Crowd or Audience? Match or Event?

Sorry it's soap box time again!

Cricket Match or T20 Event?

I notice that Edgbaston is trumpeting that they've already sold 91% of tickets for T20 Finals Day, before the season has even started.  This begs a few questions, even though it's great that a full house is almost guaranteed for a truly enjoyable day, especially if your team wins.

Clearly T20 Finals Day is an event and isn't now designed to be solely attended by fans of participating counties, in fact those partisan fans are increasing, it appears from experience, being marginalised with poor viewing aspects, scattered allocations and poor numerical allocations. No one would choose to sit in that Motorpoint Upper stand exposed to the September elements, rain and gales up there on a calm sunny day but then again if your team is winning, you'll put up anything!

In 2020 the new "Not city but regional but currently nameless" T20 Franchise Competition starts after the Blast competition has been concluded at least a month early than currently scheduled, better for the Upper Motorpoint stand, you'd imagine:

• but will this new competition detract from the currently successful event of Finals Day?
• will the new competition be a series of multi-venued events, each marketed individually?
• will attendees of these events be an audience, not encouraged to support a team but rather to support the event, a spectacle of a razzmatazz game of T20?

Everyone goes home happy, no one is disappointed at the event - great!

But that's all soulless and not competitive sport, no one has invested any emotion in the event; players might be playing for personal pride but the witnesses won't care if an individual succeeds or fails in his endeavours. How sustainable is that over several season? Meanwhile competitive cricket will be pushed increasingly to bleak inhospitable margins of our summer, brrr!