Drive, he said

In Nicholas Winding Refn's rather good movie Drive, the unnamed driver wears a bomber jacket with a scorpion embroidered on the back. It obviously meant something as Refn provided several lingering shots of it throughout the film, but it wasn't at all clear what that meaning was.

At first I thought it might be some kind of Tarantino homage as it seemed quite Quint, but during the bloody final scenes, a character briefly mentions the parable of the turtle and the scorpion.

In it, the scorpion is on the bank of a river, and asks the turtle to take him across on his back. The turtle says to the scorpion, 'you must promise not to sting me, because then I will die and you will drown'. The scorpion agrees, but in the middle of the river, stings the turtle.

'Why did you do it?' the turtle asks.

'Because it's my nature,' the scorpion replies.

Admittedly it's a bit of a leap from Ryan Gosling to N Srinivasan, but the point's the same: a body will obey its nature most of the time. The leak of the ICC's position paper simply suggests the logical conclusion of a direction that has been apparent for a long while. That the wealthy and powerful will exert their wealth and power is not really news in the wider sense.

The story has barely made the mainstream media in England, which perhaps reflects that lack of surprise. Cricket is a parochial sport built on empire, and for all of its talk about creating a global game, the ICC is a cartel/oligopoly/closed shop of the classic kind.

As Hunter S Thompson once wrote about another industry: 'the music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There is also a negative side.'

Amen, bro, amen...

NB: Cricinfo has reported the story best. Read Jarrod Kimber,  Russell Degnan  and David Hopps for the skinny.