Specsavers Sponsorship Elapses

ECB Didn't see that coming...

Andrew MillerUK editor, ESPNcricinfo

The precarious finances of English cricket look set to take a further hit this summer, after Specsavers' deals to sponsor both the County Championship and England men's Tests against West Indies and Pakistan elapsed without a replacement being confirmed for the 2020 season.

Specsavers, the opticians and eye-test specialists, came on board as the County Championship's principal sponsor in February 2016, on a four-year deal that was due to end after the 2019 season. Two years later, they took over from Investec as principal sponsors of England men's home Tests, on an initial two-year deal that encompassed high-profile series against India in 2018 and Australia the following year.

However, it would appear that that deal has not at this stage been renewed, despite the huge publicity the company received after the bespectacled Jack Leach played a key role in England's famous victory in last summer's third Ashes Test.

On Thursday, Specsavers branding was removed from all social-media references to the County Championship and England's Test series in 2020, as well as from the ECB's official website.

This year's County Championship had been due to get underway at the weekend, with the first round of four-day games originally scheduled to start on April 12, Easter Sunday. However, the season has been postponed to May 28 at the earliest due to the Covid-19 outbreak, and further delays are anticipated with the UK currently implementing social distancing measures to combat the spread of the virus.

The ECB is mapping out a series of contingency plans, depending on how much of the English season is still available to be staged, as and when the current restrictions on live sport are lifted. Tom Harrison, the ECB chief executive, recently stated, in a letter seen by ESPNcricinfo, that a complete cancellation of the English season could cost the game up to £300 million.

On Wednesday, the PCA announced that, following discussions with the ECB and the 18 first-class counties, £1 million of domestic prize money would be redistributed to help fund player wages. An agreement was also reached for counties to furlough their playing staff if required, an option that several have since confirmed they will be taking up.

Last week, England's contracted players donated £500,000 of their salaries to the ECB and selected good causes, with the women's squad also accepting 20% pay cuts in line with those of their coaching and support staff.

West Indies were due to arrive in England next month to begin a three-Test tour, with the first match scheduled to start at The Oval on June 4, but that prospect looks increasingly unlikely.

"The deadline of 28 May still stands but, as you say, it's looking less and less likely that we're going to be out there in June," Ashley Giles, England men's director of cricket, said.

Spitting on ball could be banned over coronavirus fears.
Tim Wigmore.

London Daily Telegraph.

Thursday, 9 April 2020.

PTG 3078-15239.

Players may be banned from spitting on the ball because of fears that it could spread coronavirus when play eventually resumes, a series of scientific experts have warned.  "Spitting on the ball would definitely be a risk, particularly given how infective the virus is and how long it has been found to survive on inanimate surfaces”, said Richard Bradbury, an epidemiologist from Federation University in Melbourne. Sanjaya Senanayake, an infectious diseases specialist from Australian National University, said that he would recommend "definitely no spitting on the ball" when cricket did resume. "The virus has been found in saliva”.

Generally one player on each team will spit on the ball after each delivery by a pace bowler. This imparts moisture on the ball, in order to maintain a shiny side and to help the ball swing. "Spitting is worse than just throwing a ball”, Senanayake said.  When moisture has been applied, the ball is then thrown to other fielders, who catch the ball and then throw it to the bowler.

But coronavirus can transmit through saliva, meaning that if one player had Covid-19 then their teammates and opposing players would risk contracting coronavirus if they touch the ball and then touch their faces before they had washed their hands. As such, spitting on the ball while on the field is believed to significantly increase the risks of coronavirus transmission.  Spitting "is a classic risk of fomite transmission on a much higher level”, said Rowland Kao, an epidemiologist from the University of Edinburgh. "So it would be a bad idea”. 

Kao also said that spitting on the ball also risked transmitting other diseases as well as Covid-19. In the event of closed doors matches being played after the lockdown period.  Banning spitting on the ball could reduce risks of transmission to players, officials and groundsmen,. If spitting on the ball was barred, that would be likely to reduce the amount of swing that the ball generated, and make conditions easier for batsmen.

The England and Wales Cricket Board (EWCB) are currently drawing up plans for initially playing behind closed doors but indicated spitting on the ball has not been part of their discussions so far. "We are working on creating a medically sterile environment at grounds and around teams and how strict those are will be governed by medical advice”, said Steve Elworthy, the EWCB’s director of events (PTG 3063-15170, 27 March 2020). 

Gould recounts his role in Newlands ball-tampering.
Paul Hayward.

London Daily Telegraph.

Thursday, 9 April 2020.

PTG 3078-15244.

Ian Gould still has the balls that featured in one of the game’s biggest tampering scandal and brought Australian cricket to its knees. As third umpire in that seismic Cape Town Test in March 2018, ‘Gunner' Gould has the evidence in a London vault, but says you would be surprised if you took a look.  “If you saw the balls, you would get it completely wrong”, says Gould, nicknamed ‘Gunner' for his brief time in goal for Arsenal. “At the end of the day, the sandpaper didn’t get on that ball. They were working to get the ball to be pristine. Once they’d got one side bigger and shinier, that’s when the sandpaper was coming in”.

Gould’s recollections of one of cricket’s greatest scandals are shot through with comedy as well as first-hand insight. Midway through the drama that saw Steve Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft banned, an International Cricket Council official called the third umpire’s room to say he had spotted a separate offence. Bear in mind, the on-field officials had already challenged Bancroft and the mood was suffocatingly tense.

In his new autobiography, 'Gunner – My Life in Cricket’ (Pitch Publishing), Gould, 62, recalls passing on the new information from the third umpire’s booth, saying: “Stay calm, and ask Nathan Lyon what colour socks he’s wearing’”.  The reply from the pitch: “Seriously? Go on, what’s the punchline?”  Gould again: “No punchline, seriously. They think that Nathan is wearing black socks. Ask him to show you his socks”.  The reply was: "They want us to ask Nathan Lyon what colour socks he’s wearing, in the middle of this s--- storm?’”

Lyon’s response was expletive-filled, but he did run off and return with white socks on. Then the true scandal really broke, when more TV pictures showed Bancroft concealing sandpaper and shame descended not only on Australia’s cricket team but the nation.  Gould says: “I didn’t realise what the repercussions would be. If you look back on it now, Australia were out of control probably two years, maybe three years, before that, but not in this sense. Maybe – behavioural, chatty, being pretty average people.  But when it came into my earpiece I didn’t think the Prime Minister of Australia was going to come tumbling down on these three guys" [PTG 2392-12123, 25 March 2018]. 

All Gould thought was: "how do I put this out to the guys on the field without making it an overreaction. It was a bit like on ‘Mastermind' when the light is on top of you and you’re going – oh dear, how do I talk through this?  When the TV director said, ‘He’s put something down the front of his trousers,’ I started giggling, because that didn’t sound quite right. “Obviously, what’s come from it is for the betterment of Australian cricket – and cricket generally.”

Gould is a bridge to another age. He was “the last of the footballer-cricketers” at Highbury, after Denis Compton et al, learnt of his England One Day International summons as a wicketkeeper “in the 147 Snooker Club in Hove, when a call came through for me on the payphone by the tables”, and won two trophies for Sussex in an era when “Imran [Khan] and Garth [Le Roux] were a frightening prospect”.

The relentless travel and rootlessness of travelling (one year he spent 80 days at home) took its toll, with a depressive illness he has overcome. He says: “At the end of it, I physically didn’t know what I was doing. I was turning up at airports, I didn’t know what teams I was going to umpire. It was horrific”, In the book he writes. “For a time, I didn’t really know who I was or where I was. I felt like a shell of a man”.

An international umpire from 2006 until he retired for good this year, Gould says of ball-tampering: “I’ve been told there’s been an era when people were putting a massive amount of tape on their hands. Some of it was as simple as an ordinary plaster with the gauze taken out and emery cloth or sandpaper put in where the gauze was. That was rife. Also rife was people wearing Elastoplast tape, stretch tape, that had superglue on it”.

Gould, Richard Illingworth and Nigel Llong took over the 2018 South Africa-Australia series midway through. They were warned by the International Cricket Council to expect conflict and keep an eye on Australia’s handling of the ball. “It was physical contact I was worried about”, Gould says. Lawyers had been called in to fight over a claim that Kagiso Rabada had bumped into Smith and the mood was hostile (PTG 2384-12086, 21 March 2018).

Gould admits he saw an escalation in sledging: “I remember once, I just stopped a game and said, ‘Look, if you want to carry on talking like that, let’s all go to the pub. If you said that about someone in the back end of 'The Lanes' in Brighton, you’d end up in the Sussex General Hospital.’ I remember stopping a game over something personal and the guy saying, ‘It’s OK Ian, I play with him in the IPL, he’s a friend of mine’”.

As for the Cape Town balls, in London, Gould says: “If people want to have a look at them, they can. But then I’ve also got the balls from the [next] Johannesburg Test and it looks like they haven’t come out of the wrappers. Everyone was petrified in that Test and didn’t want to go near the ball”.