Are You Feeling Alienated Yet?

Game cannot afford to alienate core support in pursuit of new audience.
Mike Atherton.

The Times.

Thursday, 16 May 2019.

PTG 2795-13938.

On the face of it, last Friday’s England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) One-Day Cup match between Middlesex and Lancashire at Lord’s, was an attractive fixture. There were eight internationals on show, including the great Jimmy Anderson and the Kiwi Ross Taylor, one of the best batsmen around. There were other future internationals on view, too, such as Saqib Mahmood, the young Lancashire speedster who can lay claim to be best on show in this year’s competition, and Middlesex’s Max Holden, who had beaten the club’s highest List A score days before when he made 166 against Kent.

Not only that, there was an extra edge to the game. After three weeks of round-robin fixtures, this was a knockout play-off match, with the winners scheduled for a semi-final two days later at Hampshire, and a final at Lord’s in the offing after that. Despite all this to attract a live audience, MCC had sold fewer than 100 tickets the day before the game. More turned up on the day, of course, but Lord’s was mostly empty, even so. Two days later, vast swathes of empty stands greeted Lancashire again when they played Hampshire in their semi-final at the Ageas Bowl, the day after the second One Day International of the England-Pakistan series.

The easy line here would be to bemoan a loss of interest in the game, the kind of piece that appears routinely at the start of the season in early April, when mostly freezing temperatures are a barrier to anyone attending a ground in person. Things, though, are never as simple as they seem. Consider this: neither Middlesex, MCC (who sell tickets for Middlesex’s matches at Lord’s) nor Lancashire could know of the fixture until three days before, Middlesex having completed their last group game against Kent two Tuesdays ago. Between this last group game and the effective quarter-final, Middlesex and MCC had two days to market the match.

When was the last time you saw any marketing for Championship cricket or 50-over cricket? When, come to think of it, did you see any marketing for Test cricket? In a recent MCC survey, a high proportion of respondents said Test cricket was their favourite form of the game, but little is done to promote it. Here in England, counties — budgets tight of course — save their marketing pounds for the Twenty20 Blast, while ECB has a war chest to spend on marketing the Hundred next year, the logo and websitefor which were unveiled on Wednesday.

If awareness of this match was limited as a result, now put yourselves in the position of a Lancashire supporter who did know it was happening. Anyone wanting to go to Lord’s for what was effectively a quarter-final, would have had to book a day off work, and they would have had no time to do so. Friday is an expensive day for travel, especially given the lack of time to book early train tickets, and the game being a day-night fixture might have necessitated an overnight stay.

At that stage, supporters didn’t know whether Lancashire would make the semi-final two days later, so it would have been a waste of money to book to stay down for the whole weekend. And, if they wanted to make arrangements for the match at Hampshire once Lancashire beat Middlesex, then they were asked to make two return trips south at the last minute in three days. Just thinking of those travel costs and logistics gives me a headache, as it did Lancashire’s office staff who had to organise last-minute accommodation for the players. Is it any wonder supporters decided to stay away, especially with the games being televised as they were? It is almost as if these fixtures were arranged to dissuade a live audience.

Clearly this is an exceptional year, with the Ashes and World Cup, and other cricket has had to be shoehorned in as a result. But the lack of thought for the paying and travelling supporter in the knockout stages of this year’s One-Day Cup fits with a trend whereby that supporter often gets the roughest end of the deal. In the rush to exploit new markets, those who have supported the game through thick and thin — the old market, in other words — are disregarded.

Whether, as in this instance, because of a thoughtless schedule, or overpriced tickets, overpriced food and drink, poor experiences on the giant replay screens, being turfed out of hotels at the last minute, as some England supporters were in Sri Lanka this winter, or the small print refusing a refund for expensive fifth-day tickets, which again happened this winter when a Test finished early, the paying spectator often gets a poor deal.

To give one example: I had an email this winter from a long-established supporter called David Daniels, who goes to one of the Midlands Tests every year with friends. Last year, his ticket cost, in his words, “a very reasonable” £UK55 ($A100). For the previous Ashes series, tickets were £UK90 ($A165), a mark-up which he was happy to accept. This year, a similar seat for the Ashes would cost him, he says, over £UK200 ($A370). “Neither I nor the usual group from my village will be going”, he emailed me to say, the first time in more than 40 years that he will not have watched a day of an Ashes series live. He wondered, whether the habit having been broken, he would be back again.

Despite the continuing lukewarm and scornful reception to the ECB’s marketing of the new, urban competition, I have little doubt that, with ECB, and broadcasters Sky and BBC putting their shoulders to the wheel, the Hundred will be successful next year, just as T20 was in 2003. Trying to embrace a new audience is no bad thing, given that the ECB’s research, unveiled today, shows that present attendees to cricket are overwhelmingly male (82 per cent), white (94 per cent) and affluent (65 per cent). That said, this core constituency should not be forgotten nor taken for granted.

As of now, other domestic cricket on offer as the ECB looks to new markets during the Hundred, is the 50-over competition. The best weeks of the season will have no first-class cricket at all. The reason given, is that the Directors of Cricket from the counties are wary of playing Championship cricket with weakened squads. But, given the choice, I suspect the core constituency would prefer to watch young, emerging, local players given an opportunity to play first-class cricket in the best months of the season, rather than an endless diet of one-day cricket. At least, given their long-standing support for the game, they should be asked their preference.

Give this a read: https://mailchi.mp/3b431540dd25/the-big-why

English cricket must not abandon its fans in pursuit of a new audience

SAM MORSHEAD: The most peculiar aspect of The Hundred is the apparent lack of empathy for the very real sense of disenfranchisement felt by existing cricket fans across the country

The Cricketer 3/4/2019 at 3:33 PM

There is a lot of strangeness about The Hundred.

From the haphazard announcement of its creation and the scattergun communications since to the very public trial-and-error process by which the rules seem to have been drawn up, the PR strategy behind the ECB’s soon-to-be-flagship concept could quite easily have been the product of a boozy lunch between Tom Harrison and Alan Partridge.

“Idea for a new competition,” as Steve Coogan’s hapless character would mumble into his dictaphone. “Women and children will love it. Back of the nets.”

You can imagine the scribbles on the back of a Travel Tavern paper napkin.

Insist research proves there is a gap for a fourth format in a world where three already feels gluttonous yet fail to offer the data for general scrutiny over an 11-month period? Tick.

Claim the game needs to be shorter to keep a hold on the attention spans of the modern yoof but introduce actual commercial breaks into the middle of an innings? Yup.

Fall out with your most powerful county ally because they have the gall to question it? You betcha.

Most peculiar of all, though, is the apparent lack of empathy for the very real sense of disenfranchisement felt by existing cricket fans across the country.

It is not an exaggeration to say the ECB’s brainchild is wildly unpopular - an online poll of The Cricketer’s readers recently revealed that just 12 per cent supported the new competition - yet the governing body have ploughed ahead with their own intrinsically flawed plan, like the rogue dictator of a central African state. Or the current Prime Minister.

The campaign began with a poorly coordinated launch, littered itself with mixed messages and then proceeded to become entirely deaf to criticism.

"When it comes to self-flagellation, English cricket is rapidly becoming the Silas of the sporting world; always thinking it has done wrong, always punishing itself for sins that only it sees"

We are surely just weeks away from being told that The Hundred means The Hundred.

More recently, Harrison has tried to present the competition as a genuine option for county regulars which, while an admirable sentiment, only goes to suggest that both he and his advisors have spent next to no time drilling down through the various blogs, forums and social media accounts belonging to diehards of the domestic game.

There, opinion is very close to universal: The Hundred is not welcome.

None of this is to say the ECB’s decision-makers do not necessarily want what they consider to be the best for the game - interpretations of what exactly “the best” means differ substantially from person to person, depending on commercial imperatives and the like - but the persistent refusal to acknowledge the thoughts and fears of the cricket-going public of England and Wales (you know, the ones most likely to attend games, put money behind the bar and wrap their children in merchandise) is totally perplexing.

The ECB have made little attempt to achieve anything close to what politics refers to as losers’ consent - a seal of reluctant approval from those who ultimately are not getting what they want, usually achieved by involving all parties in the conversation - and now discussion about The Hundred has become one-way.

Some arguments have gone as far as to suggest not getting behind the new competition in all its ambiguous glory is a vote for cricket’s demise, which is tangled rhetoric on a par with claims that Brexit voters cast their ballots purely to punish a younger generation (it is quite tough to believe the vast majority of the sport’s fanbase want the game they love to fail, after all).

Others have made the ham-fisted assertion that radical changes in the game are critical to avoid a fast and painful death, happily overlooking the seismic success of the pre-expansion Big Bash and IPL, and relative success of the CPL, PSL and various other franchise leagues (let’s not forget that the Vitality Blast has hit record attendance figures in two consecutive seasons).

"It is that combination of condescension, coercion and claptrap which will turn these folk away from the game, at the very time when the governing body is desperately doing all they can to attract fresh blood"

When it comes to self-flagellation, English cricket is rapidly becoming the Silas of the sporting world; always thinking it has done wrong, always punishing itself for sins that only it sees.

The ECB are placing The Hundred at the epicentre of their five-year plan for the 2020-24 period, during which time they intend to engage a new audience with the sport. Primarily, this audience is metropolitan, young and ethnically diverse. That is a fantastic initiative.

It is an attempt to reach into the realm of men, women and children who otherwise have not been engaged by the game for reasons of accessibility, perception or cost. It will bring the sport back from behind the deep, dark shadow of the Sky paywall, too. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Right now, there is a growing feeling among cricket’s existing fanbase that the game is at best ignoring their concerns, and at worst forgetting them altogether.

Those blogs and tweets tell the story of men and women who feel like they are being barked at and told what to think, who feel as though the game they grew up with is slipping out of their fingers.

This feeling can come from the price of a seat at Lord’s rising to as much as £150 per day during the Ashes, to amateur cricketers being told by pros via Twitter that the only way of preserving their clubs is to chop all matches down to T20 or shorter, to the ECB’s careless approach to bringing The Hundred to life, and many other ways besides.

It is that combination of condescension, coercion and claptrap which will turn these folk away from the game, at the very time when the governing body is desperately doing all they can to attract fresh blood.

The ECB, leading figures in the commercial cricket world and the enthusiastic advocates of The Hundred among the playing ranks might believe that the men and women who are so staunchly against the new competition are doom-mongers; backwards-facing and overly-resistant to change.

But, actually, they are fans. The sport needs them. And it needs to listen to them, too.