Cricket's Route Back to Normality?

 

Cricket's route back to normality: The challenges facing the sport in 2021

SAM MORSHEAD - SPECIAL REPORT:

On Monday, the UK government announced a rough guideline for exiting lockdown and returning to normal life in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Within the roadmap, there was a tentative timeline for the return of fans to sporting venues, giving cricket lovers across the country hope that they will be able to enjoy a day in the sun at their favourite ground in 2021.

But getting from roadmap to reality will be quite the journey.

Here, The Cricketer explores the routes cricket might take, what spectators can expect from their matchday experience this summer, how administrators are tackling the problems posed by the situation, and how counties will be affected.

The timeline

Within the government’s roadmap, there are two prominent dates for cricket’s administrators: May 17 and June 21.

If everything goes to plan, sporting venues will be allowed to welcome back either 4,000 spectators or 25 per cent of capacity - whichever is smaller - on May 17.

Five weeks later those limits could be removed, with 100 per cent of capacity permitted, depending on the progress of the vaccination programme in England and the rates of transmission of the virus. 

The fixture list

With the release of The Hundred schedule on Tuesday, the domestic cricket calendar for 2021 is complete. 

The County Championship opens up the season in April and May, with the T20 Blast group stage beginning on June 9 and running until July 18 - intersected by two rounds of red-ball cricket in early July - before The Hundred and the Royal London Cup coexist over the course of a month.

In the weeks prior to the government’s announcement, there had been tentative discussions between county officials about rearranging the campaign, with an eye on maximising the earning potential of the Blast.

Plan B would have seen the Championship played in its entirety in the early season, with the Blast moved back to late August and September, in an effort to allow counties the best chance possible to host full houses - given the T20 competition generates around 90 per cent of the counties’ matchday revenues. 

One minor tweak to the schedule - shifting the two Championship rounds in early July forward a month, and bumping the entire Blast back to start after June 21 - has also been discussed.

The chances of a late change to the already delayed fixture list appear to have faded with the news from Westminster on Monday, however.

The Cricketer has spoken to several senior figures on the county circuit, and the overwhelming feeling is that, if the roadmap progresses to plan, the domestic schedule needs to be set in stone to build consumer confidence. 

“If we suddenly started chopping the schedule around late in the day, I think that would be viewed quite negatively by fans,” Warwickshire chief executive Stuart Cain said.

“I think the season is set now. People have started to plan around their fixture lists. To be able to get crowds in for the Blast from June 21 is better than we thought we were going to get, so I’d leave the schedule as it is.”

Lancashire CEO Daniel Gidney said: “The vast majority of my colleagues would accept we don’t need a Plan B for the revision of the schedule now, that’s just going to increase uncertainty.

“Why would you book a ticket if the message out there was ‘we’re not quite sure and in a few weeks’ time we’re just going to turn the whole schedule around’.”

The pilots

While the government has set a tentative earliest date of May 17 for fans to be allowed back into matches across the country, there will be a large pilot programme in April to determine best practice.

Cricket believes it is in prime position to play a leading role in this initiative.

Spectators for County Championship matches in April are largely from older demographics, and the vast majority should have been vaccinated by the time the season begins - the government has set a target of mid-April for everyone over the age of 50 to have been offered a first dose.

Furthermore, cricket already has experience in hosting these test events - pre-season friendlies for the Bob Willis Trophy last July saw 1,000 fans permitted into The Oval and Edgbaston - while the ECB pioneered the bio-secure sports bubble last summer and worked closely with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport over Covid-safe protocols. 

In a coordinated PR push following the announcement of the roadmap on Monday, the chief executives of Surrey, Lancashire and Warwickshire - who operate three of the biggest venues on the county circuit - all called for limited capacity crowds from the start of the Championship in early April.

“As far as I am concerned I want to be able to get members back watching the County Championship in April,” Gidney said. 

Surrey chief exec Richard Gould said: "With outdoor leisure attractions like Thorpe Park, London Zoo and pub beer gardens all allowed to reopen on April 12, we very much hope that we will be permitted to open up the Kia Oval to some Surrey members for our first home game of the season, three days later.”

Cain told The Cricketer: “If on April 12, the Bullring (shopping centre in Birmingham) is rammed to the rafters with shoppers and beer gardens are full of drinkers who are going to go at it for eight or nine hours because they haven’t been able to for months, then surely it’s safe for 2,000 or 3,000 members to come and watch County Championship cricket.”

One reason for counties’ determination to get members back inside grounds in April is to reward them for their commitment to the sport last year.

All counties offered a variety of options for supporters once the season was canned as a spectator sport, from donations to full refunds. Across the country, the generosity of the county fan was spectacular.

“The challenge is this year,” says Cain. Nearly 65 per cent of Warwickshire members donated their membership fees to the club in 2020. “It’s unreasonable to ask a member to pay a membership fees without knowing if they’re going to get to see any cricket, and then ask them to donate again.

“The members across cricket deserve some recognition for the role they’ve played in keeping the sport alive.”

At Lancashire, that figure was 85 per cent. 

“They’ve been really tolerant, really patient, really loyal,” said Gidney.

Leicestershire, meanwhile, report that 93 per cent of their members donated their fees for last season, despite not seeing any cricket.

“It was magnificent,” chief executive Sean Jarvis told The Cricketer. The Foxes’ membership for 2021 is up 25 per cent compared to the same time in 2020.

“People are supportive in what we’re trying to achieve,” Jarvis said. “Our membership is not huge and not expensive but we have seen a good uptake. Our vision is not just about one year, it’s about a five-year plan and people are buying into that.

“We’re encouraged but it’s one hell of a challenge.”

A lobbying process will take place, involving the ECB, DCMS, government ministers and local health authorities, but cricket is generally confident that it will convince policy-makers that it is up to the task.

One way it will do that is by highlighting the importance of accumulating information prior to any mass opening of major sporting events.

With that in mind, the ECB, Lord’s and Edgbaston will pitch to the government to increase the number of fans permitted inside for the two Test matches against New Zealand from June 2. 

“It is a big leap. If you go from 5,000 people up to 25,000 then there isn’t really a chance to test the protocols to see if you can do it safely,” Cain said. 

“I’m sure that Wimbledon, Wembley for the European Championship, and other grounds can learn as a result of those pilots.”

Gidney agrees. 

“The more pilots we have the more data we have. Last year we had two pilots, and then it got stopped. We need lots of pilots, we need lots of different test environments, we need loads of data parameters - and let's give the government the data so we don't rush in blind on May 17.

“You can’t just go from nought to 60 with this.”

A small working party of county chief executives has been formed to explore the ways in which a safe return of crowds can be delivered, with a focus of delivering solutions rather than asking questions of policy-makers. They will be informed by Steve Elworthy, the ECB’s director of special projects, who was at the heart of the behind-closed-doors bio-secure bubble success of 2020.

Crucially, cricket will not look to position itself in an adversarial role in its conversations with the government. There were moments in 2020, mostly relating to the recreational game, when ECB figures were frustrated by the prime minister’s rhetoric - notably his description of the ball as a “vector for disease” - but the governing body chose to keep its public messaging relatively benign. 

Cricket was one of the first team games to return in July, and that outcome is in the mind of the sport’s administrators as they look to convince politicians that hosting more spectators sooner can be achieved safely.

“It’s not about lobbying in a traditional sense,” said Gidney. “Let’s make this a technical rather than a political conversation, which I don’t think will help anybody.”

“It’s important to have a national approach to this,” Cain said. “If we are going to use pilots then it would be crazy for us to use a methodology which wasn't adopted by Old Trafford for the football, or Wimbledon for the tennis.”

“The collaboration that’s going to be required once again is huge,” said Jarvis.

That national approach must be good enough to be spread across sports, satisfy the government, and be acceptable to Public Health England and its local advisory bodies, who had sign-off on event protocol in 2020.

Conundrum No.1: Glamorgan

There is additional complexity in Cardiff, where Glamorgan’s route to welcoming fans back to Sophia Gardens remains a whole lot less clear than the other 17 first-class counties’.

Glamorgan are subject to the jurisdiction of Welsh authorities, who have yet to produce an equivalent timeline to the roadmap unveiled by Downing Street on Monday.

In Wales, there is a tentative target date of March 15 for non-essential shops to reopen, but there is no date for the wholescale return of schoolchildren to their places of learning, let alone the resumption of major events. 

A statement from Glamorgan read: “We are continuing to work closely with Welsh Government and ECB in regards to the safe return of spectators this summer.

“As a club, we have been working hard in preparing for a number of scenarios covering crowd capacities and timings.”

Conundrum No.2: The county ground juggling act

For the smaller grounds, implementing a reduction in capacities and introducing Covid-safe protocols come with substantial caveats.

The Cricketer has been told of at least two venues that would be unable to accommodate 50 per cent of capacity as well as ensuring all relevant public health provisions - such as the zoning of certain areas of the stadium and one-way systems - are in place. With that in mind, if step four on the government roadmap was delayed, but stadiums were allowed to up their attendances from 25 per cent to 50 per cent, for example, the smaller grounds would not see the benefit. 

“We approach the season with caution,” said Jarvis.

“We’re aware of reduced capacities coming into the ground and we remain hopeful we can get 100 per cent in sooner rather than later, but we’re treading carefully.

“Leicestershire are still implementing a mitigation strategy - cost reduction, maximising revenue streams where we can - but we’re approaching it with caution. We’re trying to make sure we get through this year breaking even, and then build again for 2022.”

What’s more, some counties will see increased playing costs in 2021, due to the changing nature of the fixture list, at a time when their revenues are thin.

“With the increased number of Championship games and us playing down south a lot more in our conference then there are increased expenses,” said Jarvis. Leicestershire suffered lost revenues of around £1million in 2020.

“We’ve got to watch our costs with eagle eyes to ensure we continue to mitigate everything we possibly can while at the same time evolving and developing.”

The ticket sales

“There will be people desperate just to book whatever they can, and there are others who we’re going to have to coax,” Gidney said. “People are nervous.”

With that in mind, expect to see considerably more information about what used to be second-nature activities pre-Covid when booking tickets in 2021. Cricket bosses will attempt to put supporters’ minds at rest by explaining stadium zonal systems, sanitisation processes, and other health-related matters in detail. The ECB will launch a 'Buy With Confidence' scheme from Monday, designed to put minds at rest.

Even when they have assuaged lingering doubts, county cricket will still have to compete for audience with The Hundred. 

Heavily-marketed teams packed with well-known players will play four men’s and women’s double-headers in seven major British cities at the height of the school holidays, with tickets on offer for as little as £5 for under 16s and £10 for adults. 

The ECB have committed substantial resource to the new competition. Gidney said in a conversation with journalists this week that The Hundred’s marketing budget stands at £100,000 per match, though the budget includes promotional activity for the women's tournament, associated projects such as Hundred Rising (a recruitment programme for young creatives) and other messaging - and the counties expect its target market to overlap with the Blast’s core demographics.

“The Blast schedule got confirmed so late. It’s really put us under pressure,” Gidney said.

“We’ve got this huge marketing machine that’s coming in for The Hundred starting March 1, and we’ve got to work alongside that to make sure we give it our best go.”

Lancashire hosted a club record 95,319 fans at their home Blast matches in 2019 but have a target of just 80,000 in 2021, given the twin impacts of uncertain fan behaviour and the competing forces of The Hundred. They remain optimistic, however, and are selling their major matchdays from July 1 onwards to 100 per cent capacity. More than 9,000 fans have rolled over their tickets for the home Roses clash against Yorkshire in the Blast, while 29,000 rolled Test tickets on for the visit of India in September, and 11,000 took up the option for the T20 against Pakistan.

“We know there will be a Venn diagram and there will be current fans of T20 that will want to see The Hundred,” says Gidney. “It won’t be an entirely new audience; that’s just being pragmatic.”

In a twist of fate, it is county members who will have first access to tickets for The Hundred.

The counties themselves have been charged with promoting the tournament to their own fanbases, ahead of a general priority sales window which is due to open on April 7.

They will be incentivised by the fact they are set to benefit financially from The Hundred, with host venues taking 30 per cent of ticket sales in addition to the £1.3million dividend paid to all 18 first-class counties by the ECB as a convincer for supporting the concept in the first place.

At the same time, though, the counties will be hoping to generate fresh interest in the Blast. 

The ECB have committed to increased advertising for the T20 competition, with a dedicated promotional campaign - 'Blast Off' - due to be launched on March 1. The central marketing budget for the Blast is bigger than ever before, and advertising slots have been taken around Channel 4's coverage of the fourth Test between India and England, as well as across the white-ball series - which is to be screened in the UK by Sky. It is believed to be the first time the Blast has enjoyed TV advertising. 

It promises to be a difficult balancing act. 

The confidence of employees

Before fans can be allowed back through turnstiles, cricket grounds across the country will have to ready themselves for their return. 

Many have not cranked their hospitality operations into gear for the best part of 18 months, while many of the young men and women who keep the machine chugging on matchdays have spent more than a year out of work or on furlough. 

County officials are conscious of the pastoral care they afford to their employees when they are asked to get back to work. 

Edgbaston employs up to 1,000 people for major match days, the vast majority of whom are under 40 years old and come from the local area.

“You could get to a point where the profile of the crowd is such that they are probably all vaccinated but the profile of the working staff is considerably younger and so haven’t been vaccinated,” Cain said.

“It’s great talking about crowds but I’ve also got a duty of care to the staff, to make sure that not only are they safe practically but they are safe emotionally as well.

“There are people who have been on furlough and barely left the house for a year, and to tell them to go from that to suddenly working in a 25,000-person stadium is not easy. We have work to do to get them back into that mindset.”

Lancashire sent all employees a detailed guide to their new working environment when Old Trafford hosted England’s behind-closed-doors fixtures last summer, and Gidney says the intention is to do the same again this spring.

“It felt like over-communication, but the feedback we got was that the staff really appreciated actually seeing and hearing what we were doing to keep them safe,” he said.

The lateral flow tests

Once pilot programmes are commissioned, and grounds are readied, fans need to be successfully and safely reintroduced to sporting environments.

“We’re aware of reduced capacities coming into the ground and we remain hopeful we can get 100 per cent in sooner rather than later, but we’re treading carefully"

The sports industry is looking into how it can implement rapid-result lateral flow tests as an additional layer of protection.

These tests can show if an individual is Covid-positive in as little as 30 minutes, and at a cost of between £3 and £5 per unit are considerably more affordable than the £100-£150 PCR tests which have typically been used by sporting bodies to date. It is unlikely that, at those prices, the cost would be passed on to fans, either. 

Spectators would need to spend a short period of time in a holding area outside the stadium before being permitted to the turnstiles. 

For venues like Old Trafford, with its 17 acres onsite, or Edgbaston, with nearly a year’s experience as a coronavirus testing facility, the logistics of these operations is considerably more simple than for smaller county grounds.

Even some of the larger venues would be posed with tricky juggling acts should onsite lateral flow testing become a staple of mass attendance in 2021: would a Lord’s crowd have to queue back to St John’s Wood tube station, for example? 

Lancashire have taken an interest in the government’s lateral flow testing research being conducted by scientists at the University of Liverpool and will offer to become an arm of the project.

“We’d love to send some management over and to be involved and engaged in that process,” Gidney said. 

The vaccination passports

A more controversial proposal is the introduction of vaccination passports.

Politically sensitive, the concept is seen in many quarters as impinging on personal liberties, but some in the sports industry see it as a way of returning large crowds to major events as quickly as possible. 

The government’s roadmap details how it will investigate the use of “Covid status certification… using testing or vaccination data to confirm in different settings that people have a lower risk of transmitting to others”, and in an interview in December the vaccination minister Nadhim Zahawi suggested that “restaurants and bars and cinemas and other venues, sports venues, will probably also use that system - as they have done with the (test and trace) app”.

While united on much of what it needs to do to return fans to stadiums, cricket is not yet quite on the same page when it comes to the difficult subject of vaccine passports.

Gidney insisted it must not be ruled out.

“The travel industry is already moving in this direction,” he said. “So ultimately this won’t be the domain of national governments.

“SAGA have announced that you can’t go on cruises unless you demonstrate that you’d have a vaccine: there you have a private company which has set out a policy for booking.

“Emirates, our naming rights partner, were one of the first airlines to insist on a negative PCR test within 72 hours of take-off. So the travel industry has really been leading in this area. 

“However difficult that is, in terms of return of crowds, it should be considered part of the talk. It’s not a silver bullet but it’s something that should be considered.”

Cain was less emphatic, preferring to allow government to lead rather than private companies.

“We’re open-minded and we’ll take whatever government guidance is in place. It would be quite dangerous for sport to try to adopt its own policies,” he said.

The matchday experience

All that, and we still haven’t arrived at the moment a spectator takes his or her first step inside a UK cricket ground for more than eight months. 

For the cricket-going public of England and Wales, 2021 will be a vastly different experience - especially until step four of the government roadmap is activated, which currently has the June 21 target date.

Facemasks may well be required inside stadiums - as is the case in the ongoing Pakistan Super League, where 50 per cent of stadiums are open to supporters - while sanitising stations will be commonplace and grounds may well be sectioned off. 

“If it means you have to wear a mask and there’s a space between you and the next person, that’s a price well worth paying to come and watch live cricket,” said Cain. “I think people will be tolerant about going into stadia with whatever protocols they have to adopt.”

Complete laps of the inner or outer perimeter of a venue, a favourite pastime of many county cricket supporters, may well be temporarily ruled off-limits, too. Edgbaston, for example, has a plan to cut its stadium into three self-contained “mini stadiums”, with the reduction of transmission risk at the heart of the idea.

Expect paper tickets and cash to be widely phased out.

Most large arenas had already begun to transition away from both prior to the pandemic, but the events of the past year have accelerated that process.

Edgbaston have launched an app for its tickets, while all its concession stands will take contactless and card payments only in an attempt to minimise transmission. Additionally, some crowd members will be able to make the most of a serve-to-seat service, reducing congestion at the bars. 

Counties with unreserved seating policies, especially when it comes to the Blast, will have to review and allocated assigned seats, while some of the larger venues in urban areas will look at staggered arrivals of spectators.

Edgbaston, at the heart of a primarily residential area of Birmingham, is one such example.

“We’ve got to think of the impact on the local community as well,” Cain said.

“One of the biggest concerns is how people arrive at the ground, and how people visit local shops and use bus routes.”

The route back to normality

There are challenges, plenty of them, but those in charge of the county game are as positive this week as they have been at any point over the past year.

“One of the biggest worries I’ve had is that if we hadn’t got crowds in this summer, that’d be two years of people finding other things to do,” said Cain, who is hoping to see Warwickshire recover after a seven-figure drop in revenue in 2020.

Gidney and his Lancashire team have the ominous task of fighting back from a year-on-year drop in turnover of £18million - down from a club-record £34m in 2019. But he believes the appetite is there on the part of fans, and the operational ability is there on the part of administrators, to give cricket a kickstart this summer.

“People talk about the Roaring Twenties after the First World War; I genuinely believe we're going to have the same again,” he said. 

“There's something like £250billion of savings in households… because people just haven't been spending any money. 

“We safely showed last year we can get people playing cricket - that was our K2 to climb, now we've got our Everest. After speaking to a number of other CEOs, we're really up to this challenge and we want to find a way of doing this safely and as quickly as we can.”