No 90, June 2 - The Grumbler's County Cricket Newsletter
🔴 Gould backs you-know-what 🔵 40 years since Surrey's 14 all out 🤷♂️ How much is 'enough'? 🟢 All the Blast news 🟤 Vince's Blast record 🟣 First woman umpire in Blast 🟠 Transfer market opens?
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Watch the above.
We keep on telling ourselves tales like this.
We keep on selling stories saying we should refrain from mindlessly chasing money. Books and movies have always coated these narratives in saccharine and rammed them down our throats. These days, social media stars compete to signal such virtues.
In his book, Head, Hand, Heart, David Goldblatt talked about modern society’s disrespect for caring and manual jobs compared to the money and power bestowed on highly-educated, desk-based roles. He used the example of funeral speeches highlighting qualities such as kindness, compassion and altruism when, in fact, the dearly departed may have spent most of their living years feeling forced to chase status and money.
Spinning stories to conceal real motivations is nothing new. George Orwell’s parable, Animal Farm, pointed out society’s hypocrisy in this regard back in 1945. And, turning to a more modern example, it seems that those NHS heroes worthy of weekly nationwide applause during the pandemic have become irresponsible inflation-causing militants when, after years of stagnant wages, they demanded enough money to keep them away from the local food bank.
I bring it up because convenient tales are being woven in the pursuit of ever more in global cricket. Whether it is “pay English players what they want or we will lose them to franchises” or “India deserve nearly 40 per cent of ICC revenues”, these stories are the justification for more basic motivations.
In a pure business sense, of course, these positions are logical and ‘correct’. But it assumes there is no such thing as “enough”. In fact, it wallows in the very notion we should always want more.
It is not enough to be a millionaire playing Test cricket for England, enjoying fame and fortune far beyond your county peers, let alone the general public. You should be a multi-millionaire playing at all the best franchises around the world.
You are elite. You are special. You deserve it.
At this point, someone chips in with phrases like “short career”, “maximise earnings”, “looking after your family”. The last of these is the best example of a narrative mask.
How much do you need for your kin to live in reasonable comfort and, anyway, why should your elite, ultra-rare and valuable skills mean you deserve a lifetime of luxury and should never work again? Especially as so many look to stay in the game in some form anyway. It is not like boxing where the risk: reward calculation includes factors such as the ability to tie your own shoelaces in 10 years’ time.
Yes, the market might be willing to pay that much but we all know that in doing so, sports organisations often hamstring their long-term futures in chasing short-term success. And, of course, when this comes to pass the players and executives are gone but the supporters remain.
If you look at lessons from the world’s richest leagues, the NFL and the Premier League, such elevated status often ends up destroying the stars’ families through bankruptcy and divorce anyway.
In truth, ego is often both the driver and the danger in the desire for more. For players and executives and, as a result of their negotiations, their clubs.
More shows the world that we are special.
More means we are better than others.
More means we have smothered our insecurities for a while.
The chase goes on for so long that, eventually, more just means more.
The other prevailing narrative in cricket right now is that India deserves such a huge slice of the ICC pie because they provide the vast majority of the “value” in the game. By this they mean “money” and, yet again, it is perfectly correct and logical if you adhere to the laws of sports capitalism. On this podcast, Richard Gould described the financial carve-up as the game going “from a Big Three to a Big One”. It has been reported as the world’s largest nation, in population and cricket, flexing its muscles and stealing the pot. But roll back a decade or so and the documentary Death of a Gentleman shows how the Big Three did exactly the same to the other cricket-playing nations. This is akin to 20 English football clubs leaving the rest to form their own competition in 1992 then, 30 years later, the top six trying to stitch up that same breakaway group.
There is no such thing as “enough” in these scenarios. And there never will be.
Just as the best, most highly paid cricketers in the world can only live in one house at a time and drive one car, at some point, India will require competitive opponents in order to enjoy their dominance at World Cups. Fertile foreign territories also provide elite talent and grow the game. If you say that a “rising tide and lifting all boats” then you need others to do more than just stay afloat. Plonking a shallow, cookie-cutter franchise on foreign soil will not work in many territories and, even when they do, it will not serve the game’s interests first. It will look after the mother ship.
When Muhammad Ali received a three-year ban from boxing for refusing the draft in 1967, Joe Frazier, his bitter rival, gave him money to allow him to keep training. Smokin’ Joe knew it would benefit them both if the ‘Louisville Lip’ was fit and ready to fight as soon as the suspension was lifted. They met at Madison Square Garden less than a year after Ali came back in a bout dubbed the Fight of the Century. Frazier knocked down ‘The Greatest’ en route to a points win. Each man was guaranteed $2.5 million, the largest single payday for any entertainer or athlete at the time. However, Ali went on to win their two subsequent bouts.
I do not want to be guilty of virtue-signalling myself. I work for money and will maximise it if I can. But, it is within reason. Creativity, expression, new experiences and, yes, family have been far more important in my career choices. I could earn much more doing something I find detached and dull.
Perhaps I am in the fortunate position of not having to depend on access to sports players and executives for my income but I feel that outright greed is given too much of a free pass by the media. Especially television who, of course, provide the money to fuel the machine. Meanwhile, for their part, supporters often fan the flames of wage inflation with expectations of immediate and constant success.
I am not proposing some sort of sporting socialism, though the beauty of US sports’ draft system in evenly distributing talent is that it adheres perfectly to Karl Marx’s “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”. But please could we not draw the line at destroying so much of the specialness in the game to move a player’s salary from $2m to $3m or pumping up the bonus of some mansion-dwelling executive by an extra $100k? And let’s not spaff all our resources on unnecessary tournaments because the agents say their star now needs an extra 0 on his pay cheque or he’s packing for his latest plum T20 gig at the Timbuktu Tallywhackers.
I can almost hear you tutting at my naivety. You’re probably right.
But, if we cannot limit our demands, then at least we must admit that we are selling ourselves short and believing the fairytales spun by the talented and powerful to protect their precious egos from the stark realisation of their true motivations.
Personally, I am tired of greed being disguised as some sort of greater good.
Enough is enough.
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Added: Simon Hemsley, Ralph, Alastair Wilson
T20 Blast news
Sue Redfern: Umpire becomes first woman to stand in T20 Blast (BBC Sport)
Liam Livingstone named Lancashire captain for 2023 T20 Blast (Cricinfo)
Benny Howell set to miss majority of T20 Blast with calf injury (Cricketer) ($)
Yorkshire will not emerge from crisis until they learn how to win again (Telegraph)
and then this happened…
Yorkshire break nine-month winless run by sneaking past Notts (Cricinfo)
Chris Cooke, Colin Ingram cut loose to leave Middlesex down and out on their outground (Cricinfo)
“Playing at Lord's gives Middlesex an air of privilege, but they are more in tune with the average millennial in that it's hard to see how they will ever afford their own home. Whenever they play at Lord's, MCC get £16,000 as the cost of staging the game and 30% of whatever proceeds remain. Play on an outground and a convivial crowd of a few thousand is not about to transform the finances unless a hedge fund manager gets tipsy in the bar after the game and agrees a sponsorship deal.”
News, Views and Interviews
Signings: Hatzoglu (Glamorgan - Blast - overseas - cover for Neser), Parnell (Durham - Blast - overseas), Lamb (Lancashire to - loan), Agar (Kent - overseas - end of July)
Contract: Leonard (Somerset - 1yr)
Cricket's 'transfer window' opens on June 1 and it can be a disruptive time (Mail)
An illuminating piece on cricket agents and the motivations behind player moves. Especially given my intro.
“I don’t think I’ve ever moved a player where the financial aspect was the guiding factor. Of course, the size of an offer is important but it’s nearly always for cricketing reasons.”
Interesting. However, salaries ranging from £27,000 to £150,000 at counties do not constitute “life-changing money” in modern sports terms. I would argue the big bucks of franchise cricket will change this.
For example…
Jason Roy's decision wakes English game to lure of Major League Cricket (Cricketer) ($)
Former Cricket Scotland Chair Attacks 'Fatally Flawed' Racism Report (Cricinfo)
Bans For Ballance, Bresnan, Gale As CDC Announces Yorkshire Racism Sanctions (Cricinfo)
Mike Ashley in shock £16m bail-out offer to rescue cash-strapped Yorkshire from debts (Mail)
ECB Chair: 'We're Signed Up With The H*ndred Until 2028 (Cricinfo)
The H*ndred can be ECB’s life raft for the coming T20 storm (Times)
ECB Chair Denies The H*ndred Is Under Threat (SportsBusiness)
Like much of county cricket, I have lots of time for Richard Gould. Under ECB chair Richard Thompson, the new CEO has a delicate task to piece together a fractured sport in such a way that it has the strength to survive challenges on multiple fronts. Let alone thrive.
Thus far I have stressed the actions over the words. So far, so (sort of) good.
However, this interview rather troubled me. (See the above podcast and resulting reports)
The previous regime not only crashed the car, it knifed the tyres of the other getaway vehicles in the car park by allowing Teflon Tom Harrison to agree a new TV deal with Sky just before he left. At the time, I wrote about it being the final nail in the coffin of the county game. All we had to look forward to was a slow, sad funeral.
The Richards have prised the lid open once more but the resuscitation will be long and arduous.
The current landscape means they must pay lip service to Sky, even if they truly want to do away with the tournament-that-shall-not-be-named. Exactly that was reported recently and there was no denial or rebuttal. Perhaps deliberately, they allowed the story to breathe.
However, in this interview, Gould talks of his faith in the tournament. He says every major cricket nation has a "super prime time white-ball competition" so we want to "make the [tournament-that-shall-not-be-named] bigger and better... the Blast too." He also wants Test cricket to grow, push up salaries for players, ensure the pathways are healthy, look after volunteers and work in a collaborative way that brings everyone with them.
This cannot happen.
Even the two most valuable annual sports competitions - the NFL and the Premier League - have had to sacrifice important aspects of their identity to fill their coffers and please the paymasters over the last few decades. This has drawn hefty criticism from supporters at each stage of the process but its ongoing success and rising revenue clearly shows that the good outweighs the bad.
Allocation of resources always reveals the list of priorities. Ring-fencing August for the tournament-that-shall-not-be-named and then tossing it unprecedented buckets of marketing cash told us what the last regime wanted to grow. Pushing the Blast to the early summer cut revenue to the counties and thus made them subservient to the ECB's bright new baby.
Leadership is about hard choices. In the end, the new ECB have to make theirs, just like the old ECB did.
At some point, they will have to get off the fence.
Has Bazball taken hold of county cricket (Yahoo)
First Look As New Pub Opens At Hove Cricket Ground Three Years After Old One Closed (Argus)
There’s A Good Reason Why Fans Can Have Real Value In The Boardroom (Times)
Major League Cricket's Investment And Venue Plans Boost Hopes Of Olympic Place (Insidethegames.Biz)
Major League Cricket: Silicon Valley investors expect cricket to finally crack America (Telegraph)
International cricket should find a way to co-exist with T20 leagues - Wasim Khan (Cricinfo)
Former Black Cap Lou Vincent Living The Quiet Life In Lumsden (Stuff)
ICC Revenue Deal Set To Overlook Chance To Grow Game In Favour Of Enriching Richest (Guardian)
Kent adapt Canterbury Cricket Week in line with dizzying change (Times)
30 May 1983: Surrey are bowled out for 14: 'Everyone who got a duck was given a tie' (Guardian)
40 years ago - remembering the day Essex bowled out Surrey for 14 (BBC Sport)
The 2009 Oscar for best documentary went to a movie called Man on Wire. It tells the story of tightrope walker Philippe Petit's daring, but illegal, high-wire routine performed between the World Trade Center's twin towers in 1974. It is considered "the artistic crime of the century”.
Man on Wire is a fine film for many reasons, not least Petit’s framing as the quintessential bohemian artist.
But, in my opinion, the movie is much better for the lack of footage of the walk itself.
This was a heist performed by scatterbrained artists, not hardened criminals, so their video camera did not make it to the roof of the Twin Towers as planned. All we have is grainy black-and-white photos, so we are left to imagine the sheer terror of this act. The narrow, swaying wire, the overwhelming tension and the potential plummet to the New York streets below are all seen in our minds. Then there is the moment when Petit decides to lay down on the wire in the middle of his crossing.
Likewise, Essex’s demolition of Surrey 40 years ago this week has a very special place in my mind, in part, because there was no footage or, of course, social media. I know the tales of players being hauled out of baths to go and bat, celebratory t-shirts being printed (by Surrey), proposed nightclub visits (again by Surrey) and Henry Blofeld's early date at the theatre leaving a sub-editor to fill in the report for the remaining few overs when the carnage occurred.
Who knows what is 100 per cent true and, frankly, who cares?
How many days of county cricket are commemorated 40 years later?
If that means we 'print the myth' then so be it.
….finally, this glorious piece of County Cricket nonsense has just started on Twitter. Link here
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