No 39, Jan 7 - The Grumbler's County Cricket Newsletter
What do we really want from county cricket? | A little bit of politics | Ray Illingworth RIP | All the latest county moves | Essex contract news | Yorkshire sign up two big name interim coaches
Happy New Year and all that. There is not much county cricket news around at the moment so I have mixed it up a little in this edition.
The main issue at hand is a fundamental one. After the Ashes debacle, the organisation, the leadership and the very point of the county game is under severe scrutiny. I have tried to bring together the key stories, issues and written my views on the topic. It is a long blog. Sorry about that. But once I clambered upon my high horse frankly it was hard to get off. Enjoy.
The future of County Cricket
Those Who Seek To Cut Counties Have Short Memories (Full Toss)
12 county batters England haven’t tried yet in Test cricket (Wisden)
County numbers surface AGAIN.. (Peakfan)
Chairless, cheerless, charmless: The ECB end 2021 in a sorry state (Cricketer) ($)
English cricket is in disarray – and it’s a metaphor for the whole country (Guardian)
Hope can rise from this Ashes debacle, if the ECB stops choking the golden goose (Guardian)
The intensity of the navel-gazing and self-analysis enveloping English cricket will only start to subside once Joe Root's beleaguered team are back home.
The start of the Fourth Test went by almost unnoticed. The urn has gone and, so it seems, has the interest from all but die-hard fans.
Kevin Pietersen achieved his attention-grabbing aims with a piece blaming the County Championship for all the ills of the England team and proposing a franchise-style four-day competition instead. He argued that "in The Hundred, the ECB have actually produced a competition with some sort of value" and this should be built upon.
Any piece on this topic written for a betting site and including the sentence "when I made 355* against Leicestershire in 2015… it was the moment when I realised just how far county cricket had fallen" really needs discounting.
In recent memory, the ECB produced a competition with such value it entirely took over cricket. It is called T20 and spawned the IPL, a well-moneyed event about which Pietersen has waxed lyrical.
A sport of such richness and history can not be fashioned only by marketers, television executives, pundits or ex-players whose vision is so narrow
The marketers within global cricket have subsequently rinsed and repeated (actually that should be repeated and rinsed) the format into oblivion. It seems there is always a T20 league being shown on the Free Sports channel on my satellite system these days. It involves a handful of short-format journeymen I know and an abundance of players I don't but nestles in neatly alongside the channel's other offerings, including pro-bull riding and 'timbersports'.
No, I don’t know what that is either.
My point is that a sport of such richness and history can not be fashioned only by marketers, television executives, pundits or ex-players whose vision is so narrow.
Writing in the I, Chris Stocks takes down much of Pietersen's argument. Meanwhile, Peakfan knows his beloved Derbyshire could be first against the wall should this revolution come so he pleads "People mention us, Leicestershire and Northamptonshire as targets, forgetting that 'big' counties poach our best talent once developed."
Traditional fans do have a tendency to clutch at straws in this debate. But not here.
As ever, Freddie Wilde adds data to the discussion (above). His thread argues playing Championship games so early in the season is not a problem but the pace of county bowlers is more of a concern. Quite rightly, David Lloyd suggests the surfaces are the problem and offers to be a kind of Pitchfinder General, seek out and punishing guilty groundsmen.
The best and most comprehensive take is from Tim Wigmore ($). His primary point surrounds accessibility, a problem that clearly lies at the core of everything.
Whisper it quietly, but Gen Z (those age 10-25) are not watching live 90-minute football games on television these days. They and the Millennials (26-41) are strongly averse to advertisements and paying for content. Given media rights fees entirely underpin their business models, this is a major concern even for sporting Goliaths' like the Premier League and the NFL, who are tweaking their coverage and even the rules of their sports to attract the young.
English cricket spent almost a generation off terrestrial screens with disastrous consequences and, as Duncan Stone argues in his new book, even that controversial move has a hefty class element. There is a clue to the real significance of free-to-air coverage in its name. Many of the low-paid have never been able to afford satellite television and, even today, 1.5m people in the UK still do not have an internet connection at home. Add the loss of cricket in primary schools and you have effectively taken an axe to the main arteries through which a sport can connect with younger, less affluent sections of society in the 21st century.
The criteria behind the obscene bonuses of ECB CEO Tom Harrison et al has been described as "growing the game". Certainly returning cricket to terrestrial television fits that. But you did not have to create a tournament that divided fans, betrayed the counties, stretched the calendar to breaking point, undermined the cash cow of Test cricket and emptied your healthy reserves to do it. Despite the nay-sayers, fashioning something from the Blast was entirely possible and preferable. Perhaps it would not have earned as much TV revenue but our sport would be more widespread, more united and in better health. While the Hundred only came into being this year it has dominated the ECB’s agenda in increasing levels since 2016. While their attention was elsewhere, the sport has been hit by numerous crises. In his New Year piece, George Dobell took the ECB to task over this issue, their overall strategy, their politicking and pretty much everything else.
It is interesting to read several mentions of Harrison as now "seeing out time" or "on his last lap". Entirely coincidentally, it has also been reported those bonuses are yet to be paid. Of course, "growing the game" is a suitably vague and wide-reaching criteria that was always going to be satisfied in some form or other. Bump up your ticket prices, especially for the prawn sandwich brigade, and appoint a vast, expensive partnerships team then you can PR an increase in revenue (leaving out costs or just ‘account’ for them in a different way as they have in The Hundred’s figures). But it will do nothing for the grassroots game or Rory Burns' ability to see-off Mitchell Starc's in-swinger.
As we look to refashion our game, I am wary of being entirely data-led, in the same way we cannot be entirely money-led. Of course, facts are crucial and these can be supported by numbers, especially on the playing side. However, the appeal of sport rests on its emotional pull and that cannot always be measured in any satisfactory form. In my experience, the best way not to get fired for a big decision is to point to the numbers. But the best way to push through meaningful, long-standing change is to create an idea supported with facts and analysis but driven by a purpose that truly inspires people. Then live your values.
Even as a devoted 'legacy fan' of county cricket, it is clear that 10 counties based in the biggest grounds could provide enough talent for the England international teams. There is also validity in the argument this would reduce the burden on players, provide greater intensity and pitch the best against the best more consistently. However, at the same time, if you get rid of Durham you are annexing the north-east from the first-class game, ditto Somerset and the south-west, Essex and East Anglia, Kent and Sussex for the south-east. This is the polar opposite of “growing the game”.
But if we are talking about sports business in purely practical terms, you can also extinguish most of the professional football teams in the UK. Certainly all those outside the Premier League and a couple of boroughs of Glasgow. Let's be honest, few of us missed Bury FC when they were expelled from the Football League in August 2019. But a hardcore of their fans have continued to congregate at their usual pubs at 3pm every Saturday since then and there were immediate moves to bring them back as a 'Phoenix club'. This is all nonsensical unless you understand unique culture of British sport and its place in society.
As the peerless David Goldblatt explained in ‘Games of Our Lives’, sports teams are the last remaining institutions that can truly bind us to our locations. We live in one place but work and socialise in another, we do not go to church, our pubs have closed, and local papers have been casualties of the internet age. We are so connected to anyone, anywhere digitally that we can afford to shut ourselves away from our neighbours to such an extent that it took the Thursday evening clap for the NHS for me to actually talk to mine for the first time.
Modern Britain says it values community but it does little to retain it. This is not a straight fight between profit and people, it is more efficiency versus resilience.
In the short term, any franchise model appears lean and mean because it leaches off its host. It is highly 'efficient', allowing the marketers to claim success, update their CVs with impressive returns and move on to a better job. However, that which is left behind is weaker and a crisis can precipitate rapid decline or even collapse.
In economic terms, you can apply this to the exporting of manufacturing to China in the globalised market of the 21st century. The US only truly realised their folly when the pandemic first broke and all the cheap imports stopped. Those bargain prices at Walmart had whittled away at their economic foundations to such an extent that even Donald Trump knew it was politically expedient NOT to blame China for the pandemic. Meanwhile, the recent trial of Elizabeth Holmes shows Silicon Valley’s approach of 'fake-it-till-you-make-it' is fine for phones but can be lethal when applied to health care.
The governors of the cricket and the government of the country have the same background, same leadership tactics, same tailors and the same approach driven by the interests of the few not the many.
Look at the thread-bare county squads that played in the Royal London Cup while the Hundred was going on. In itself, this was no bad thing, many of us enjoyed the ‘Dads and Lads Cup’ but, with the big money and big names playing elsewhere you can see someone arguing against its existence at the first whiff of a crisis. That is why Pietersen's pontification was so predictable - the England test team is struggling, supreme talents such as the one that allowed me to score those runs against a threadbare Division Two bowling attack at Grace Road must be protected so let's take an axe to the trunk of the tree on the bone-headed assumption that we can still harvest those pretty blossoms in the upper branches year after year.
Yes, there is 'inefficiency' in the existing domestic structure of county cricket. It was created in a different age and needs to be refocussed. If the Championship's role is only that of a talent pipeline for the Test team, and not a valuable competition in itself, then the existence of 18 first-class counties playing red-ball cricket will always be under scrutiny if not a direct threat. But supporting it adds to the resilience of the game. There are more professionals, a greater spread of teams around the country and the emotional ties built up over the centuries remain strong. Market it well (or actually just start marketing it all), get it back into schools and create a better pathway for the cream to rise.
Likewise, there is inefficiency in the National Health Service and its costs are so burdensome that successive governments since Margaret Thatcher have been trying to privatise it. This particular bunch of amoral, corrupt bastards have taken it to a different level by actively trying to open it up to the vultures in US market. Having lived Stateside in recent years, this must be resisted at all costs.
County cricket, like the NHS, has been suffering seemingly terminal decline due to neglect, poor leadership and far too many short-sighted, short-term reforms. The endless pursuit of 'efficiency' has weakened resilience. With both, a clear decision has to be made over what we want. If we want a thriving health system free at the point of service then be prepared to pay a little more tax, refuse to accept the obscene evasion in big business and vote out governments who clap the organisation at the front door then stab it in the back.
If we want county cricket in something like its current form, fans must back it with their patronage and interest while uniting around voices like the Cricket Supporters Association. For their part, counties must unshackle themselves from their natural predilection for intransigence and self-interest. But the biggest change must come within the ECB. It is time to clear the decks, abolish it and bring in a new body with a different agenda, just as it replaced the TCCB in 1996. Let's use this crisis to unify the game, giving fans a voice and voting rights akin to any other interested party.
Because right now, I feel both the game and this country are at a tipping point.
I feel utterly divorced from the leadership of UK cricket and the nation as a whole. The governors of the sport and the government of the country have the same background, same leadership tactics, same tailors and the same approach driven by the interests of the few not the many. In Last-Wicket Stand, I wrote about the ideological link between Brexit and The Hundred. Both were PR'd as a progression with sunlit futures but, in truth, were naked power grabs that have only served to divide us. The difference was Brexit clearly had popular support, though the shameful lies, exemplified by the claim that an extra £350m a week would go to the NHS, and the consequent emergence of serious and previously unmentioned issues demonstrates how democracy was hoodwinked.
Unless we can shift the priorities and attitudes of our 'leadership class’, I can see a future without Britain without an NHS and county cricket system in anything other than name.
With that, Britain would lose something that cannot be bought, measured or marketed.
And it could never again call itself 'Great'.
Contracts and Signings
Coaching - G Flower (Sussex), Harmison and Sidebottom (Yorkshire - interim positions)
Essex announced half a team of new contracts in the build-up to Christmas. The Harmer deal is a long one - Harmer, Snater, Buttleman, Wheater, Nijjar, Walter.
Tweet of the Week 1
I was moved by a paragraph in one of Ray Illingworth's obituaries that mentioned his life-ling devotion to Farsley Cricket Club and how he "prepared the wickets well into his 70s and could not resist arriving to paint the crease even after a heart attack slowed him down in 2011".
I wonder if Eoin Morgan will be doing this in his dotage?
Podcast
An honest appraisal of the last year by the Cricket Badger boys. It’s not too pretty.
Tweet of the Week 2
This sort of thing makes me mad. One of the attractions of cricket is how close the fans can be to the players. They always walk straight through the crowd to get on to the pitch. In the past decade, major football clubs have started using retractable tunnels to avoid such confrontations and I would hate players to withdraw for fear of this sort of yobbish stupidity.
Finally…
This chap has crushed a cricket ball in a hydraulic press so you do not have to. If you think this is not worthwhile or interesting then 6.6m YouTube views in less than a year would suggest you’re wrong.
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