Cricket ignores peril of death by Sky

When Citizen Murdoch swooped on Irish football, a game which not so long ago earned young participants like Johnny Giles a lash from the straps of patriotic Christian Brother teachers - they said it was the game of the Englishman and the Devil - the government moved to rescue the outbid RTE national television channel.

When Citizen Murdoch swooped on Irish football, a game which not so long ago earned young participants like Johnny Giles a lash from the straps of patriotic Christian Brother teachers - they said it was the game of the Englishman and the Devil - the government moved to rescue the outbid RTE national television channel.

The Irish government said no deal; you couldn't deprive the mass of the population of what, despite that old persecution, had become the national game.

It would be wonderful if our own media and sports minister Tessa Jowell showed similar vigour on behalf of the fan of cricket, which of course has been an integral part of the English psyche since the dawn of the British empire, but no doubt she has higher priorities, not least ushering him into the nearest super casino.

Sky's exclusive rights to broadcast Test cricket is unquestionably a deadly blow to the game's long-term ability to inspire a young audience to replace the one that is dying off, a point made graphically this week by the former England captain Mike Gatting, who said if he hadn't been able to turn on the family telly and watch the great performers in the Test arena he probably wouldn't have taken up the game, which would have lost the nation one of the last of its players able - if we forget Shane Warne's "Ball of the Century" - to compete seriously with the Australians.

At every level, cricket's sell-out to Sky is dismaying but then scarcely a surprise in the wake of that gut-wrenchingly inappropriate tour of stone-age Zimbabwe.

The numbskull administrators do not even vaguely grasp Gatting's simple point. The health of any game is dependent on its ability to inspire and move the largest possible following. If anyone doubted this they should have been in Las Vegas last weekend - or tuning in to Sky - for the boxing bill on which Danny Williams was so comprehensively beaten by the world heavyweight champion, Vitali Klitschko.

These two privileged sections of the dwindling boxing audience got to see 24-year-old Miguel Cotto, the World Boxing Organisation's junior welterweight world champion. It was the kind of treat long denied to viewers of terrestrial television in this country. When British boxing decided to sell itself to Sky it cut itself off from the great natural swell of support that could be raised at the first serious evidence that the nation had a legitimate world contender.

Consider briefly, for example, the vast constituency of Frank Bruno in those heavily scripted, wise-cracking days in the company of the BBC's Harry Carpenter. As recently as last weekend, the British reporters covering the Klitschko-Williams fight taking their places at ringside had to brave mocking chants of "Bruuno, Bruuno" from their American colleagues who remembered the support he carried to his brief attempts to dethrone Mike Tyson. Bruno had a huge profile in this country, one that dwarfed that of the infinitely superior Lennox Lewis, who fought exclusively on Sky.

Here in Britain, Ricky Hatton and Joe Calzaghe are now the big marquee names, but what do the television-starved majority of British fight fans really know of them? Only what they read, which is that they are good in their own world but rarely extended by the higher flights of world-class opposition.

What is denied the fans who cannot afford a dish and monthly subscriptions is the lifeblood of exposure to the highest quality.

While in recent years the BBC has offered only the risible, wildly inflated diet of Audley Harrison - and the Olympic explosion of Amir Khan, the potential of whom has no doubt been exaggerated by Britain's infrequent sighting of outstanding young fighters - the Sky minority have enjoyed something resembling a fistic banquet. They have seen the superb quality of Bernard Hopkins, Oscar de la Hoya, Winky Wright, Kostya Tszyu, Shane Mosley, Marco Antonio Barrera, Erik Morales, the now sadly subsided Roy Jones and, perhaps most exciting of all, the bewitching Cotto.

Ask any boxing fan who subscribes to Sky what he thought of Cotto's demolition of the former world champion Randall Bailey and you will invite a rhapsody of praise. Cotto said boxing is far from dead, that it will never perish when such style and intensity are still available.

Watching Cotto fight his way to an inevitable but still thrilling victory, was to be reminded of the last great peak of boxing in the Eighties. Then, in North America, network television each weekend regularly aired high-quality boxing shows; the great Alexis Arguello-Aaron Pryor title fights went out on national television, and every city newspaper in North America had a dedicated boxing writer and a posse of eager young aspirants for what was considered the most colourful and compelling sports beat.

Boxing was big-time then, but last weekend in Las Vegas, the American fight scribe was a rare thing indeed. The New York Times didn't carry a single line of preview for the Klitschko-Williams fight.

This, more than anything, was death by network television starvation. For irrefutable proof, you only had to watch the moves of Cotto. He declared that boxing, at least outside the heavyweight division, was not dying of its own accord.

Now, we can only mourn the appalling negligence that will permit the most intriguing and brilliant phases of Test cricket to be played out before so many unseeing eyes.