In 1899 an international tribunal controversially settled a border dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana in favour of the British, and 125 years later Liam Dawson is walking back to the Providence Stadium pavilion, run out for a two-ball duck after failing to slide his bat into the crease. Obviously we’ve stripped out a little intermediate context there. But these two events, these seemingly random nodes in time, are in fact ephemerally connected.
What do you mean, you haven’t been following Hampshire’s progress in the Global Super League Twenty20 in Guyana? It’s been playing live on YouTube every night. Nick Knight and Mark Butcher are among the commentators. International stars like Moeen Ali, Carlos Brathwaite and Shan Masood are featuring. At the time of writing, meanwhile, Dawson has faced five balls in the competition, scored one run and been dismissed three times.
Hampshire will probably struggle to make the final. The standard of cricket has been fine, even if the level of effort – from players and spectators alike – could charitably be described as mixed. The standout bowler has probably been the 45-year-old Imran Tahir. But of course none of this really matters, because in a way the GSL isn’t really a cricket tournament at all. It’s Potemkin cricket, cricket-flavoured content, cricket as the honey trap in a much wider plot of geopolitics, Russia and India, hard power and big oil.
Almost a decade ago, oil was discovered off the coast of Guyana, transforming overnight the fortunes of this sparsely-populated, thickly-forested tropical South American nation. According to the World Bank, it is the fastest-growing economy in the world. There has been lavish investment in infrastructure, in schools and hospitals, roads and tourism. Big news for Guyana. And quite a big problem at its western frontier.
Because, as it turned out, the 1899 Paris Arbitral Award did not settle things. For most of the last century Venezuela has maintained its claim on the Essequibo province, fiercely stepping up its rhetoric under the autocratic rule of Nicolás Maduro. With oil reserves now at stake, it has begun amassing troops at the border and threatening to annex the region. Vladimir Putin is a close ally of the Maduro regime, and any armed conflict would be fought with Russian backing and Russian hardware.
So: you’re a tiny oil-rich state of less than a million people, with a huge Kremlin-backed dictator at your border rattling pots and pans. You need friends, fast. And above all you need to make a noise for yourself, get seen and heard in the corridors of power, give the investors of the world something they want. Enter cricket.
Before the oil, Guyanese cricket was basically stagnant. The Providence Stadium hadn’t hosted a Test for 13 years. A talent pipeline that once produced Carl Hooper, Shivnarine Chanderpaul and Lance Gibbs had essentially run dry. But investment has brought the good times back. Guyana hosted two West Indies games and a semi-final at the recent T20 World Cup, while Test cricket returned in August. Two more international stadia, along with a new national academy and T20 league, are on the drawing board.
But the real jackpot – as ever in this sport – is India, and of course there is a natural synergy here. Nearly half the Guyanese population is of Indian origin. India wants a sustainable, reliable source of oil for its growing population. Guyana wants visibility and foreign investment. What better vehicle for this beautiful friendship than T20 cricket?
And so this is how Dawson ends up run out without sliding in his bat, in a narrow defeat by Lahore Qalandars, in a largely deserted stadium, in a tournament literally nobody asked for. A T20 Champions League without any actual champions, but with a $1m prize pool and Hampshire Hawks (seventh in the South Group of the 2024 Blast) invited largely on the strength of its new Indian ownership.
The whole idea is basically a test run, a prototype of a new Guyana-based T20 asset that might one day even attract the best Indian Premier League franchises, many of whom are already embedded in the Caribbean anyway. Border security and soft power, expressed through cricket. And this is an actual, serious prospect: last month the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, visited Guyana, where he unveiled the new Global Super League trophy and met Guyanese cricketing luminaries. “It’s obvious he’s doing a good job,” said Clive Lloyd. “We would like more prime ministers like him.”
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There is, perhaps, one final point to be raised here. What, if anything, are the players to make of all this? Do they have the faintest idea what’s even happening here? The way in which their talents, their names, their bat-grounding skills, are being leveraged in the name of geopolitics? Do they even register the ExxonMobil logos plastered across the stadium, sense the sheer absence of sport in their sport?
Perhaps not. Perhaps for most this is simply a pleasant couple of weeks in the Caribbean, a handy winter tune-up, a solid payday. But at some point – and let’s park the moral dimension for a moment – they might start to realise that only a fraction of the riches gushing through this game are flowing into their pockets. The sums in cricket’s brave new frontier are actually pretty modest, once boards and agents and taxes and expenses have been paid off. Even the very best salaries pale in comparison with top athletes from other sports.
Divided and adrift, floating atoms in the ectoplasm of cricket, the typical modern franchise cricketer exists in a kind of perpetual blur, forever chasing down the next contract, blissfully unaware of the games into which they are being coopted. Meanwhile the wage-to-turnover ratio is about 67% in the Premier League, 65% in the NFL and an estimated 18% in the IPL. Taking a collective interest in the political currents of their sport isn’t just good citizenship. It might just be worth their while.
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