’t obtain an education beyond primary school level, that women cannot work outside the home and are excluded from public office and the judiciary?

Still, having taken this stance on Afghanistan, what would our attitude be to Saudi Arabia? Because without its position as the oil market’s biggest swing producer, Saudi Arabia would surely be a global pariah.

It’s a brutal, oppressive autocracy that imprisons and murders its critics, has waged an eight-year war in Yemen at the cost of 400,000 lives, and, of course, utterly immiserates half of its own population – viz, women.

Oh look, there’s a Saudi Arabian women’s cricket team.

Right on! Errr, well, they’ve played a total of five games, as part of a few cosmetic freedoms allowed in the past few years advantaging a tiny proportion of the female population, the overwhelming majority of whom remain third-class citizens.

Under the guardianship system, Saudi women still need permission from a male guardian to marry, and once married must obey their husband in every aspect of their lives, while the father remains legal guardian of any children in the event of separation. There is no prohibition on spousal or statutory rape.

I could go on, but you would do better to read the long essay by Megan Stock in The New York Times last year headlined The West Is Kidding Itself About Women’s Freedom in Saudi ­Arabia.

Let’s not stop there, either. In Saudi Arabia, same-sex relations and non-Muslim worship are outlawed, atheism is a capital crime and freedom of speech a dead ­letter.

Periodically we hear of, without quite taking in, reports of a “crackdown” on this, or a “hard line” on that. Maybe think about it this way: last year a dental hygienist and mother of two was sentenced to 34 years in jail for a few retweets critical of the government.

That’s before we even get to the Public Investment Fund, the tentacular and opaque sovereign wealth fund promoting LIV Golf and owning Newcastle United, and Aramco, the world’s biggest polluter and most assiduous greenwasher.

Let’s just say that if Pat Cummins took their money, he would get a solid boost in the hypocrisy stakes.

So what’s the difference for cricket, in the creepy country stakes, between Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia?

The difference that should matter is that there’s a lot of cricket in the former, which the ICC is mandated to support and nourish, and virtually none in the latter, where cricket would be not so much bridge-building as erecting a diving board over a swimming pool of money.

Which in the end would probably prove the difference that actually matters: that Afghanistan is poor (wretchedly so), and Saudi Arabia rich (or at least its elites are, sickeningly so).

The former it is possible to make a moral example of in the name of “equality”. The latter it’s easier not to think on too deeply, to say that it’s none of our business, that we can’t be too fussy, that sporting lives are short.

After all, there might be a buck in it – mainly for a handful of Indian corporations, some already amply-paid cricketers and a few ticket-clipping middle men.

Nobody will be so Messianic as Arthur Jensen in Network (“The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance!….There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars.”)

But that will be the subtext: that money is neutral, non-moral, weightless, that we might as well have it as anyone else, that for the right price we’d sell cricket to the North Korean Tobacco and Asbestos Corporation.

And about that you shouldn’t be excited.

You should be disgusted.