Month: Mar 2024

What Went Wrong With The ECB’s Balls?

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The ECB has been encouraging children as young as five to play with their balls over the course of seven years, and recently discovered that it may have been illegal to do so.

There’s probably a better way to put that…

The ECB runs two large junior participation programmes; All Stars and Dynamos cricket. Both of these schemes offer at least eight one-hour sessions of cricket training based on a single centralised format. Children in either programme also receive their own personal kit which includes a bat, stumps, T-shirt and other accessories. Clubs have also been encouraged to purchase their own All Stars and Dynamos-branded equipment for their junior sections from an ECB-hosted website.

The ECB announced last week that some items they provided for both All Stars and Dynamos cricket last year failed a safety check. Specifically, all of the plastic cricket balls as well as batting tees and banners offered to the clubs which were hosting the courses were found to have levels of restricted pthalates above the maximum permitted in the UK.

It is important to stress that children who attended junior cricket last year (or indeed in previous summers) are not in immediate danger and this news should not be used to engender panic in children or parents. Regulations typically set limits on potentially dangerous chemicals far below the point at which they can actually cause harm. The ECB have consulted Trading Standards and the Office for Product Safety and Standards, neither of whom appear to think that there is a need to recall the items.

At the same time, the ECB has rightly informed clubs and possibly parents of their critical mistake. This has the potential to not only devastate the All Stars and Dynamos programmes, but damage junior club cricket across the country. Many parents will think twice about sending their kids to sports clubs when they might be using equipment which does not meet basic safety standards.

The ECB’s public statements are not helping in this regard. For a start, there is no ownership of the problem. The ECB are the ones who contracted whichever factory made the plastic cricket balls, and they are the ones who sold those balls to parents and clubs on the basis that they met the relevant UK safety standards. It would seem a basic moral imperative that they should replace any affected equipment free of charge, and I would be a little surprised if it wasn’t a legal imperative too. It would also have helped mollify club administrators, many of whom I would guess are furious right now, if the ECB had immediately committed to supplying alternative free cricket balls before the start of the season.

The press release is also confusing when it comes to the issue of the dangers and risks the balls pose to children. On one hand, the fact that neither Trading Standards nor the Office for Product Safety and Standards appear to believe that the test results merit a mandatory recall would imply that there is no significant danger posed by the chemicals. On the other hand, the ECB has advised “that the [plastic] balls should no longer be used” by either individuals or clubs which makes it seem like the risk may be higher than they are letting on. This is either incredibly poor communication or a very inept cover-up.

Where did it all go wrong for the ECB?

The most obvious cause of this fiasco is having the kit produced in a country with different, lower safety standards than the UK because it is ‘cheaper’. It would be virtually impossible for this to occur in a UK or EU factory because the laws in these countries wouldn’t allow any products with these plastics to be sold legally. By saving some money and cutting corners, they are now in a position where they may have to replace every All Stars and Dynamos ball they have ever sent to a club or kid at their own expense.

It bears saying that this is actually the second problem that contracting manufacturers on the other side of the world for All Stars and Dynamos has caused the ECB this year. They had already announced a postponement due to “experiencing some delays to the usual kit delivery process”. Given recent geopolitical events, it is not unlikely that a container ship with the ECB’s equipment has been redirected away from the relatively quick route through the Suez Canal due to increased risk in that region. This would not be an issue if it were being made closer to home.

On paper, the plan looks great. Going with the lowest bidder for making the kit saves everyone money which can be spent elsewhere. A Just-In-Time logistics setup where the equipment arrives just as kids are due to get their packs in the post means that the ECB don’t have to shell out on storage. If everything works as expected, it is a cheap and elegant method of distributing kit to almost 100,000 children and their clubs.

If.

It clearly never crossed anyone’s mind, at least in a position of power within the ECB, that any part of this masterplan could fail. But it did, and it has left not only the ECB but thousands of amateur cricket clubs in a real hole. The situation is vaguely reminiscent of when COVID-19 hit English cricket in 2020. The ECB had neither insurance to cover such a calamitous global event, nor any reserves to speak of after having used them to bribe the counties to support The Hundred in the previous years.

One issue that consistently dogs the ECB is a critical lack of diversity. I don’t mean in terms of gender, race, religion and so on (at least in this particular case), but of mindset. There is a culture within the sport’s governing body which seems to actively discourage dissent. People in positions of power hire their friends or, if they don’t apply, people with similar backgrounds and viewpoints to themselves. Experience, professional standards and an extensive track record are seen as secondary to being loyal and ‘fitting in’.

The upshot is that the ECB has all of the characteristics of an echo chamber. There are no questions raised about potential problems, no outside views sought, because there is no one in the decision-making process who disagrees with what is proposed. ECB employees tend to look alike, sound alike and think alike.

No one at the ECB appears to have asked the questions: “If the deliveries are delayed by a week or two, wouldn’t that massively harm the hundreds if not thousands of clubs who rely on these programmes to launch their junior cricket season every year?” or “Is the reason why the the plastic kit is so cheap because safety has been compromised?”

At the same time, there seems to be no sense of individual accountability either. This can partly be explained by the homogenous nature of the ECB. No individual can be blamed if everyone agreed, after all. More broadly, the simple fact is that club cricket is such a low priority within the organisation that a catastrophic failure leading to dozens or even hundreds of clubs disappearing probably wouldn’t be seen as a reason to fire someone who was otherwise liked by their bosses.

The person currently in charge of the All Stars and Dynamos programmes is former Cricket Wales chief executive Leshia Hawkins. She was, in fairness, only appointed last October which means that it would be unfair to hold her liable for the production issues which were certainly in place before she started. Her predecessor, Nick Pryde, has already left to work for an investment bank in their sports division. The response from the ECB after they discovered their mistake, which has somehow managed to be simultaneously fearmongering and totally ineffective, does fall on Hawkins’ shoulders.

One of the successes of the All Stars programme was that it offered clubs with few members, few volunteers and few resources a ready-made kit for running a junior section. It is more or less the only aspect of club cricket which is well-advertised by the ECB with its own website, its own social media accounts and a plethora of both physical and digital marketing materials made available to clubs. This means that many of the clubs who will be most affected by the delays, lack of equipment and negative publicity are the ones which are least able to absorb these blows. And the ECB appear, from the outside, to be doing nothing to help them.

Which brings us to the place we almost always end up in articles about the ECB: Their failures don’t really affect anyone within the organisation as they shrug it off and claim they ‘tried their best’, but cricket fans across the country end up suffering the consequences.

It really would be great if we could try something different.

Thanks for reading. If you have any comments about this post, the women’s T20Is or anything else please leave them below.

Why Are Women Paid So Little In English Cricket?

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Today is International Women’s Day. Considering that the ECB have yet again posted their usual self-congratulatory social media posts patting themselves on the back, it seems worth examining why they consistently pay women a lot less than men.

The ECB themselves will concede that women white ball England cricketers are paid 30% as men, and the recent ICEC report suggested that the real figure may be as low as 20.6%. In The Hundred, the average woman cricketer is paid 35% as much as someone in the men’s competition this year.

The main argument that the ECB employs to justify their actions is money. Women’s cricket makes less money than men’s cricket, and therefore women’s cricketers must be paid less money than men’s cricketers as a result. To quote ECB chief executive Richard Gould from his recent appearance in front of a select committee:

“We are investing around £25 million ahead of revenues currently. If you look at the commercial revenue for the women’s game, it is around £10 million or £11 million. We are investing about £35 million or £36 million into the women’s game at the moment. That is something that we want to be able to keep doing.”

From this description, someone would get the impression that the ECB are being incredibly generous with regards to women’s cricket to the point of being practically charitable. As is often the case with figures released by the ECB, they do not tell the whole story.

The first thing which must be acknowledged is that women’s cricket does bring in a relatively small amount of revenue when measured against men’s cricket in this country. However, this is far from being a fair comparison. Test cricket accounts for something in the region of two thirds of the ECB’s total revenue, and the England women’s team barely play any matches in that format. When comparing the financial draw of the men’s and women’s international white ball sides or the men’s and women’s Hundred, it is a lot closer than many people would expect.

In 2022, for example, men’s England T20Is had an average viewership of 631,000 compared to 313,000 for the women. Given that TV rights deals account for the vast majority of the ECB’s revenue, it would therefore follow that England’s women T20 cricketers should be paid at least 49.6% as much as the men, or 65.3% more than they are now. However, it should also be noted that this is not an entirely like-for-like comparison because the current BBC TV deal gives the broadcaster two men’s T20Is but only one women’s match. This meant that a third (two out of six) of men’s games were shown on BBC Two in 2022 (where you would expect a much greater audience without a paywall) compared to a sixth (one out of six) of the women’s.

The Hundred tells a similar story. Women’s matches in 2023 attracted 55.5% of the men’s audience when shown on both BBC and Sky, and 48.9% for Sky-exclusive games. It would therefore be difficult to justify not paying women at least 48.9% as much as the men, or 39.7% more than they are now.

This is before you consider the effect that the competition’s scheduling has on these audience numbers. Almost every women’s game bar the two playoff matches is in a time slot which compromises people’s ability to watch it either live or on the television. In 2023: Twenty women’s matches were during working hours on a week day, six matches were at the same time as a men’s game and shunted to a secondary Sky channel, and another six matches began on a weekend morning. By contrast, only two men’s group matches were played during working hours.

When a women’s game is played second in a Hundred doubleheader, which has only happened once in 2022, it attracts a virtually identical TV audience to a men’s game. The women’s opener that year had an average of 510,000 BBC viewers compared to 520,000 for the men’s opener a couple of weeks earlier. This women’s match also had visibly more fans in attendance than the men’s game which preceded it. It is almost certainly the case that if the roles were reversed and every women’s match was played second in a doubleheader, then they would attract more TV viewers and higher attendances than the men with little-to-no reduction in terms of overall revenue.

This post has concentrated on players so far, but they are by no means the only women who are arguably underpaid in English cricket. Female coaches, administrators, umpires and so on are all paid considerably less than their male counterparts. This is broadly for the same reason as the cricketers, that jobs in women’s cricket have lower salaries than the men’s equivalents, but with an added twist. A female player doesn’t have the option to play for a men’s team in order to find a higher paying job, but women in other roles can work in men’s cricket and just don’t get the opportunity to do so.

This can be illustrated by the umpires used in last year’s The Hundred. On-field umpires were paid a match fee of £1,000 for each men’s group game, but only £300 for a women’s match. Thirty-two games in the women’s competition featured a female on-field umpire, but none in the men’s. The ECB might argue that the men umpiring women’s matches were paid the same as the women but this misses the point.

It is almost universally accepted by people ‘Inside Cricket’ that being successful in men’s cricket qualifies someone for a role in women’s cricket, but someone whose only successes are in women’s cricket can’t make the ‘step up’ to the men’s game. This would explain why only one woman (Lisa Keighley from 2019-2022) has held the role of England women’s head coach since 2000, for example. The last two men to hold the position, Mark Robinson and Jon Lewis, appear to have had no experience regarding women’s cricket before taking the job. It is so rare for women to receive similar opportunities that when Alex Hartley was appointed as spin bowling coach for the men’s Multan Sultans team last year it was considered headline news.

The ECB’s justification for paying people less within women’s cricket than men’s relies on the fundamental premise that women’s cricket only generates £11 million per year on its own merits, and so any additional funding must be provided from a finite pot of Test match money. The viewing figures don’t obviously support this viewpoint, with women’s T20Is and the women’s Hundred appearing to attract roughly half as many viewers as the men (or a third of the overall viewing hours, to put it another way). However, it is far from unheard of for people to view something as less valuable purely because it was done by a woman. Perhaps it has nothing to do with the ECB, and it is Sky who have only paid the ECB £3 million or so for the rights to all women’s cricket even if that sum appears to be insultingly low?

This is not the case. The TV rights for English cricket are sold in a block. The ECB offers a tender with the ability for a TV broadcaster to show more or less all professional cricket played in England and Wales, and the TV companies respond with a single bid for everything on the table. Sky Sports has not gone through each competition and said “We will pay £150 million for men’s Test cricket, £20 million for men’s white ball internationals, £35 million for the men’s Hundred, £10 million for the T20 Blast and £5 million for all women’s cricket.” That is not how the process works.

To again quote Richard Gould from last month’s select committee appearance:

Damian Green: Within the various media deals you do, does that mean that effectively the broadcasters are paying more for men’s Hundred matches than women’s Hundred matches?

Richard Thompson: I think it is packaged.

Richard Gould: Yes, our rights are sold in a collective manner. They are all sold together and that gives us the ability to invest where we think the future markets are going to be. We do think that the future market will be women’s cricket and women’s sport. It is the collectivisation of those rights that gives us the ability to get money where it is most needed.

So it is the ECB which is ascribing a very low value to women’s cricket matches within the £220-million-per-year Sky Sports broadcast deal, it is the ECB who appear to consider a viewer of women’s cricket to have less financial worth than a viewer of men’s cricket, and it is the ECB who grudgingly pay women from money those women earned and then expect to be applauded for it.

So to answer the question in the title: Why are women paid so little in English cricket?

Because the ECB think they can get away with it.

Thanks for reading. If you have any comments on this, the Test match or anything else please leave them below.