It's Just Not Cricket! - Death of a Gentleman and Red Army

I've been watching two sports' documentaries, the first about cricket and the second about ice hockey, one about the future and the other about the past.

Death of a Gentleman

Two cricket mad journalists (Englishman Sam Collins and Australian Jarrod Kimber) try to find out if test cricket is dying out and if so why, mostly by following the career of test cricketer and Australian opening batsman Ed Cowan.

What starts out as a travelogue with the focus on test cricket matches turns out to be a sort of sports version of "All The President's Men", with Sam and Jarrod finding a trail of very suspicious dealings between the Australian, England and Wales, and Indian cricket boards to effectively take over the International Cricket Council (based now in Dubai!) at the expense of other ICC members. Mostly this is due to the sheer spending power of TV franchises centred around the Indian Premier League.

The IPL is based on Twenty20, a short version of the game akin to Sunday League cricket, and this has increased the popularity of the game, but to the detriment of test cricket, partly due to the different styles required, but mainly due to good players being unavailable having being "drafted" into the IPL, in a fashion similar to American sports.

It's unusual for a sports documentary to engage as well as this and, although it's a little melodramatic at times, it does show the corrosive and corrupting effect of money on sport and the people who run it. Recommended.

Red Army

By the 1980's, the U.S.S.R.'s national ice hockey team had come to dominate the Winter Olympics, frequently winning gold. With the invasion of Afghanistan and a potential boycott of the summer Olympics later that year looming, a clinching match took place between the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R.

Centring on the Soviet team, especially the leader of the five most prominent players, "Slava" Fetisov, this is a window into that late Soviet era, complete with KGB minders, midnight arrests and defectors. It also shows how these players struggled to survive in the post-Soviet world, eventually teaming up to win the Stanley Cup in 1997 for the Detroit Red Wings. Recommended for fans and non-fans alike.