No 143, Dec 23: The Grumbler's County Cricket Newsletter
🟠 ECB spends on you-know-what, cuts money elsewhere 🔴 Spinning stories and creating doubt 🟣 My meetings set for New Year 🟢 Worcs, Notts, Surrey signings 🔵 30m Champ stream views in 2024
There was room for one more newsletter moaning and groaning and generally being gruff full of tidings of cricketing comfort and joy before Christmas. So here we are.
I have news on the campaign to get the game’s glorious leadership to answer serious questions from the Dept of Culture, Media and Sport over their current strategy.
In other words, here is my updated to-do list…
Get meeting with DCMS ✔️
Get meeting with All-Party Parliamentary Committee for Cricket ✔️
Hopefully, we can have face-to-face chats early in the New Year. The DCMS date is with an official, not the chair. I’ll be bringing a couple of sports industry experts with me.
Many of you have sent me ‘fob off’ replies from your MPs and the DCMS but I venture that weight of whinging has played a part. If you want to join the campaign then add your name to the list here.
And remember this is not about going backwards and re-creating some non-existent cricketing structure from a rose-tinted past.
I am pro-change. Just not the change the ECB have enacted.
I have doubted their clarity, coherence, competency and true intentions from the start. Little has transpired to change my mind. Also, leaning into tradition and history is the unique selling point of the UK, let alone UK sport.
Here’s another post from Fanos Hira, a former Worcestershire chair and finance/governance expert who wrote a report revealing the true cost of the tournament-that-shall not-be-named. The £9m loss he found (outside of the £1.3m paid to each county) was far removed from the fiscal picture painted by the ECB.
He is in the middle of a series on LinkedIN that rips off the Band-Aids masking some of the damage this event has done and questions the thinking behind it.
We are already at 23:30 on New Year’s Eve over the franchise sales. Yet the basics of the strategy have not been scrutinised properly. The weakness and insecurity of our counties and the media industry that covers it have meant the vast majority has been waved through largely unchallenged. That is why I am going to Parliament over the issue.
I went to the Essex AGM last week. There is a thread of notes here.
It was outlined that we are in the middle of a decade when the ECB’s payments to counties are flat. In 2029, they may go down.
If you account for inflation and increases in specific cricketing costs they already have. Hence the more-urgent-than-normal distress signals at a number of counties.
Yet look at the stories below in the news section and you will see where the ECB are spending their money. And big money at that. While they cut back elsewhere.
They will argue that the rising tide will lift all boats. The trouble is that the non-host counties have rickety crafts with leaky hulls and the ECB are reducing the number of lifeboats year-on-year. Meanwhile, the host counties are creating state-of-the-art vessels and will still have more money coming in. So they are sailing off into the distance, bound for a brighter future.
As we approach the New Year, I wonder what county cricket will be like in 12 month’s time. “Still muddling through” has always been the answer to that perennial question. But look at rugby, which went through its outside investment moment a few years ago. Major clubs have gone out of business and now there is ‘civil war’ and the leadership has been ousted amid accusations of mismanagement.
I bet the fans were spun some positive stories back in the day when the RFU’s plans for a bright new dawn were challenged.
With a few important exceptions, I wish the cricketing community a Merry Christmas.
In the New Year, I’ll send out a survey to readers. So look out for that.
☕️ When I started this newsletter I made two promises, it will be free forever and your data will never be misused. If you like this newsletter (and you can afford it) please consider buying me a coffee via Ko-Fi or subscribe via Patreon. All coffee buyers are name-checked in the next edition.☕️
PS. I am on Threads. Join me there as Twitter has been ruined. Also here are my social media links - Facebook | Instagram
PPS I have set up a County Cricket Chat space on Reddit - r/CountyCricketChat
PPPS If you want to get involved in any groups to change this situation. Then there is the County Cricket Members Group and, of course, the Cricket Supporters Association.
Player moves, contracts etc
Jacob Duffy: New Zealand bowler to join Worcestershire | BBC Sport
Notts bring in Australian quick O'Neill for start of 2025 County Championship | ESPNcricinfo
Surrey sign New Zealand all-rounder Nathan Smith | South London News
Netherlands international Fred Klaassen signs new white-ball deal with Kent Spitfires for 2025 | KentOnline
Alex Lees named Durham club captain and signs new contract | ESPNcricinfo
Billy Root Signs for Another Year at Glamorgan | Glamorgan CCC
Nottinghamshire: Dillon Pennington and Ben Slater sign new deals | BBC Sport
Nottinghamshire's Tom Moores signs two-year white-ball contract extension | The Cricketer ($)
I thought they were the skintest of the skint.
Ravi Bopara: Northamptonshire re-sign ex-England all-rounder for 2025 Blast | BBC Sport
Keaton Jennings: Lancashire captain extends deal until end of 2029 | BBC Sport
Aaron Beard: Former Essex seamer explains retirement decision | BBC Sport
Surrey legend Adam Hollioake appointed as Kent's head coach | ESPNcricinfo
News, Views and Interviews
County cricket primed for £500m H*ndred payday – squandering it would ruin game | Telegraph
Telegraph doing Telegraph things
Here’s where the ECB’s money is currently going…
Top Men's H*ndred salaries to rise by 60 per cent in 2025 | ESPNcricinfo
‘I won’t apologise for H*ndred pay rises – we need best players’ | Times
To be fair, I genuinely believe some of the ECB’s actions around NOCs have been motivated by a desire to protect county cricket. But it is too late as it has been severely weakened by the shape-shifting demands of growing the tournament-that-shall-not-be-named. As I said last time, it is “either/or not and”.
They need to pay more (and much more still) to turn the heads of the elite. And even then the Indian players will not come.
Inevitably, their stance has annoyed others. No doubt, the ECB and their consultants will say this is the downside of being a ‘disruptor’. Perhaps. But it reveals the tension of being the governing body AND the commercialiser of the game. They are still trying to be ultra-capitalist, globalist modernisers and benevolent, domestic paternalists at the same time.
It does not work in a sport like cricket.
At the MCC lunch last week, told me “It’s just money. In business, the money always wins. You follow its path to find the truth.”
But sports business should never be pure business, because it relies on fans, not customers. Yet they continue to pursue the short-term pound rather than invest in the long-term emotional connection sport creates.
You cannot constantly cream off the top.
Meanwhile, here are the cuts being made…
ECB cut funding for Over-50s county cricket | Cricketer ($)
ECB’s university cuts are short-sighted and hurt late developers | Times
In the last newsletter, I wrote about the major doubts over the ECB’s ability to get any uplift in media revenue. For example, the international rights are forecast to rise from £2.1m per year to £34m by 2032.
Now their leading sponsors are paying less in real terms…
ECB in talks to extend controversial Hundred sponsorship with KP Snacks | The H*ndred | The Guardian
Which means the below is bollocks because they cannot turn down the money…
ECB rules out 'IPL takeover' of the H*ndred | ESPNcricinfo
But then there is the threat of all this…
Leading England cricketers ready to boycott next year’s H*ndred | Telegraph
The H*ndred accused of prioritising foreign stars over homegrown talent | Telegraph
The H*ndred: Pay gap to widen between top men and women in 2025 | BBC Sport
Personally, I have huge doubts there would be any boycott but these stories do demonstrate significant, growing unrest. The usual way to keep players happy is to pay them more. Understandably that is what the ECB is doing to make the you-know-what more attractive but it is a fool’s errand.
They can only bring in sufficient money by selling out private equity or overseas owners (which means they lose control) or charge much more for tickets and put the game behind a television paywall (which does nothing to grow it)
It is all leading to this…
Cricket’s new world order makes a few players rich while the majority miss out | The Guardian
Huge inequality is coming to the game.
The Premier League did that to English football in the 1990s and the Champions League did it to European football a decade or so later. When the money started to wane, the European Super League was mooted. That was beaten by fan protest but it is back on the agenda and, in my opinion, will happen when the big teams decide the current structure, and the media revenue it attracts no longer works for them. They will have their spreadsheets open from here on in. Once the numbers add up they will start spinning those tide-rising tales of sports-wide prosperity from an entirely selfish move.
On the lines of the above here is an excerpt from Fanos Hira’s piece on LinkedIn
Economics is often presented as scientific and definite. It goes back to Adam Smith’s concept of “the rational economic man”, consistently and coherently acting in self-interest.
But, in truth, we rarely act purely logically. These days especially, we are sold ideas. Whether it is Natalie Portman flogging perfume for Christmas or elitist charlatans like Trump and Farage somehow convincing an electorate that they will look after them.
Meanwhile, my dad’s enthusiasm not only sold me football and cricket but the teams I should support in those sports.
While the PR industry is based on selling an idea. The elite echelons also create doubt to serve their clients. Here is a fine podcast series on how doubt sustained the popularity of smoking long after science proved its dangers and is doing the same thing around climate change right now.
Looking at less serious offshoots of PR, the sale of the franchises is a sale of an idea. And the need for them is partly based on the doubt that the county system can create and sustain a viable future. (Or certainly, one that allows UK cricket to keep pace with countries that used to follow it).
That may well be true and a solution must be found. But given the ECB’s approach, why should we swallow their truth and believe in their solution? They don’t bat for the likes of me. Under their watch, the UK has gone from a leader of world cricket to a follower playing catch-up, copying others’ ideas and selling outsiders a major chunk of the game.
Remember, Britain does entertainment differently from the rest of the world. It is one of the reasons we are so good at it. Another peculiar British anachronism, panto, provides 30-40 per cent of annual theatre revenue and has not only recovered from a potentially fatal hit from Covid but is growing.
My big problem is that the proposed strategy (for you-know-what, not panto) has never been properly questioned. Certainly, it seems that no-one in this supposedly democratic structure is going to open the idea up to any sort of vote. The hosts want it and the non-hosts are so skint they cannot afford to rock the boat.
In the past fortnight, we have seen players in the tournament-that-shall-not-be-named get a massive pay hike. Yet there is little to suggest the income from sponsorship and television will grow to cover it meanwhile there have been cuts in small but important (and not money-making) areas of games.
There is money available from selling the event to IPL owners and private equity. In fact that has become the entire focus of domestic cricket right now. And, despite their obvious power, the ECB believe these owners will be kept in check and not bully their way to greater influence and control.
Not only that but they say a primary aim of the revenue raised is to plough it back into a loss-making county game that has been entirely undermined and sidelined by this process. And presumably, reinstate the funding into the areas they have just cut.
It is a nonsense, a fantasy, a story made up to continue the process of putting more money and control into the hands of fewer people. And, of course, the chosen few are only happy to propagate the lie.
It all reminds me of this cartoon on the economics of immigration policy.
MCC appoint energy executive Robert Lawson as new CEO | ESPNcricinfo
Inside MCC's rocky 18 months from Ashes embarrassment to Hundred sale | Telegraph
I went to the MCC Christmas Lunch last week. It was… err… eye-opening.
To put it politely, I felt as if I was in the middle of a Two Ronnies sketch.
The turkey was nice though.
Welcome to Sixes: cricket pushes boundaries of competitive socialising | The Guardian
Club cricket in Shanghai: a familiar comfort in an unforgiving city | The Guardian
Blair Tickner: I found out my wife had cancer during county game – but had to play on | Telegraph
I looked at the Derbyshire CCC Foundation brochure this week. There are so many good schemes in cricket and so much more good work can be done at a time when we need it.
For example, there is a crisis of loneliness among the elderly. It can have a catastrophic effect on their health. I firmly believe county cricket can be a force for social good, especially among our pensioners. Sunshine and company on quiet weekday mornings in summer is a therapeutic sweet spot.
Unfortunately, the UK does not seem to truly care about old people or county cricket.
Somerset Cricket Foundation plays role in VI cricket success | Somerset County Gazette
Walkers & Talkers Arrives at Glamorgan | Glamorgan CCC
County cricket club holds memorial for super fan | AOL
Lou Vincent interview: Public shame of match-fixing turned my family against me | Telegraph
I actually felt a bit sorry for him after reading this. Surprised he is still playing the game at any level.
Durham Cricket announces historic men’s and women’s pre-season tour to Zimbabwe | Durham CCC
Racism costs exceed £1 million as Essex's grim financial position worsens | The Cricketer ($)
Cricket balls can concuss and even kill batters – at all levels, helmet use must be taken seriously | The Conversation
Marathon to be ran to honour Josh Baker and raise money | Worcester News
Phil Collins appointed Club Chair as Lord Ian Botham elected as Honorary President | Durham CCC
No, not that one.
First Class Counties Reach over 30 Million Live Stream Views | Derbyshire CCC
Surely this level of reach could command a worthwhile Championship-wide sponsorship fee. And costs could be reduced with a Championship-wide approach.
A central system is the best way to maximise the value of this brilliant service across the game.
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