Tomorrow, the ECB and several county chairs are going before the Digital, Culture, Media And Sport Parliamentary committee to answer questions regarding racism within English cricket and their responses to it (or the lack thereof). This is certainly an important issue which should be questioned and addressed, but it is far from the only problem that the sport has regarding diversity and equality. The treatment of women cricketers by the ECB and the counties has been (and continues to be) shameful.
This genuinely angers me, and never more so than when the ECB posts press releases, promotional videos and friendly articles by useful idiots in the press declaring how committed they are to gender equality. It is absolute bullshit. I’ve posted about this before, after the ECB posted a series of videos on Twitter proclaiming their support for the International Women’s Day 2020 campaign ‘Each For Equal’. It’s fair to say that I was not impressed.
In the first season of The Hundred, the total player wage bill for the women’s competition was £1.3m compared to £6.7m for the men. This meant that the average man was paid £45,000 more than the average woman. The ECB announced pay rises for everyone in this year’s competition, which was presented by some useful idiots in the press as being a “108%” (or “more than doubled”) increase for the women compared to ‘just’ 25% for the men. A real blow for equality in sport. This was technically accurate, but hardly tells the full story. With the total wage bills being £8.3m and £2.3m in 2022, the average pay gap for women cricketers has actually increased by £5,000 to £50,000.
The first question this scenario begs to be asked is whether it is legal. If you had a company with a 50-50 gender split and every single woman was paid £50,000 less than a man in the same job, you could expect to spend most of your time in lawyers’ offices and employment tribunals.
We understand in sport that men’s and women’s sports are typically separate, with their own discrete economic and competition structures and therefore it is not unfair for Cristiano Ronaldo to be paid more than Ella Toone, for example. However, it is not immediately apparent that this would apply to The Hundred. Almost every source of income is pooled together from both competitions, with no distinction for what proportion can (or should) be attributed to the men or women. The TV deals all include both men’s and women’s games. Every ticket sold (barring the season openers) is for both a men’s and women’s game. The same sponsorship deals cover both competitions. At the same time, it would seem like women do the same amount of work as the men in The Hundred, playing the same number of games and having apparently equal media and sponsorship commitments. It would be very interesting to hear what someone with more knowledge than me regarding employment law had to say on the issue.
Even if total pay equity is not legally required, the current balance is significantly out of proportion to the value they bring to the competition and the compensation they therefore deserve. With wage budgets of £8m and £2m, the women will on average be paid 25% as much as the men this season. According to the ECB’s own figures, the women’s Hundred had 52.4% of the attendance and (for the final) 58.3% of the TV viewers compared to the men’s games. It would seem to logically follow that the women therefore deserve to be paid at least 50% of what the men receive, or double what they are currently due in 2022.
To be clear: The TV audiences are the key statistic regarding how much income can be attributed to the women’s competition. The Sky and BBC TV deals alone account for £36.5m, roughly 70% of The Hundred’s revenue. If women’s cricket is attracting 52.4% of the men’s audience (and it is) then it follows that they are earning 34.4% (0.524/1.524) of those TV deals, or £12.5m. This would mean that the women’s competition is already making a profit, and would continue to do so even if their total wage budget was increased to £8m per year.
At the same time, the men’s competition has significantly greater costs. As well as having higher salaries for the players, it also requires an annual payment to the counties of £24.7m to compensate them for losing contracted men’s players during the season as well as lost income from hosting fewer, lower status men’s games in the middle of summer. This means that the men’s competition earns £24m in UK TV revenue (65.6% of £36.5m) but costs at least £32.7m. Even if you attribute 100% of ticket revenue (around £6.5m) to the men’s Hundred, it would still be making a significant loss. In short: The women’s Hundred appears to be subsidising the men’s.
However, these attendance and viewing figures don’t tell the whole story. The scheduling of The Hundred in the first year was entirely focussed on the men’s competition. Every single men’s game in 2021 was in a primetime television/attendance slot, by which I mean outside of work hours and avoiding clashes with the men’s Test series against India. By contrast, every weekday women’s game (bar the season opener) started at 3pm or 3.30pm and there were also ten women’s games scheduled to take place at the same time as the Tests.
That the women attracted such a large audience in spite of these handicaps placed on them by the ECB is incredible and, I would argue, suggests that they are significantly undervalued. After all, if the roles were reversed and every women’s game was given this kind of priority, would the men’s attendances and TV audiences still be higher? There is a reason why almost no sports play their games during work hours, if they can avoid it.
It bears saying that achieving equal pay in The Hundred would be much easier with the support of the PCA. The women players are all members, and you might expect that their union would be supporting them gaining more (and, I would argue, fairer) pay. However, the most obvious way for the ECB to implement this would having a £5m wage budget for each competition, which would represent a 37.5% pay cut for men. As I have previously posted, the PCA always seems to prioritise the interests of their male members over everyone else.
Even so, to pay women cricketers so little would seem to be too hypocritical even for the ECB to stomach. After all, they post lovely videos on all of their social media accounts proclaiming their support for International Women’s Day every single year. Given that one of the key themes running through every single International Women’s Day campaign is the fight against pay disparity, and the ECB actively promotes these campaigns, supporting equal pay in their new competition would seem like a no-brainer.
Which should tell you exactly how much I rate the ‘brains’ at the ECB.
Thanks for reading. If you have any comments, please leave them below.
Being Outside Cricket 
Think I’m right in saying that there is significant female representaton on ECB Board plus Non Execs who should know better, yet this remuneration structure was approved
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There is something delicious about watching the utterly useless English cricket media, who since 2014 have been the propaganda arm of the ECB now turning on one of their hero’s, namely Stuart Broad. Remember how they loved the cricket genius Twitter handle, and giggled like school girls at the thought of giving KP a kicking?
But now it is Broad, who ironically has become the new KP. Difficult to manage, too big for his boots. In the same way they all rallied to captain Cook, now they do the same to another hopeless captain. How dare Broad say it as it is. How dare he say he is one of the better players.
They even now say that he and Anderson should not get a special send off. Were they saying this about Cook on that day he left, and an entire test match was turned into one of the most nauseous, embarrassing matches in English cricket history? Oh no.
What this confirms is how useless the English cricket media are, and how completely enthralled they are to ECB top brass. Strauss, Cook, and Root really do walk on water. And God help anyone who dares to be their own man with a different opinion.
Broad will get little sympathy because he has been on both sides.He was a company man, now he finds himself in the cold outside. The ECB and their embarrassing chums in the media will not tolerate anything but obedience to the cricket mafia.
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Don’t know why that has posted there.
It was entered as a new post, not a reply.
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No, they shouldn’t get equal pay…..unless they can prove that the woman’s game is selling equally the same amount of tickets at the ground, and at the same price as the men’s tickets. Same with TV subscribers. Woman’s commercial cricket is new. They need to show there is a clear commercial demand for tickets.
Equality in the entertainment industry is a silly concept unless you sell the same amount of tickets. It’s down to bums on seats and product sold. In the last ten years some of the music industry’s best performing acts have been woman. Adele, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift. Woman delivering massive commercial returns.
If a man demanded equality and equal pay to say Adele… the answer coming back would be…. “do you sell the same amount of downloads and CDs as Adele does?…. Can you sell out arenas and massive global tours?” If the answer was no, you would not get equal pay. The very idea would be silly. The male singer would be laughed out of the record companies offices.
How many tickets for the hundred are sold to fans who only want to watch the woman’s match? We don’t know unless you play the matches at different venues. If the woman’s match is played on a separate day to the men’s match do they sell out the same amount of tickets at the same prices?
If woman get equal pay to men and they are not selling the same amount of tickets and tv subscriptions they are effectively being subsidised by the men. If I was the men, I would then consider going on strike because it’s money you earned.
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Money THEY earned? Will the ECB fork out child benefits to the population? Will the ECB pay for schools and what not, since you know the economic development in Britain, which is partly a result of such social amenities and investment in the people make cricket as lucrative a career as it is, compared to say what it is in Zimbabwe? Or do you think your average international England player would pursue a career in cricket if their World Cup pay would amount to $500 for an entire tournament?
One problem is that you can’t disaggregate or isolate what brings in what, and what costs are associated with everything. Eg. with football do clubs actually pay for the police presence to deal with hooligans? Or are they effectively subsidised by the state? Same with cricket. Those tax breaks and incentives that cricket clubs enjoy are paid for. By ordinary people.
If you stack everything against the women, like the ECB have done, and you still get attendance rate of 52%, at worse times (during working hours, with international cricket in England being broadcast), with more competition from the same sport, you can’t simply justify 15% of the wages being spent on women. Should be at least double that.
If you take this step further, a decent argument can be made that male cricketers should receive about 20% of what they are currently earning. After all, is cricket (on Sky) not heavily paid for by football? Why are male cricketers entitled to money that is actually earned by footballers?
Also, if you take it one step further, should England international cricketers not get a wage reduction of 50-60%, based on the fact that people with similar skillsets from say Zimbabwe, Pakistan or Sri Lanka get paid peanuts compared to them? The same applies to overpaid bloat like Harrison. Somehow I doubt that the CEO of CSA makes about 15 million ZAR a year.
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Whatever we may think of the ECB, and I would hope you would not accuse me of being an ECB fan their revenue comes from tv deals where subscribers pay monthly fees, and tickets at the ground, plus sponsorship deals.
Show me the evidence that these tv subscribers pay monthly fees to watch commercial woman’s cricket. Show me the evidence that woman’s cricket can sell out large venues on a regular basis when there is no men’s match on the same day. Your point about footballers is a valid one, and one I have made myself. Cricket is being subsidised by football fans. If there was a delivery system that allowed people to just pay per event we would have a much clearer idea of what generates the revenue. I’m sceptical that woman’s sport would attract many paying subscribers at this time.
Play the 100 matches on different days and let’s see what the audience figures are for each match. If the woman’s matches can sell out at the grounds, and there is good viewing figures on subscription tv then pay them more, Perhaps one day woman’s cricket will be more popular than the men’s. (If the men don’t improve soon that may happen.) And when it does, I will have absolutely no problem with the woman getting more money than the men.
Personally I think it’s absurd that woman tennis players get equal prize money at Wimbledon. To start with they only play best of three sets instead of best of five. (Wheres the equality in that?) Many early round woman’s matches are just two sets, 6-1 6-2 say that often struggle to last more 45 mins an hour if you are lucky. And it’s very unclear if people would pay the same for a ticket if the whole days play on a particular court was all woman’s matches.
So woman in tennis at Wimbledon get the same pay for doing far less work. Funny how the pro equality people have absolutely not problem with that.
I look forward to woman’s Premiership footballers demanding the same money to their men’s counter parts. And the clubs having to pay it by subsidising it by taking the money from the men’s players who generate the viewing figures. I’m sure those who subscribe hundreds of pound to support men’s Premiership football will be delighted when their team can’t attract the best players because half the money goes to the woman’s players,
As I say, if the woman can generate the money they should get the dosh. It happens in the music industry, and I have no problem with it, But I see no evidence there is a massive paying market for woman’s cricket.
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Mark, thank you for articulating the counter-view so clearly.
I think that the mens & womens double-headers are one of the few (only?) positive points coming from the Hindred, bringing women’s cricket into much greater visibility. I am, however, deeply sceptical that were they to be played on a stand-alone basis the women’s matches would attract more than a fraction of the crowds (and TV viewings) of the Men’s.
Women’s cricket at the international is good competitve sport, but in UK domestic games the talent pool is spread too thinly. Fielding especially is very weak and there are too many grins and shouder shrugs at poor execution. Developing and promoting women’s domestic cricket is 100% the way to go; equal pay at this stage, for the reasons Mark gives, is not.
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Thank you, although I will not comment on the merits of the quality of the woman’s game, I leave that to others who will decide if that is what they want to pay for. And if they want to pay in big numbers to watch, then that’s fine by me. It’s their money and they can spend it as they see fit.
The equality argument that is relevant is that woman should be able to play whatever sport they want to play. If they want to play sports that have traditionally been played by men (cricket, rugby, football) that’s ok. However, that is a very different issue to the one of playing for commercial returns. That is down to the customer or fan. They decide the value not the players. It’s not an equality issue, but a market issue. You can choose to play cricket or rugby or whatever as man or a woman, but you can’t force people to pay to watch you.
You can not demand to be paid the same as men when there is no evidence there is a large commercial market to watch. It would be like me demanding I be paid the same as Adele to sing at The Royal Albert Hall. It would be ludicrous and absurd as I wouldn’t sell a single ticket and rightly so. But it wouldn’t be an equality issue, it would be a market one based on demand. Or in my case a lack of demand.
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I’ve added a couple of paragraphs to the post to address your points:
To be clear: The TV audiences are the key statistic regarding how much income can be attributed to the women’s competition. The Sky and BBC TV deals alone account for £36.5m, roughly 70% of The Hundred’s revenue. If women’s cricket is attracting 52.4% of the men’s audience (and it is) then it follows that they are earning 34.4% (0.524/1.524) of those TV deals, or £12.5m. This would mean that the women’s competition is already making a profit, and would continue to do so even if their total wage budget was increased to £8m per year.
At the same time, the men’s competition has significantly greater costs. As well as having higher salaries for the players, it also requires an annual payment to the counties of £24.7m to compensate them for losing contracted men’s players during the season as well as lost income from hosting fewer, lower status men’s games in the middle of summer. This means that the men’s competition earns £24m in UK TV revenue (65.6% of £36.5m) but costs at least £32.7m. Even if you attribute 100% of ticket revenue (around £6.5m) to the men’s Hundred, it would still be making a significant loss. In short: The women’s Hundred appears to be subsidising the men’s.
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Danny “The women’s Hundred appears to be subsidising the men’s.”
Not so, as you point out the men’s game has much higher costs. As you rightly point out the cost to the counties. What are the counties? Cricket clubs built up over many decades , and paid for by people watching exclusively men’s cricket. The woman are playing on facilities that were built up and funded for over a hundred years from money exclusively to watch men’s cricket.
How would the woman do if they had to build their own facilities from the ground up? New stadiums and such? Where is the evidence they would be able to generate the money to do so?
There is little evidence that there is big commercial returns from professional woman’s sport when separated out from double header events. For example, the Olympics, and the Grand slam tennis events are played at the same venues and same facilities at the same time. But the olympics is a one off event every four years, and is shown mostly on free to air tv around the world. The tennis majors account for just four events a year. The woman’s football world cup fairs better as a stand alone event, and woman’s football is slowly becoming more commercially viable. But it’s a long way away from the popularity and revenue of the men’s game.
We simply don’t know what woman’s market value is unless they do it as a stand alone sport with their own events and the money they raise is exclusive to their event. Woman’s tennis players and golfers have attracted sponsors from various clothing lines and cosmetic companies, and the top players make a descent living that way. But the viewing figures on pay for view sports channels is small compared to the men.
Woman’s cricketers and footballers need to build their brand, and they do that by providing the product, improving the standard first, and the money comes later when you prove there is a market. Many woman singers are seen as better than the men so deserve the big money.
There is not even pay equality within men’s sport. Do Championship footballers get equal pay to Premiership footballers? Do players in top Premiership teams get the same money? Do strikers at Man City or Liverpool get the same as the left and right back?
Equal pay in sport and entertainment is a nonsense. It’s based on market returns. Create a product or act, price it accordingly and build a brand over decades, Don’t just show up after a hundred years of men’s sport, demand to use the same facilities, and demand equal pay.
A woman lawyer or a woman surgeon or a female accountant or female nurse or female shop worker or delivery driver competes with men in the same market. If you apply that to sport woman and men’s sport should be abolished and woman should compete with men. As they do in entertainment. If a woman footballer is as good as a man she should play in the Premiership or against the men is tennis. However, be careful what you wish for…. as John McEnroe points out someone like Serena Williams would not make it into the top 200 of the men’s tennis players. This is true of the top golfers. I look forward to woman competing against the men in the NBA or Heavyweight boxing. At this point in history it would be ridiculous. Or maybe not as we see the entry of transgender woman (biological men) into woman’s sport. Martina Navratilova has said that eventually the woman’s final will be contested by two biological men.
Woman must build stand alone events, and build a loyal fan base that enjoys women’s sport and more importantly will pay the cost to watch it. Then, and only then will you earn the same as men but you may well earn even more if it becomes very popular.
Finally Danny I will agree with you at how absurd the ECB looks when it try’s to virtue signal on international woman’s day or tweet out whatever latest political stunt the ECB thinks it needs to show solidarity with. However, the bottom line is money, that is the driver which is why they end up looking foolish. The 100 itself is about money and money only. The “grow the game” stuff and all that is cobblers. It is only about revenue.
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Your basic point seems to demonstrate a misunderstanding of Danny’s argument, Mark. He’s saying that the women’s games are subsidising the men’s on the basis that it’s making a profit while the men’s games aren’t. (More realistically I would say, that it’s making a smaller loss if you work on the assumption that the general costs of this massively loss-making competition are divided equally–apart from the bribe, sorry compensation payment, to the counties for the loss of their male players, which obviously only applies to the male games).
Your point about using facilities originally developed for men’s games–even leaving aside such considerations as how much of the money came from female spectators and that now they are clubs both for men and women–just strikes me as absurd. It’s really an abstract conceptual rabbithole down which you could disappear endlessly. Should black- or brown-skinned players have to earn less in county cricket (or playing for South Africa) because they’re using grounds which were developed by clubs whose sides were historically white? Should Polish footballers have to pay a levy to the German FA out of their match fees every time they play in Wrocław on the basis that historically it was a German city and that its original teams were German? What about disabled or blind cricketers playing on grounds originally developed out of money made by watching body-typical or sighted players?
It would help your argument I think if you didn’t drag out such hoary old cliched (and irrelevant) rubbish as transgendered women competing in tennis being biological men–when a glance of about two minutes at the relevant guidelines would show that it’s considerably more complicated than that if you want to compete in professional women’s tennis. It just makes the whole argument look like one of those whingey, self-pitying “white men have it so hard” arguments.
I don’t have a very strong opinion on to what extent the women’s game could stand on its own feet commercially, but at the very least it’s more complicated than you give it credit for in the Hundred. First, the situation generally seems to be evolving quite fast, so what’s true now may not have been true even relatively recently–although as you say, there’s too little evidence to see very clearly in a lot of cases. Second, the last women’s World Cup final managed to fill one of the largest cricket grounds in the world and generated the sixth largest pay-TV audience for any cricket match in Australia ever, men’s or women’s–which suggests that the potential at the very least is there for people to be interested in women’s cricket. Third, the women’s games accounted for one third of the TV audience for the Hundred–and on TV there’s no such thing as a double-header: you watch what you want to watch and switch off for what you don’t…and as is pointed out above, the women’s games were at a massive disadvantage in terms of timing; maybe this proportion would have been higher if they’d been played in the evenings.
And fourth, the whole point of the Hundred was that it was a brand new competition in a new format with some completely new rules featuring new teams, pitched (weren’t we told so ad infinitum?!) at a completely new audience. So although we don’t know whether the women’s games could have stood commercially on their own, we actually don’t know that about the men’s games either–we would just be extrapolating from other competitions (and maybe our own preconceptions!)
I’m not entirely convinced that the players should be paid equally from the figures Danny gives, but it seems clear that they should be paid at least double what they’re actually being paid. Luckily there’s also a very easy way to test some of the basic assumptions on which these arguments are based, and that’s to reverse the running order of the games on some evenings this season and see what happens to the viewing figures and ticket sales.
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Who gives a Donald Duck about The Hundred? It should be abolished. Sorry, MUST be abolished.
As for women in sport and equal pay – well, if they can generate similar levels of income to mens sport – on their own merit i.e. without female/male double-headers, then they do deserve it.
There’s not much evidence of that though, not if rugby is anything to go by.
In 2018, the male premiership final at Twickenham drew 80,000 punters, all paying £60-100 each. The women’s final was at Ealing Trailfinders and drew a crowd of 4,500, who paid £15 with kids paying £5.
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I can see all the arguments but the reality suggests that the disparity should be an issue (not equality of pay), the women’s game as a double header (might benefit them) also bring more people to the event that see a 2-for-1 as better value than just one game that could finish very quickly.
The current numbers are a poor reflection on ECB valuing and developing the women’s game. Comparison’s with other sports do not help it’s the ECB’s strategy since the 2017 world cup win that has left the game in limbo.
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Ah, the ECB. Promoting women’s cricket, this time by cutting off 25% of the Hundred schedule to accommodate a tournament whose dates were known before last year’s Hundred started and which could have been worked around (especially given that it’s a once-a-decade or less event) by some very minor adjustments to the international summer.
Not to mention the other effect, that the Hundred will be completely lopsided because the teams won’t play every other team. Remind me why the KSL was abolished again…
You’ve got to hand it to them. Utter arrogance, lack of care and incompetence at every turn. But Harrison’s still worth his repulsively-large bonus for promoting cricket through the Hundred.
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At least they’re consistent.
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And the marking their own homework award this week goes to (who else) the ECB! Ashley Giles sacked on the recommendation on the person who takes his job (maybe, but not necessarily, temporarily, but still…) and the bullet is delivered by a man who should by rights also be out of post but seems to be surviving because there’s no-one to sack him.
Good to see, too, the impressive ECB good journalism machine putting about that the WI tour may well be led by someone who hasn’t had a coaching (as opposed to DoC) role for the best part of a decade!
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Yeah, I thought that. I guess you could argue that the job of an international head coach is not unlike a county director of cricket, as you delegate most things and only make the ‘big’ decisions. Stewart was my pick to be England DOC when Ashley Giles was hired, as his record was much better in the role. However, Stewart has never shied away from criticising the ECB whilst Giles is a company man, so you can see why they did what they did (and why it failed).
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At what point are the captain and players going to be in the firing line? By all accounts a clique of players in the dressing room did not like Ed Smiths selections so he was fired. We hear that some players did not like the rest and rotation policy that Giles brought in. But surely he was only trying to protect and look after the players health in a pandemic? Obviously not appreciated.
As Nasser Hussien pointed out Bairstow wanted to go home after the Sri Lanka tour instead of taking his form to India. Is that Giles fault? The dressing room wanted more power over selection, and Giles gave it to them by making the coach and by default the captain solely in charge. They screwed it up with some of the stupidest selection decisions, not Giles. Yet he is fired.
Giles made Silverwood supremo which was a poor decision because Silverwood is not a good Test match coach, and I suppose he should go for that….yet the supremo and captain stay in position.
And in the background Mr “Trust” seems to be preparing for another ECB job for himself. ECB jobs for the boys who select themselves, coaches and captains who select the players, and stay in job after a complete mess of a tour, and players who think they should have absolutely everything without backing it up with consistent performances. The lunatics have taken over a very crowded asylum.
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Must have mistyped the wrong email address as the avatar has changed. See if this one goes back to yellow.
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RESULT!
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Is it one sacking a day? Presumably tomorrow wiill be Thorpe’s big day. Logically Root and Harrison would follow, but the plan doesn’t seem to be that clearly thought through!
Hopefully though, Strauss’s massive patrician intellect will extend to noticing that England have a batting coach who’s said publicly that he doesn’t do red-ball tours….
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And asking for a friend: what has Paul Collingwood (no coaching experience at all outside the England job other than a very short consultancy stint for Scotland) brought to the set-up that Silverwood and Thorpe haven’t?
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Silverwood had to go, and as Gies gave him total selection powers I guess he had to go as well. His so called clear chain of accountability! In my view the management structure needs to be split between test and white ball. With two different coaches If the ECB is going to continue the ludicrous schedules it favours. The amount of time away from home as a one head coach fits all is too much. This will lead to some tension at times between players who play both formats being required to miss certain tours but that is unavoidable if the ECB keeps its ludicrous amount of cricket.
However, so far no one who bowled a ball or batted an innings or took a catch in Australia has been removed. Namely the captain. And the general consensus is he will stay in position because basically there is no one else. He seems a weak captain who assuming many of the selections and tactics where his own seems clueless at making basic decisions. Was it Silverwoods ideas or did he just rubber stamp what Root wanted?
I make no apology for the fact I take a more old fashioned view that as Ian Chappell once said “coaches are for driving around the countryside in.” Players have to take more responsibility for their own game. The best coaches need to be working with younger players at country level. You shouldn’t need batting and bowling and fielding coaches when you step up to test cricket. And if you do perhaps you shouldn’t be playing at that level. In the modern era of camera phones and internet a player on tour could speak to his own coach through video back in the UK.
At the end of the day players need to improve themselves, and take more responsibility for their performances. It seems to me the plethora of back room staff act as a safety net which protects them when they fail to perform. Whoever the test coach is he won’t score a single run, take a wicket or make a catch. They can set the tone or the scene, but the actors are the players, and they have to perform.
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Haven’t been here for a while, life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. Observed of course the Ashes drubbing, satisfying as an Aus. But extremely disturbing news Langer may coach England. This is just not right. Bayliss was one thing but not Justin Fucking Langer!
Can you imagine Michael Vaughn coaching Aus? Not a chance in hell.
All best wishes to Langer, but please don’t go to England.
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I wouldn’t worry Fred. With white ball cricket England did at least have the basis of a good side for Baylis. I don’t think Langer or anyone else will be able to anything for England’s test team..We have no batsman other than Root, and Stokes on a good day.
On the other hand, the only thing that might make Langer want to come to England is being humiliated but Cricket Australia. Like asking him to apply for his own job back because his own players don’t like him, That might just push him over the edge.
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Michael vaughan would work for anyone provided they polished his halo enough, wouldn’t he?!
I suspect that Mark is right about Langer–that he would only go near the England job as a (deserved) “fuck you” to CA. I wonder if he’s more likely to surface as coach of Surrey.
What is it with these administrators anyway, that they can’t say or do anything straightforwardly? If you’re going to sack somebody, then sack them, but anyone with half a braincell should be able to see that a six-month extension-until-sacking of somebody who’s just won a World Cup as coach might come across as a tiny bit rude.
Standing well back…I also wonder whether Langer is all he’s cracked up to be as an international coach. He seems to have fallen out terminally with three different captains and an unspecified number of other senior players if reports are to be believed–which could be anything up to six or seven. That is, this is not a Moores or Kumble situation where the coach and one captain can’t work together.
In terms of record: yes, he picked Australia up from a place of some ignominy in 2018, although I think his “resetting” of their moral compass has been hammed up something chronic. But as for playing record–he failed to get to the final of the 2019 WC despite Australia having been one of the dominant teams in the group stage There are plenty of suggestions, although it’s difficult to know, that the WT20 win was despite rather than because of his coaching. The Ashes win proves almost nothing–this was an astonishingly weak England team; and Pakistan also usually lose in Australia. He lost twice against India at home, including against a massively under-strength India.
And what you might call his litmus test series generally either weren’t played during his tenure (NZ and SA away), or he failed to win (Pakistan and England away). So his reputation would appear to rest largely on thumping a strong NZ team at home in 2019.
To me, the clamour for him to be coach of England (and for that matter for Bayliss to be red-ball coach of Australia) is a classic example of reacting by going to extremes. This extreme hasn’t worked so let’s do the polar opposite. I’m not sure that the record of Langer (or Bayliss as a test coach!) comes anywhere near justifying that–especially since one of the other candidates is a man who took two different teams to no. 1 in the test rankings.
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Why would anyone want to coach (manage) modern players anyway these days? (Money aside) The players seem to run the dressing rooms anyway, and moan if they are ever asked to step outside of their comfort zone. They want to select the team, decide the practice routines, and then hide behind the coach when they don’t perform.
I see the ECB have given the temporary job to Paul Collingwood. Why bother? Why not try without a coach, and give all the responsibility to Joe Root the captain? Appoint an administrator touring manger to sort out hotels and flights and stuff behind the scenes, but leave all the cricket decisions to the captain. Sink or swim. Can’t be any worse than the last series.
As to Langer it seems the Australian management didn’t want to fire him, and didn’t want to admit they didn’t want to rehire him for any longer than a year. So it seems they floated out the idea he might have to apply for his Job again. Result! Now if his successor fails they can claim they never got rid of Langer, and are not to blame.
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Talking about players, one of the litmus tests of the new England will I think be how they treat Robinson. If he arrives in WI in the same shape that he left Australia–or with the same attitude to fitness- then he shouldn’t be anywhere near the team for the first test. There’s an argument that he shouldn’t be anyway, including that he shouldn’t be on the tour at all.
But I have a feeling the reset won’t extend that far, given the retention of a failing captain and the appointment of an unproven coach–which is a mistake they’ve made relatively recently and which is a little odd given that there is an England coach who’s won ICC men’s silverware and another who’s won a women’s troiphy and has just won the Championship.
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Well, that was an interesting selection meeting–if a rather eccentric one! I wonder if Root had rather more to do with it than seems to have been credited in a lot of the reports. Specifically, i wonder if the Anderson/Broad moment was more to do with their attitudes and Root deciding that he wanted to be free of them than wanting to move on or try younger options per se (although England coaches do have recent previous form with that too, notably Robinson’s abrupt dropping of Edwards).
The player who’s come out of it worst in context is probably Burns–and again I suspect there’s something the management and/or Root don’t like about his attittude rather than simply the fact that he had a shocking tour…specifically that he might be considered a bit lackadaisical for his own good.
I’m glad they’ve dropped Malan–at his age, his record isn’t good enough to be keeping him even as a medium term option. And I’m glad they’ve given Foakes a go and preferred Parkinson to Bess.
But there’s also a fair bit of evidence of not seeing the wood for the trees. Seven seam bowlers but only seven top six batters, against a weak batting team and where it’s England’s batting that needs to be put back together most urgently? Only two top three batters (three if Root bats at three)? Alex Lees–whose much-lauded reboot at Durham has involved four seasons in none of which did he average 40 and whose inclusion means no place for Bohannon, who’s record is in a different league (note too that Lees was ponderous at the sharp end of the Championship and scored three runs in the match against Australia A).
And my, they’re putting a lot of trust in the seam bowling. One player who travels as well as Guinness (really, HOW has Woakes made this squad?!), one injury-prone fast bowler, one both whose fitness and attitude to fitness are questionable, and two more who last season failed to play a full season between them despite not playing for England, the Lions or in the IPL.
It should be an interesting series!
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Interesting! But also maybe not all it seems. Already people are asking if this is the end for Anderson and Broad? Maybe?
Or
They are being rested for the summer? As to the batters they have tried most of them so it’s a lucky dip.
One thing is for sure though….it’s a huge opportunity for players on the trip to make a case for themselves. After a disastrous Ashes tour this is an opportunity. How many players will take advantage of that? It’s up to them to perform.
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Remember when The ECB fired almost anybody who was not on board to protect the rather poor captain Alastair Cook? The reason given then was TINA
It seems they are doing exactly the same again.Everyone has to go to protect a poor captain because TINA.
However If Broad and Anderson have been rested, and will return in the summer then that does not show much respect to the WI or the paying fan.
Always planning for the series after next… instead of the one right in front of you.
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I’m not sure that what I read today (that the reserve opener is Dan Lawrence) is good p-lanning for any series–now, next year or next decade!
Lawrence I believe doesn’t have the most orthodox technique. He’s scored three hundreds since 2017 in the Championship–one of which was against a Derbys attack that the Essex commentators were saying wasn’t f-c standard– and has rarely if ever opened in f-c cricket. Ideal candidate for opener.
(In passing, being a professional cynic for a moment, interesting that the coach is from Durham and the captain from Yorkshire and the two most contentious selections have only ever played for….which counties was it again?!)
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England “We’re shit.”
South Africa “Hold my beer.”
Seriously this peformance by South Africa is appalling (and where are we supposed to steal our middle order from now??)
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New Zealand? Although I doubt any of them would want to join the England dressing room right now.
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I’m struggling to accept how good New Zealand are. I’d really like to see them play Australia at home – maybe that wouldbe a competitive series.
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The most surprising thing: people are surprised about South Africa being pathetic with the bat in 2022.
Should be a first ever series win for New Zealand against South Africa coming up. Will be a small miracle (I think the English press would call it ‘progress’) if it not ending with a whitewash.
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I was really looking forward to this series. I suppose South Africa could bounce back in the second test but it really is hard to see anything other than a whitewash.
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…and that’s before we get on to what the atmosphere in the dressing room is like. Board trying to sack the coach and we now know that it will try to do so at a public hearing where players may give evidence, leaving at least the possibility that some will be lining up to say that the coach is racist and others to say that he isn’t.
It’s not too hard to imagine that that scenario might not be the most supportive of a united, competitive dressing room while the coach remains in situ!
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Oh come now DLP, don’t get depressed and downhearted, as the man said. There are still plenty of fish in the South African sea for English fishers to catch. You could have a whole team, not just a middle order!
What about Pieter Malan, Vasconcelos, Ackerman, Bedingfield, Benjamin, van Buuren, Vilas, de Lange, Abbott, Paterson, Glover? None of them over 35, all had a county contract last year, several have played for South Africa but none in the last two years and only two in the last five or so.
Sure there’s one or two who probably aren’t international standard, but then this is an England team we’re selecting for….:-)
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Don’t give the ECB ideas
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There is something delicious about watching the utterly useless English cricket media, who since 2014 have been the propaganda arm of the ECB now turning on one of their hero’s, namely Stuart Broad. Remember how they loved the cricket genius Twitter handle, and giggled like school girls at the thought of giving KP a kicking?
But now it is Broad, who ironically has become the new KP. Difficult to manage, too big for his boots. In the same way they all rallied to captain Cook, now they do the same to another hopeless captain. How dare Broad say it as it is. How dare he say he is one of the better players.
They even now say that he and Anderson should not get a special send off. Were they saying this about Cook on that day he left, and an entire test match was turned into one of the most nauseous, embarrassing matches in English cricket history? Oh no.
What this confirms is how useless the English cricket media are, and how completely enthralled they are to ECB top brass. Strauss, Cook, and Root really do walk on water. And God help anyone who dares to be their own man with a different opinion.
Broad will get little sympathy because he has been on both sides.He was a company man, now he finds himself in the cold outside. The ECB and their embarrassing chums in the media will not tolerate anything but obedience to the cricket mafia.
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Random statistic of the day: the world’s no. 1 ranked test team haven’t won an away series for six years–which means they’ve only won their most recent away series against two of the eight other teams in the WTC, one of whom are second from bottom.
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It’s a complete joke, isn’t it?
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…and of course they’ve lost their last three series against the no. 3 team, two of them at home!
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But at least unlike the #3 team, they will beat ‘mighty’ South Africa in South Africa. Like any decent side from the early 2000s would have. Will be a massive achievement (then again if you cannot beat them for the better part for two decades in Australia, I suppose it may be a real cause for celebration if you can actually beat them).
New Zealand might still win by an innings if they don’t bat in the second Test, and simply carry the winning margin in runs forward; i.e. will South Africa be able to manage 275 runs across two innings? I am not THAT optimistic for South Africa’s batting.
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Women Cricketers in India from the 1970 showed their talent, but the women cricket tournaments are not popular even now-a-days. But the recent developments in Women Cricket is making it popular. There are various women cricket players in India. Some of them are Anjum Chopra, Sandhya Agarwal, Karu Jain, Jhulan Goswami, Mithali Raj, Nilima Jogalekar and Shantha Rangaswamy.
https://www.indianetzone.com/67/women_cricketers_india.htm
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