How are you feeling about Crushers GC? No, me neither. They were the team captained by the unlovable Bryson DeChambeau in the ill-fated LIV golf fiasco that thankfully has just been given the last rites. Other team members included Charles Howell III and one Anirban Lahiri, who will have trousered a few million bucks, courtesy of the Saudis. You can still pick up some Crushers merch, including a polo top for a mere 45 quid, down from £75, or a baseball cap, a snip at a fiver. Though come to think of it, LIV golf should be giving this stuff away.
So much of LIV golf was profoundly annoying, as well as doomed, not least the squandering of hundreds of millions of dollars that could have been put to better use. Instead LIV distorted a vibrant golf industry – and for whose benefit? The swollen pension pots of DeChambeau, Jon Rahm, Tyrrell Hatton and the rest. The stated aim of LIV was to destroy the European tour. Instead it destroyed itself, an outcome both widely predictable and predicted.
The stated aim of LIV was to destroy the European tour. Instead it destroyed itself
The failure of LIV has a few lessons for those wanting all sport to be simply a matter of squillions. The LIV television product was never going to compete with the PGA because it was based on teams for which no fan loyalty could be created, since they were artificial. It was played on courses that nobody knew, and it wasn’t match play. The only successful team games in golf are those marvellous matchplay events, the Ryder, Solheim and Walker Cups, all televised too.
When billionaire entrepreneurs and broadcasters in the past have disrupted the status quo, it has been to bust open monopolies of ‘public service’ broadcasters who artificially suppressed the earning power of sportsmen, notably cricketers. Kerry Packer started it in Australia with World Series Cricket; Rupert Murdoch followed with Premier League football, and survived massive losses to build Sky into a global football entertainment business. He repeated the trick with cricket, to the lasting benefit of all who love the sport. LIV, by contrast, chose to disrupt with crazy levels of cash to pull in viewers, but all that money went into the pockets of already rich superstars to play a poor and unwatchable product.
Disruptive sportswashing can have its benefits. Look how Manchester City (thanks to Abu Dhabi) or PSG (Qataris) have bust open the establishment world of Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Manchester United and Liverpool. But LIV damaged the game: it was a terrible product and it reduced the value of the PGA tour because we could no longer see Rory vs Bryson or Scheffler vs Rahm playing at Sawgrass or Quail Hollow. Middle East money might seem like good news for sport, but it’s a bad fit. They don’t create programmes that benefit development. They buy events, that’s all.
Thank heaven for Usman Khawaja, who has had the guts to reveal (as well as a book to sell) what anyone with an IQ above that of a cricket stump has known all along. Namely, that it was absurd to think the only people involved in sandpapering the cricket ball during the Cape Town Test against South Africa in 2018 were skipper Steve Smith, opener David Warner and the young batsman Cameron Bancroft who was caught with the guilty piece of household kit. Either the Australian quick bowlers – Pat Cummins, Josh Hazlewood and Mitchell Starc – now fess up, or they expect us to believe they thought the unusual state of the ball they had just been handed was a mere coincidence.
Michael Clarke has called for the lacklustre Cricket Australia inquiry into Sandpapergate to be reopened. That feels pretty pointless to me. But how about chucking Australia out of the next two editions of the World Test Championship? Anyone who played in the 2018 Cape Town Test should be banned for nine months, and Cricket Australia should get a monster fine.
As for the secondary scandal of this saga – why Khawaja wasn’t appointed captain instead of the hapless Tim Paine – maybe the answer lies in the fact that Paine was born in Hobart, and Khawaja in Islamabad. Just saying.
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