ECB Planning to Fail and Don't Care!

Not only are they hell-bent on sabotaging existing successful competitions, they're still missing the point. Get cricket on free to view TV, any cricket, any channel 1 - 5  it's not really that important and the profile of the game will rise from it's subterranean point at present ..... the obvious appeal of the product will see youngsters take-up the game again exponentially , people will talk about the game again., advertisers will want to advertise on commercial channels with sufficient viewers airing cricket again, the game will grow  - these muppets don't seem to have grasped that their selling cricket TV rights to Sky is what has sent cricket's profile into this black hole with the general public in the first place. Cricket will never appeal to every person on the planet, after all football doesn't but over the past 100 years cricket has had enough appeal for a high enough percentage of the people to make it viable enough to be a professional sport and to attract people in their millions to watch on TV, so long as the officials in control are realistic and are not greedy. Yes TV and viewing habits have changed but get a run chase on TV at teatime and people will talk about it the day after at work and want for more.

Increasingly, it seems that this ECB new competition is going to happen more for the increasing wealth of a few and is nothing to do with growing the game.

ECB T20 plan another step on sleepwalk to big-city business model.

Matthew Engel.

The Guardian.

Saturday, 8 April 2017.

PTG 2100-10646.

“The thing about cricket”, someone said at the ‘Wisden' dinner at Lord’s the other night, “is that it has this image of being a staid and stuffy old game that never changes. But it isn’t like that all. It’s in a state of permanent revolution. It’s almost Maoist”.

The game is, to say the very least, bewildering, even for people who once kidded themselves that they understood it. The 2017 county cricket season began on Friday and will finish on the third-last day of September. In the old days the counties did not play at all when there was an R in the month. This suggests that part of cricket’s radicalism is a fervent belief in global warming.

And, though there was a pullovery nip in the air at the County Ground, Northampton, on Friday the faith was not misplaced. A few hundred turned up, respectable enough on a working day with the trees still leafless. There were even two groups of kids playing with tennis balls on the outfield during lunch. The Gallone’s ice cream van, which has settled by the West Stand every summer since the world was young, was not visible but there were assurances it would be along when the sun came out.

And the congregation had the unexpected pleasure of seeing Glamorgan reduced to 101 all out soon after lunch, which put Northamptonshire top of the County Championship Division Two, with three bonus points, two hours gone and less than six months to go. Perhaps Glamorgan, who had chosen not have a toss and bat, as is not possible under England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) Playing Conditions, were confused too.

About four years ago it was decreed that, to make things easier for cricket followers, Championship matches would start on a Sunday. Well, most of the time. That has now been junked. This round of matches began on a Friday. One bemused Glamorgan supporter said he was just grateful to have the right day. Last year he came up from Swansea for the corresponding match on the Tuesday, only to find it started on Wednesday.

Anyone could empathise. 'The Cricketer' magazine’s annual fixture wallchart now has to be colour-coded in 17 different shades to cater for all the tournaments, divisions and formats. The Tokyo subway map is simple in comparison.

It will soon get much, much worse. As is now well known, the ECB has decreed a new Twenty20 competition three years hence, to be played in eight cities, involving new franchises yet to be formed and yet to hire marketing men to think of cliched names. It is an unusual sport that decides to spread the game by removing it from the places it is played at the moment. It will not even encompass the nine Test match grounds. Northampton is the nearest first-class cricket ground for about five million people across a huge area of east and central England.

It will certainly not make it here, whatever vague hints may have been dropped, even though Northamptonshire last year defeated all their better-funded rivals to win the existing ECB event for the second time in four years. And, as far as their most loyal followers are concerned, they can stick it. Barry Card, a retired civil servant, travels regularly from Doncaster to watch matches here. “I wouldn’t cross the road to watch that”, he says.

“My opinion’s not printable”, said Dianne Ward, membership secretary of the Supporters’ Association. “I can’t repeat what I said”, said Alan Claridge, a club member since 1960. None of them dislikes Twenty20 cricket as such; they just want to see their own team play it. Which fits with the known pattern of British sports watching.

Yet something else is going on here. The club they love, in a few weeks’ time, will no longer be theirs. Last September, hardly noticed even by the local press, an Emergency General Meeting of Northamptonshire members voted to accept a plan by the club’s board to make the club a subsidiary of a newly created holding company. Control is expected to pass formally from the membership to the new company within a few weeks, as soon as it receives the £UK1 million ($A1.7 m) in cash from potential shareholders that the board regarded as the minimum starting point. They have already surpassed that amount in pledges.

There was little opposition to the plan in the end because there seemed to be no choice. There are safeguards to prevent any one businessman taking control and to stop the ground being sold off for housing, though some conspiracy theorists have noted there seem to be quite a few people in the property business involved.

The response to this scheme is far more open-minded. “Doesn’t bother me”, said Card. “If that makes it a better club, that’s fine”.  "On the surface it looks good. They put up a very good case but I’m waiting to see”, said Ward. Claridge was also relaxed but did add: “They say they have lots of businessmen wanting to put money into the club but there was nothing to stop them putting that in as it is now”.

It is true that Northamptonshire had a near death experience two years ago, after a building project went badly wrong. Their latest chief executive, Ray Payne, is content to leave cricket to the experts but takes direct responsibility for cost control and finding non-cricket revenue. It is perhaps a long overdue separation of powers.

But something beautiful is being lost. Until very recently all the county cricket clubs were just that, clubs, where the members had ultimate authority which, in extremis, they could exercise. Sussex overthrew a rather dozy old committee in the 1990s and rapidly became county champions for the first time.

The whole concept implied that the game sprung from the people. We may drowse in the sunshine, when it appears, applaud appreciatively and occasionally chunter but in the end We Can Be Roused. It is something that clubs like AFC Wimbledon have rediscovered in football.

But cricket is heading towards a business model. Northamptonshire are the third team to take this step: Hampshire have long been under single-owner control; Durham’s members have recently lost their residual rights. Others are bound to follow. It will be a slow process but it is beginning to look inexorable. It is getting little scrutiny because the cricket media are better at keeping their eye on the ball rather than the boardroom. Owning a cricket club is unlikely to be a means to riches in itself, though there are ancillary possibilities.

At Northampton many members are saying they are not interested in buying £250 ($A415) shares as long as they can carry on watching. It is a rather depressing response; one share will not be worth much but it does buy the right to be heard.

Attendances at county cricket have been falling for at least 60 years. It used to muddle on by having low wage bills and low expectations. But the Faustian deal with broadcaster ‘Sky', which came into force immediately after the huge popular triumph of the 2005 Ashes win, had more consequences than even its opponents suspected. Obviously it diminished the game’s base and it haemorrhaged players and spectators.

But it also created internal expectations. The players’ pay exploded; the ECB turned into a vast, impenetrable bureaucracy. Hence the constant revolution: the game cannot maunder on pleasantly; it must keep coming up with ever more eye-catching gimmicks.  Hence the grand plan for city-based franchises. Alongside the contempt from the Northamptonshire faithful, furious at their unjust exclusion, there seemed a great deal of scepticism among those within the game to an extent that is beyond normal conservatism.

Cricket is not and never has been a big-city game. At the county level it works best in places like Taunton, Worcester and Canterbury, that do not even support league football teams. The belief is that if one invents a team and markets it cleverly to a large population, they will come. The England players, who should be at the heart of any marketing operation, will probably not be involved because they will be playing Test cricket.

Unless they are not because the emerging global circuit of the big Twenty20s – Australia, India and soon England – will be paying so much that the big stars will not bother with the tedious old disciplines because they whack the ball around for three or four months out of twelve and make enough money never to have to work again.

All the world’s great games have an internal integrity that underlies the business. If civilisation collapses, the remnant in rags will still hunt out footballs and golf clubs to try and recreate the old joys that might persist in their memories.

Perhaps there will be cricket bats too. But cricket gave two great things to civilisation: the idea that the umpire’s decision is final, which has now officially been abolished by the review system; and the delicate interplay of individual and team success that really exists only in cricket and baseball. Neither of these exists in the ECB’s big-city game. Nor will there be any vestige of the sense of tradition and loyalty that has sustained this game through centuries of optimistic spring days like this one.

ECB to spend £UK6 m a year on T20 marketing.

Elizabeth Ammon.

The Times.

Monday, 10 April 2017.

PTG 2100-10643.

The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) will spend more than £UK6 million ($A9.9 m) a year marketing and running its proposed new Twenty20 tournament. The budget completely eclipses anything previously spent on the marketing of English domestic cricket.

The proposed new tournament will see 36 matches played over 38 days, meaning that about £160,000 ($A264,320) per match will be allocated for marketing, promoting and operations. By comparison, Surrey, who almost always sell out The Kia Oval for their ECB’s current ‘Blast’ T20 matches, spend just £35,000 ($A57,820) on the marketing of their T20 campaign.

Most counties use relatively cheap digital engagement to promote their matches but the ECB is expected to launch a huge marketing campaign including television and radio advertising, billboard posters and advertising on public transport.

Financial forecasts for the new tournament prepared by the accounting firm Deloitte and shown to county chiefs last September predict that the central costs of the tournament will be upwards of £15 million ($A24.8 m) a year, half of which will go on budgets for players and coaches and the rest primarily on the marketing and “activation” costs of each of the matches.

The financial forecasting has a separate amount of £700,000 ($A1.2 m) for what is described as management costs. This includes the salaries of ECB staff employed to organise and run the new competition and is in addition to the £1.3 million ($A2.1 m) that the counties will receive. It means the cost of the new tournament will be approximately £40 million ($A66 m) a year. The ECB is forecasting the competition will make a loss of more than £15 million ($A24.8 m) in its first year (PTG 2076-10511, 15 March 2017), and has privately warned that, like the Australian Big Bash League, it may not make a profit for at least the first three years.