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#360reviews: Death of a Gentleman - The Biggest Scandal in Sport?
“No-one wants to see a film about good sporting governance.” – ECB president Giles Clarke, Death of a Gentleman.
Clarke is right, which is why so many people are interested in Death of a Gentleman. This is a good film about bad sporting governance.
For anyone that has followed the story of how the International Cricket Council came to be run by the sport’s three financial behemoths, DOAG will not reveal any new major developments into one of cricket’s biggest scandals.
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It will, however, take you on a journey that runs parallel to the highly secretive and controversial ushering in of the BCCI, ECB and Cricket Australia as cricket’s ruling powers and introduce you to the men with a stranglehold on world cricket.
This film ends up in cricket’s rather bleak present where the filmmakers say cricket is being “buried in the urban desert of Dubai.” The film’s true rooting is in the future of the sport and how the game has lost the charm that make traditionalists hark so fondly back to a simpler time before twenty20 cricket.
Starting off as a film on the future of Test cricket and almost a homage to the purest form of the game, journalists Sam Collins (Wisden, The Cricketer) and Jarrod Kimber (ESPNcricinfo) of The Chuck Fleetwood-Smiths begin innocently enough with interviews from legends of the sport and the then up and coming Australia batsman Ed Cowan.
As the film develops over the next four years and is condensed into 99 minutes of enthralling viewing, the pair find themselves sat in front of two of cricket’s most powerful men as they uncover a wholly untoward operation. The two men in question are the seemingly untouchable N. Srinivasan (former BCCI president and current ICC chairman) and Giles Clarke (then ECB chair and now its president).
While Srinivasan (below) comes off as elusive, Giles is portrayed as arrogant and utterly self serving.
“The ICC is currently chaired by a man who the Indian Supreme Court kicked out of their cricket board, who then also kicked out his IPL franchise for match fixing,” explains Kimber.
“Until at the very least, Mr Srinivasan has been kicked out of world cricket, and some form of transparency and independence comes into the game, Sam and I will be around. The game is too important to us to sit back and watch others ruin it.”
In prickly exchanges with the pair (notably Collins), Giles becomes increasingly irritable by being held to account.
It is this exact reason why the work of the BCCI, ECB and CA (headed up by Wally Edwards) that makes their position so worrying.
Holding the purse strings to world cricket, the three boards are seen in this movie to force out any competition through threats of reduced lucrative tours and corridor deals within the ICC that stamp out any challenge before it bears fruit without the possibility of accountability.
The film shows their manoeuvres to be detrimental to the game at best and illegal at worst.
And Kimber hopes the lasting legacy of this film will be that it gets people talking about cricket’s current situation and can lead to long term change.
“It’s made me more passionate to fight for it,” said Kimber.
“It is a wonderfully flawed beautiful game, and the dirtier I saw it, the more I wanted to fight for it. That’s why I kept making this film.
“Maybe we shouldn’t have waited for three men to use money and ego to bully the 102 official cricket nations and steal the game for their own self serving reasons.
“I will continue to battle for my sport, to take it away from those who use it for themselves. We have formed Changecricket.com an action group to take cricket away from the people and boards who are running it terribly.”
Regardless of whether you’re interested in cricket or not, DOAG is a fascinating insight into money and power, with sport as its reference point. A superb film, this will leave you aghast at what people can get away with in governance.
We rate it: 9/10 – As exciting as it is worrying, the battle between good and evil is on.
Where to buy: See www.deathofagentlemanfilm.com
