No 52, Jun 1 - The Grumbler's County Cricket Newsletter
🟠 Blast crowds struggling, are you surprised? 🟢 Foxes fight back with £10 deal 🟡 Key to cut Championship games? 🔵 Fans' banners taken down 🟣 Middlesex on the up 🟤 Jim Parks RIP 🔴 Cricket Nosh
It’s been another sobering, thought-provoking week for English cricket. The early part centred on ticket prices, both for the Test and the Blast. Then, on Wednesday morning, the Telegraph reported some of England MD Rob Key’s plan to ‘fix English cricket’.
Again? How many times is that now?
The headline for county fans was a likely reduction of Championship games from 14 to 10. “I think you've basically added in a month of the season with a competition,” said Key. “…so you've got to lose a month's worth of cricket.”
There is a stonking great elephant in the room here. And I’ll give you a clue, it is wearing a shirt sponsored by a crisp manufacturer.
As time ticks on, I am getting increasingly concerned about these all-important reviews into English cricket, partly because of the chumocracy at the top of the game. Key’s qualifications were sketchy to say the least but we were told he was “a good bloke” so… umm… that is clearly OK then. And why does Andrew Strauss’ skills as an England captain and batter afford him so much influence on the future of the game both off and on the pitch?
Like the Sue Gray report, the high performance review is taking a long time to complete, it is quite leaky and the recommendations will be presented with the spin of Shane Warne multiplied by Murali.
As I have said before, it is all back to front. You cannot introduce the-tournament-that-shall-not-be-named, ring fence it while the jury is still out and then start to ask the existential questions.
It all smacks of another stitch up in which, yet again, legacy fans are barely considered.
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T20 Blast
T20 Blast team of the week: Who joins Paul Stirling in the XI? (Cricketer)
Gloucestershire legend Ian Harvey to leave assistant coach role (Gloucestershire)
County cricket: T20 Blast lets game do the talking after quiet buildup (Guardian)
Sussex sign fifth T20 Blast overseas player to highlight county cricket's recruitment problem (Cricinfo) Also, Sussex new contracts - Hunt, Coles, Tear
Dominic Drakes to join Yorkshire for four-game T20 Blast stint (Cricinfo)
How to save the Vitality Blast without ending The Hundred (Telegraph) ($)
I’ll be honest, this last article rather wound me up.
It started like this…
"The counties can’t say that they weren’t warned. Just as many had feared, sales for the Twenty20 Blast have declined compared to 2019, with many supporters preferring The Hundred instead.
“It isn’t hard to understand why. Compared to the T20 Blast, The Hundred has three salient advantages. First, with fewer teams, full involvement of England’s specialist white-ball players and more overseas players, the quality is higher. Second, the tickets are cheaper: tickets for Hampshire’s opening T20 Blast match at the Ageas Bowl are an eminently reasonable £24, but it costs as little as £12 to go to Southern Brave Hundred games - which are double-headers featuring the men’s and women’s teams - at the same ground. Third, the schedule is better: The Hundred is played throughout August, with the group stages exclusively in the school holidays."
Errr… and all three advantages have been deliberately manufactured by the ECB.
It’s not a surprise but now we are getting articles on ‘how to solve a problem like the Blast’ following hot on the heels of similar ones about ‘solving’ the Championship and the number of counties. As for the answer? Well, replacing the ECB with a body fit for purpose would be a start. We would not be in this situation had cricket questioned itself seriously and acted accordingly over the past few decades.
Blast ticket prices are a hot issue now, and the natural comparison is the tournament-that-shall-not-be-named. But I’d venture that paying for top playing talent and unprecidented levels of marketing without recouping much revenue at the gate has contributed greatly to the hollowing out of ECB reserves, which, I might add, were built up on the backs of previous generations of fans.
As the article says, the counties did not have to vote for it. But almost all of them would be in financial peril without ECB payments for their role in providing players and there have been numerous stories of undue pressure to bend to the will of the governing body. Those in the room used the term ‘ambush’. To present it so uncritically is, at best, naive given most of its ‘successes’ would have been possible via similar support of the Blast.
This piece, by Andrew Miller, offers much more context on how we got to this position.
How English T20 cricket settled for functionality after missing its own boat (The News PK)
For me, George Dobell has been calling it right from the start, see above. The Blast appears drab on TV and expensive in real-life when compared to the tournament-that-shall-not-be-named because the ECB have made it so. Either through their action or inaction. It has left many fans watching on, wide-eyed but helpless, as their sport is shunted into a siding seemingly in the hope it will simply rust away.
So, here’s where we are now in the Blast, above. There are lots of factors behind ticket sales figures but you can never get away from price. The MCC can blame the Jubilee for the 15,000-20,000 empty seats expected over the Lord’s Test but it is also damn expensive. In contrast, the Euro 2022, women’s football tournament held in England in the summer is trumpeting its ticketing success. I am taking my family of four to an England group game and the final for a grand total of £135. That is eight mid-range seats, including four for the showpiece sell-out at Wembley, for less than the cost of a decent single for Lord’s this week. My family are into football, my wife and daughter have played, but I would not be going if it were not exceptional value. There are many different ways to measure crowds. In my time in US sports, we considered overall match ticket revenue not crowd size as our KPI and, seen this way, Blast crowds might still be better money-spinners than those in you-know-what.
The counties’ approach to the cash cow of the Blast has been criticised for many years - too expensive, too focussed on the beery/blokey crowd and not the families which would grow the game. It is one of the important issues you-know-what was designed to address but, on the basis of the disorder we saw last year, it may not be successful.
But let’s face it, inflation is at nine per cent, money is getting tight and we know it is going to get worse. The political pollsters tell us it is the electorate’s overriding concern right now. Leicestershire have read the room and, yet again, led the way with £10 tickets (£5 under-16s) for all their remaining games. This tweet from their CEO suggests it is working…
Just think about this scenario for a minute - £10 tickets across all Blast games, major fixtures shown live on the BBC, a full-on marketing campaign and played in the summer holidays.
I firmly predict we would have had queues around grounds and ticket touts outside as demand would be so high. It would be a product ‘strong’ enough to hold alcohol-free days and family events. And, most importantly, it would have not made anywhere near the dent in the ECB finances nor split the game.
Reportedly, ECB CEO ‘Teflon’ Tom Harrison finally went because he could not get through the long-term television deal that would have cemented the future of the tournament-that-shall-not-be-named. (Hang on, wasn’t he staying because there was a vacuum at the top without a chair, and that still exists). Realistically, a new leadership team are unlikely to scrap it any time soon. There would be too much egg on the collective faces of those who remain. The Telegraph piece argues “regardless of what many would prefer, the success of The Hundred is now intertwined with the success of English cricket”. A common argument but one I have never found overly convincing.
It is near-impossible to make a purely economic case for the Championship or the 18 first-class counties to continue in their current form. (Though Surrey now have a record 17,000 members and it is growing by 200 per week.) But it is incredibly frustrating to see the one blossoming, profitable part of domestic cricket dismantled like this.
This is not on from Warwickshire, above. Supporters’ flags, which also denounced the tournament-that-shall-not-be-named, have been taken down before. Elsewhere, I have witnessed banners being extracted because they were covering advertising boards. So where can they go?
Let’s be clear. There can be no offensive language, effect on play/spectators or threat to safety. Otherwise just get them up. In fact, I’d have designated space and encourage fans to be creative. I remember the Windies fans expressed their pride in the team through some wonderful banners in the 80s.
NEIL MANTHORP: Connect the dots — and the future of T20 cricket becomes clear (Business Live)
When T20 first arrived two decades ago, it was predicted that the new format could be the death of spin bowling. Now, the pivotal part of any innings is when the slowies arrive after the Powerplay. In Cricket 2.0, the authors mused on the idea of an all spin T20 innings. Here's Talksport’s Neil Manthorpe on the evolution of IPL.
News, Views and Interviews
The reasons behind Middlesex's unexpected revival (Telegraph) ($)
This is one of the surprises of the campaign for me. The fitness of Toby Roland-Jones would seem to be key to them turning this early-season form into honours.
Tanni Grey-Thompson among new board members at Yorkshire CCC (York Press)
Former captain Graham Gooch calls Essex racism allegations a ‘stain’ on club’s history (Mirror)
Essex face sanctions from ECB for falling short on diversity targets (BBC Sport)
I have put out feelers about standing for election to the board at Essex. As a white male, I do not help achieve these very important diversity targets. But, given I was educated in a grotty comprehensive in the west of the county, I like to think I would act as a dilution to the public school bias within the game.
The Journey to an Online Digital Somerset Cricket Museum (Somerset North)
My thanks to subscriber Mike Unwin for sending me this piece on how Somerset's cricket museum has gone online.
Homes near cricket grounds – in pictures (Guardian)
Cricket Simulations - explainer (The Analyst)
Here’s a geeky yet accessible piece on how Opta run their cricket simulations.
Cricket club poses as 36-year-old woman on Tinder in bid to attract new players (Mirror)
Remembering Jim Parks | 1931 - 2022 (Sussex CCC)
Former Sussex and England keeper Jim Parks dies aged 90 (Cricinfo)
Finally, actor Rory Kinnear sums it up…
Rory Kinnear - Sixty Seconds (Metro)
Q: What hobby do you wish you had more time for?
A: “Watching county cricket. Between April and September the clouds lift for me, both metaphorically and literally, and I go down to The Oval and watch Surrey in the slowest format of the game.
“Sometimes there’s wine, sometimes there’s crisps. Actually, I’d say there’s always crisps.”
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