7 hours ago
18
I went to Old Trafford expecting to watch a game of cricket. Instead, I left thinking about history, identity and whether you can manufacture belonging. Walking through the concourses, I found myself surrounded by the faces of Lancashire’s greats. Farokh Engineer. Sir Clive Lloyd. Players whose stories are woven into the fabric of the ground. The Sir Clive Lloyd Stand is a reminder that this place has accumulated meaning over generations.
And then, almost everywhere else, Manchester Super Giants.
At first, I was impressed. The ground seemed full of supporters in new shirts, waving flags and chanting MSG. I remember looking around and thinking they had done an extraordinary job. Somehow, in almost no time at all, they appeared to have persuaded thousands of people in Manchester to buy into a completely new cricket team. Then I discovered they were giving the shirts and flags away for free.
I played at Old Trafford many times. But in this form it felt like a completely different space, a different entity plonked down, unconnected to all that culture and history.
It reminded me of watching Ted Lasso. You switch on the television and see a packed football stadium, thousands of people in the same colours, chanting passionately for their team. For a moment you wonder who they are and how you have never heard of them. Then you remember that AFC Richmond doesn’t exist. The shirts, the songs, the supporters, the rivalries, somebody created the whole thing for the television programme. There was something of that feeling at Old Trafford.
Every boundary brought another booming chant over the speakers. MSG, MSG, I assumed. Except when I listened more closely, it wasn’t MSG at all. It was LSG, Lucknow Super Giants, the Indian franchise from which this new Manchester identity has emerged.
It was strangely disorientating. Here we all were in Manchester, wearing Manchester Super Giants shirts, waving Manchester Super Giants flags, apparently chanting for Manchester Super Giants, while the sound system was playing the chant of Lucknow Super Giants.
There was something almost gladiatorial about it. Loud, colourful and undeniably entertaining. But also slightly surreal. At moments I felt less like a supporter and more like a participant in an enormous live experiment. Here is your shirt. Here is your flag. Here is your chant. This is your team.
A major question that hasn’t really been answered is: what do the players think about this? I have spoken to one or two. There is a divide. Do they think this is a good thing? Naturally, they do if they’re playing. They get paid really well, it’s short and full of energy. For the women’s game, it has been a massive economic and visibility driver.
If they’re not playing, the opposite can be true. Some of them undoubtedly hate it. You’re not working. You’re not in that narrow spotlight. Your summer is just passing by.
On the other hand, the children around me at Old Trafford certainly weren’t worrying about authenticity or history. They were watching sixes disappear into the stands, waving their flags and joining in. The crowd was engaged and there was energy in the ground. Whatever I thought about how it had been created, people were enjoying themselves.
My other reaction was more personal. I have spent most of my life either playing or coaching cricket, and I sat there bemused by what I could add to what I was watching. It felt almost uncoachable.
That isn’t to say the players aren’t highly skilled or brilliantly coached. Clearly they are. But it felt separate from the cricket I recognise as a coaching proposition. I found myself wondering what I would tell a young player to take from it or what conversation we would have about it afterwards. Beyond the extraordinary execution, I wasn’t sure. Perhaps that is partly the point. The Hundred isn’t really asking me to coach it. It is asking the crowd to watch it.
This product is totally disconnected from red-ball cricket, technically and emotionally. It is a separate thing. We probably need to be honest about this rather than dancing around it.
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There was, though, a connection between what was happening on the field and what was happening around it. Both felt invented. A new format of cricket, surrounded by a newly created team, with newly created rituals, colours and identities. None of that stopped it being fun. Judging by the children around me, it was great fun.
But it also felt detached from what came before. Underneath the barrage of MSG branding, you could still make out the old murals. Engineer. Lloyd. The names and faces of people who didn’t need a marketing campaign to make them part of the place. Their significance accumulated through performances, stories and generations of people watching them.
English cricket is now experiencing something fascinating. For years, the gravitational centre of the game sat here. Now, the money, influence and cultural confidence of franchise cricket increasingly flows in the opposite direction. An Indian franchise identity can arrive in Manchester and be laid directly across one of English cricket’s most historic grounds.
There is something almost like a reversal of cricket’s old journey around the world, although this time it isn’t colonialism, but commerce. Maybe Manchester Super Giants will develop its own stories. Maybe children wearing those free shirts will still be wearing them in 20 years and by then the thing that felt manufactured to me will feel completely authentic to them.
Perhaps the same is true of the cricket. What feels slightly alien and uncoachable to me may simply be cricket to the generation waving those flags. I can sit there surrounded by a game I have spent my life in and feel strangely separate from it, while a child sitting 10 seats away is completely absorbed.
For now, walking through Old Trafford was like seeing a new coat of paint applied over something much older. However bright the new paint is, you can still see the history underneath.
The Secret Cricket Coach is a former professional cricketer, now an elite-level coach.
