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.
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.
Today is International Women’s Day. Considering that the ECB have yet again posted their usualself-congratulatorysocial media posts patting themselves on the back, it seems worth examining why they consistently pay women a lot less than men.
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.
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.
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.
“The reality is The Hundred has been a huge success both from a ticketing and TV perspective. It is also an extremely important revenue stream for the game of cricket, generating roughly 25% of the ECB’s revenue which funds the broader game of cricket, and helps maintain a viable 18 county ecosystem.” – Surrey CCC chair Oli Slipper
“The Hundred has gone well: the obvious reason is the success [of Southern Brave] on the pitch, but I would also point to the public, families, and new watchers of cricket coming in, which has been very strong.” – Hampshire CCC chair Nick Pike
“The third year of the Hundred brought good attendance figures, better matches in the men’s competition and decent viewing figures. The concentration of talent into eight teams, instead of 18, drives up standards, and from a standing start it was clear on Sunday that the teams have built a fan base in just three years. It is a success story.” – Nick Hoult, Telegraph correspondent
There appears to be a growing consensus, at least by people within the cricket establishment, that The Hundred is a ‘success’. But by which measures, and who for, are questions without clear answers.
Unfortunately for Deloitte (and the counties), they had not reckoned on the calibre of fools available at the ECB.
The original proposal was for the new (and presumed to be T20 format at the time) competition to follow a low cost, high return model. Annual costs were expected to be £13m, with roughly half of that spent on players’ wages and the rest being almost the minimum necessary to coach, host and produce a televised sports event. A lean, simple approach to creating a new sports league.
What almost inevitably followed was an all-encompassing form of mission creep, where the new competition would not only have to make money but also directly address every other issue English cricket faces. The ECB missed out on the chance to trademark and license the T20 format when they introduced it at the professional level, so a new format had to be created. The average attendee at English cricket matches is aging, so lavish in-ground entertainment will be provided in the form of fireworks and live music to attract a younger crowd. Ticket-buyers at cricket matches also tend to be wealthy, so entry to The Hundred was to be heavily discounted. Participation is declining, so The Hundred would be partnered with a youth club cricket scheme to boost the numbers of kids playing the game. Women’s cricket was suffering from a chronic lack of investment over decades, and so the Kia Super League would be partially integrated with the men’s competition. Former marketing executive Tom Harrison wanted more information about cricket fans in order to better tailor their product and advertising, and so a bespoke app was designed to gather as much of their personal data as possible.
Each of these additions came with a cost, in terms of both money and increased complexity. The expenses more than tripled from the original projections, which in turn reduced the potential profits considerably. Even with all of these add-ons, the ECB has declared that The Hundred has made an annual profit in each of its three years so far; £10m in both 2021 and 2022, £15m in 2023. These figures have been widely questioned though.
The most thorough external examination of The Hundred’s claimed profits came from a review conducted by Worcestershire chair and chartered accountant Fanos Hira. After looking at the ECB’s actual account books, he determined that additional costs which were not publicly declared by the ECB (such as core ECB staff members working on The Hundred) meant that the competition actually made a loss of £9m in its first two years. Given that the ECB declared a £20m profit in this period, this would imply The Hundred has £14.5m of added annual expenses which must be considered.
Everything up until now has been purely about running costs, the losses made since The Hundred actually began in 2021. They don’t factor in the tens of millions of pounds spent in the years before 2020 which led to The Hundred taking its current form. Marketing and design consultants creating the team names, the team colours, the on screen graphics, the custom fonts, or the surveys and market research carefully crafted to give the answers which the ECB executives wanted.
Nor do they include the £24.7m ‘dividend’ payments to the counties and the MCC. To be clear, these amounts were not included in the initially projected £31.9m profits either but would at least have been covered by the money earned by the new competition. Instead, most if not all of these ‘dividends’ are being paid from the ECB’s central funds which primarily come from Test cricket’s Sky TV deal.
All of which brings us to the elephant in the room when it comes to The Hundred: It only works if someone else is paying the bills. The ECB might rent the eight largest cricket grounds in the country for a month, but it’s Test cricket that’s still footing the bill for their continuing existence. Owning a 15,000-30,000 capacity stadium isn’t cheap with maintenance, electricity, refurbishment and staff needed to keep it open, and the hosting fees from The Hundred will barely make a dent in that.
The players are also only paid for one month out of the year, with their counties footing the bill for the other eleven. Not to mention the decade or more of training the counties have to pay for, so that those cricketers progress through junior pathways, second XIs and finally the first team to the point where they are worthy of inclusion in a Hundred squad. Test cricket essentially funds all of the costs related to a player (secure long term contracts, training, medical fees, etc) through the central payment counties receive from the ECB.
It is a wonderful business model if you are able to persuade other people pay all of the costs necessary for your investment to grow. The question the ECB needs to answer is whether that is sustainable in the long term.
One possible explanation for the ECB’s profligate spending might be the incentives on offer to those who were in charge of delivering The Hundred. Tom Harrison and several other executives controversially received a £2.1m bonus between them, ostensibly for achieving several targets within the sport. It seems likely that some of these benchmarks related to the new competition which became The Hundred. If a cutthroat executive is told that they will be paid a bonus based on attendance rather than profits, surely all of them would sacrifice the latter to boost attendance even one iota?
One thing which must be acknowledged is that even considering the sale of teams or the competition as a whole means that Plan A has failed. The Hundred was supposed to be very profitable from Year 1, with the ability to grow from there to near-IPL revenue. You don’t sell a goose which is laying golden eggs.
The first response I have seen from most cricket fans to this news is bewilderment. If The Hundred is losing money every year, why would anyone else want to own it? There are three fairly solid reasons why: Profit, speculation and power.
For all of the issues listed in the previous section, it would be very simple for someone to come in and make a profit with The Hundred. There are so many absolutely unneccesary expenses which could be cut with almost no difference to the final product. There’s genuinely as much money being spent on fireworks at a group game as there is at some towns’ November 5th fireworks displays. The marketing budget for each team is ridiculously high, and could be reduced by about 90% whilst still being higher than a county’s T20 Blast spending. Developing a bespoke app for ticketing or a non-monetised fantasy game adds no financial value and could be replaced with cheaper alternatives. Last, and perhaps most importantly, there would presumably be no more £24.7m ‘dividend’ payment to the 18 counties and the MCC because they would no longer be ‘shareholders’ in the competition.
The analogy I would use to explain this is a shop in a great location and with a strong fundamental business model which has the misfortune of being run by absolute idiots. A smart investor will look at this shop and think “I’m not an absolute idiot. I could buy this place cheaply, fix its main issues within a week and turn it into a goldmine.”
At the same time, it is no secret that several counties (*cough*Middlesex*cough*) and perhaps the ECB themselves are desperate for more money, which is rarely conducive to wise decision making or holding out for something’s full worth. On a very basic level, I don’t trust anyone in English cricket not to screw themselves over when dealing with successful business leaders and highly competent lawyers.
Potential investors might also believe that The Hundred as a whole will increase in value over time, and seek to make profit on their purchase by selling it at a later date. This is speculating. It could be short term investment where they attempt to make it profitable as quickly as possible, and then sell it on. Alternatively, they could hold onto their stake for longer and collect the annual income whilst hoping that its value increases over time.
It seems likely that the process of private investment in The Hundred will be slow and gradual, with investors perhaps purchasing a minority stake in a team to start with, which brings us to the third benefit for investors: Power.
Right now, the ECB and counties have total control of The Hundred. They can add and remove teams, rename them, change the schedule or format, even scrap the whole thing if they wanted. The moment an outside investor becomes involved, every one of these things becomes significantly more difficult. Wealthy people don’t just hand over large sums of money without contracts and safeguards in place to protect their investments, which will ultimately mean any changes to the competition going forward would need to be negotiated with shareholders who only care about making more money for themselves.
Becoming the ECB’s partner in The Hundred could aid investors in broader ways too. The ECB has proven to be a very forthright supporter of Sky in all respects, and if IPL team owners were to co-own most of The Hundred’s teams then the ECB would probably be more amenable to (for example) supporting IPL-friendly measures at ICC meetings. An Indian billionaire might look at the possibility of extending the IPL (and its international window) to four months and consider that a £20m investment in London Spirit is worth it if it makes it more likely they can make more profit with their main team.
Creating A New TV Audience
There is an argument that everything mentioned so far is largely unimportant. Who cares if The Hundred is costing English cricket a bit of money if it’s drawing in new fans? Or, as the ECB probably calls them, customers.
The primary means The Hundred’s using to achieve this bold aim is airing up to 18 matches on free to air TV (currently BBC Two) every year. This is after a void of fifteen summers without regularly scheduled, live English cricket available to the majority of the viewing public (The number of caveats in that last sentence is because there were still England highlights, several seasons of the IPL and occasional single matches such as the 2019 World Cup final on FTA TV). Over fifty hours of exciting T20 cricket, much of which is in prime timeslots, will surely build a new generation of cricket fans!
It has not worked. This is not so say that The Hundred has not attracted any new people to the sport at all, but not in any great number. Certainly not in sufficient quantities to justify also losing millions of pounds every year.
TV figures are quite obscure in this country, which usually makes talking about ratings difficult due to a lack of information. Fortunately, The Hundred is one of the most popular women’s sports competitions in the UK (a topic which will be covered later) which means that it features prominently in the Women’s Sports Trust‘s annual reports. These reports in 2021, 2022 and 2023 include detailed breakdowns of how many people watched both the men’s and women’s Hundred in each year, which allows us to see how the competitions are faring.
In terms of the total number of people watching any part of The Hundred (known as the ‘reach’ of a programme), it has declined year on year. In 2021, the total number of people who watched was 16.0 million, which has fallen to 12.1 million by 2023.
This is a 24.4% decline from the first year. Essentially, people gave it a chance when it launched but did not come back to it afterwards. This year’s Women’s Trust report also includes the average viewing figures (the mean number of people watching a programme at any given point in time) for both Sky-exclusive matches and the 18 which are shown on BBC 2.
Average viewing figures
2021
2023
% Change
Men’s BBC/Sky Games
1,021,000
771,000
-24.49%
Women’s BBC/Sky Games
628,000
428,000
-31.85%
Men’s Sky Exclusive
431,000
275,000
-36.19%
Women’s Sky Exclusive
127,000
134,000
+5.51%
From these numbers, we can infer that average BBC-only viewing figures in 2023 were roughly 500,000 for men’s matches and 300,000 for women’s (by subtracting the Sky-exclusive totals from the simulcast games). This presents a significant problem for the ECB, because these are almost certainly below what the BBC would have been hoping for.
The men’s Hundred occupies prime timeslots on weekday evenings and weekend afternoons, which brings with it certain expectations. Only Connect typically attracts well over two million viewers a night on BBC 2, for example. Not only are the BBC paying the ECB for permission to show The Hundred, but it will be very expensive for them to produce relative to a studio quiz show or a reality/documentary show like Fake Or Fortune? or Bargain Hunt. I expect even repeats of these popular shows would attract more viewers on BBC 2 than The Hundred, at a fraction of the cost to the BBC.
In short: The Hundred is very poor value for money for them.
Sky were obviously quite happy with the first year’s ratings, which is why they extended their TV deal before the 2022 Hundred even began for a further four years to 2028 (It is not clear whether they anticipated a 36% drop in average men’s match viewers, so it is possible they feel differently now). It is noticeable that the BBC has not renewed their own TV deal yet as we enter its last year. To put that silence into context, the current free-to-air TV deal was announced over two years before it was due to begin. It seems likely that the BBC are not interested in bidding for live cricket again. Not only that, but other broadcasters might look at these ratings and make the same decision. Almost the whole point of The Hundred is to attract new fans to the sport through exposure to as many people as possible, and it’s not inconceivable that it won’t even be on terrestrial TV at all next year.
The Hundred follows the typical scheduling format of T20 competitions, which means prioritising and maximising the TV audience. No overlapping men’s matches, at least one of which is played every day, and all during the prime TV viewing hours. This compares to the T20 Blast which uses the more typical UK sports model, aiming to maximise attendance through matches being largely scheduled on weekends and Friday nights. It is therefore interesting to note that the T20 Blast’s group stages attracted an average TV audience of 187,000 in 2021 compared to the men’s Hundred 275,000 (for Sky-exclusive matches) in 2023. Obviously The men’s Hundred still attracts 50% more viewers on average, but it is also costing Sky significantly more than 50% extra in terms of rights, marketing and production costs.
But all of this isn’t even really the worst part. You may remember that a lot was made during The Hundred’s launch about how it would appeal to a younger demographic, to “mums and kids”, which would help secure the long term future of the sport. This is why The Hundred uses garish colours, bold designs, hosts pop acts during the break and otherwise does everything a middle-aged marketing executive can do to scream “This is for you, kids!”.
Even in this small, limited objective it has not worked. Of everyone who watched The Hundred (either men’s or women’s) in 2023, 7.2% were aged under 16 and another 15.2% were aged between 16 and 34. Or, to put it another way, 77.5% of the people who saw last season’s competition on TV were 35 and over. To put that figure in context, 49.3% of the UK population is aged 39 or less. It’s not just that average viewing figures have declined, but they aren’t even the viewers that the ECB wanted.
Attracting New Fans To The Grounds
One objective of The Hundred was to bring a new audience to English cricket grounds, with England and county cricket fans being generalised as “pale, stale and male“. The Hundred has had some limited success in this objective. The number of tickets ‘sold and issued’ increased from 510,000 in 2021 to 580,000 in 2023, but at a great cost. Literally.
From the fan’s perspective, getting to watch two games for less than half the price of a T20 Blast ticket is exceptional value. How many fans of white ball cricket would honestly turn that down?
When a retailer offers a product at a loss (called a ‘loss leader‘), the intention is typically to bring new customers in who you will then persuade to buy more things and in this way make your money back (and more). An example of this is when UK supermarkets reduced the price of baked beans tins to as little as 3p in the 1990s.
Unfortunately, there hasn’t been any obvious indication of benefits being felt elsewhere in terms of ticket sales. The T20 Blast has seen a large drop in attendance since The Hundred began, from 920,000 in 2019 to 800,000 in both 2022 and 2023. The Charlotte Edwards Cup also had very low crowd numbers compared to The Hundred, despite sharing the majority of the players with the women’s Hundred teams.
One obstacle that The Hundred faces in acting as a conduit to other cricket competitions is its placement in the schedule. The T20 Blast and Charlotte Edwards Cup both largely take place in June whilst The Hundred is in August. This means that even in a scenario where a new cricket fan enjoys a match in The Hundred and might be interested in broadening their horizons, they face a 10 month wait until the next professional T20 matches in this country.
The other obstacle would be the absolute and total lack of effort on the part of the ECB. I have followed @TheHundred on Twitter since it launched, and also signed up to The Hundred’s mailing list in 2020. Neither one has mentioned the T20 Blast once in that time. For a competition meant to rescue county cricket, this seems like an oversight.
It could also be a mistake to blindly assume a large proportion of people attending are ‘new’, rather than pre-existing attendees. County members have access to exclusive pre-sales and bargain prices for The Hundred, as well as some counties including The Hundred in county membership packages. According to Surrey CCC’s latest annual report, an average of 3,732 members attended T20 Blast games in 2022 compared to an average of 3,115 Surrey members at each Oval Invincibles home game. The drop in Blast attendances might also indicate that some people who had been attending county matches have switched to The Hundred instead.
Growing Women’s Cricket
The women’s Hundred is, by almost every metric, a success.
The total attendance in each of the three seasons (reaching 310,751 in 2023) of the women’s Hundred are the highest competition attendances in women’s cricket. Higher than any ICC World Cup, higher than the WBBL, higher even than the debut season of the Women’s Premier League. In terms of total viewing hours, it was the most-watched women’s competition on Sky Sports in 2023 beating the Women’s Super League, the Solheim Cup and the T20 World Cup. It is widely regarded as one of the top 3 women’s T20 competitions in the world, being able to attract overseas players of the highest calibre.
Any success the women’s Hundred has garnered is almost entirely thanks to COVID-19. Looking at the planned schedule for 2020, the women’s Hundred is clearly considered a lesser competition in every respect. It features 4 fewer group matches than the men, because the men’s teams played against their local ‘rivals’ home and away but the women’s teams didn’t. Of those 28 women’s group games, only 9 would have been at the team’s home venues (each team hosting once, except for 2 at Old Trafford) whilst 4 would have been at amateur club and school grounds. 12 of the group games overlapped with each other and only 9 didn’t overlap with a men’s match (either in The Hundred or the Test series occurring at the same time). The women’s final was due to take place at Hove on a Friday night, rather than at Lord’s.
Sky would not have been able to broadcast the majority of women’s matches, and some may not even have had streaming or radio commentary available. 310,751 people wouldn’t have been able to watch the women’s games because the grounds they were due to play in couldn’t even hold that many. Welsh Fire were due to only play a single match in Wales.
In short, the women’s Hundred was initially designed by the ECB not to maximise exposure but to minimise costs.
When the ECB was organising the 2021 competition, they implemented protocols which meant that COVID-19 testing was required at every venue. It was not practical to manage this at multiple grounds simultaneously, as the originally planned schedule would have needed, and so they decided to make every game (bar the two openers) a men’s/women’s doubleheader. When people saw women’s cricket, both in person and on TV, they enjoyed it (or at least as much as they did the men’s games) and the women’s Hundred exploded onto the scene.
Unfortunately, this early success has not resulted in the ECB treating the women’s competition with as much respect and importance as the men’s. The Hundred in 2022 was scheduled at the same time as a women’s international T20 competition, something which would never have happened with the men, which meant the women’s Hundred started later and had 8 fewer matches than the men’s that year. On the other hand, at least there was one women’s game in the evening because neither of the following seasons did.
The women’s games also don’t receive much benefit from the extensive and expensive entertainment at The Hundred matches. The fireworks and live music, costing on average £200,000 per game, all largely take place after their match is finished. If someone who wasn’t already a cricket fan wanted to go to a game purely for a band and a fireworks display, which is the whole point of having them there in the first place, they could skip the women’s match and barely miss a thing.
There is virtually no cross promotion from The Hundred for the women’s regional teams, despite them sharing virtually identical rosters. Whilst this is also true of the men’s teams, it is far more impactful with the women’s. Men’s county cricket already has its own fanbase, built over a century or more. The women’s regional teams literally didn’t exist four years ago. Nor do the Charlotte Edwards Cup or Rachael Heyhoe Flint Trophy have official social media accounts run by the ECB. The Hundred’s social media accounts are by far the most popular domestic women’s cricket accounts in this country and yet are almost entirely silent 11 months of the year. It is a waste.
The ECB’s undervaluing of the women’s Hundred occurs in the financial sense too. In 2023, the women’s competition was responsible for approximately 39% of the overall attendance and 33% of the overall Sky TV audience for The Hundred. This alone would account for over £14m of revenue, even before you begin to consider the high prominence of women cricketers in terms of sponsorship. According to the ECB, the entireity of women’s cricket in this country earns £10-11m per year. There is no possible way that could be true, unless the ECB believes that a viewer or attendee of a women’s cricket match to be worth less monetarily than one of a men’s match.
Nor is the women’s Hundred seemingly being considered by the ECB when it comes to discussions about the competition’s future. When the proposal regarding the sale of The Hundred franchises (which consist of both men’s and women’s teams) to private investors was mooted, it is stated that only men’s professional cricket which will receive the proceeds. There is also no mention of whether team owners will be under any obligation to promote their women’s teams at all. When the idea of expanding The Hundred to 10 teams was floated, the question about where the extra women cricketers will come from when there are only 8 professional domestic teams for the competition to draw from was clearly a secondary concern. The women’s Hundred appears not to be a factor in the debate at all within the ECB.
There is one thing people seem to value about the women’s Hundred though: It acts as excellent political cover. To question or criticise any aspect of The Hundred is to oppose the growth of women’s cricket, at least in the minds of some. There are undoubtedly some dinosaurs who loathe women’s sports on principle, but being able to paint everyone who thinks The Hundred has issues as being one of them is a handy tool in any debate on the subject. A real bargain, considering they are paying women 2.85x less than the men in the tournament.
Increasing Junior Participation
One of the many issues that The Hundred was supposed to address was the lack of kids playing at their local clubs, which were having to close through a lack of interest. The main vehicles for the competition to achieves its aims were All Stars and Dynamos cricket. All Stars is an 8-week programme designed for 5-8 year olds launched in 2017, and Dynamos is a follow-on scheme for 8-11 year olds was launched in 2020 and specifically tied in to The Hundred.
There is very little promotion of All Stars and Dynamos Cricket within the coverage of the tournament although, as with attendance, the competition’s position in the cricket calendar does not help with it taking place after the junior cricket season has effectively ended. All Stars and Dynamos programmes typically begin in May, nine months after The Hundred is on television. However, there also seems to be no advertising of either scheme from The Hundred’s social media or mailing lists either.
What makes this particularly egregious is that All Stars and Dynamos Cricket are used to promote The Hundred quite extensively. One of the very first questions you are asked when you install the Dynamos mobile app is: “Which Hundred team is your favourite?”, which leads to the colour themes taking that team’s colours. The app features videos of cricketers in their Hundred kits demonstrating the various skills or drills used. Kids in the Dynamos scheme are given free The Hundred trading cards.
To be clear: I’m not against any of this. I want more children to become cricket fans. My issue is that it is only working in one direction. Kids playing cricket should be encouraged to watch it on TV, but kids watching it on TV (and their parents) should also be encouraged to go to their local clubs.
In terms of the total number of kids in the All Stars/Dynamos programmes, it has decreased every year The Hundred has been held so far. It was “over 101,000” in 2021 (which was before the competition began), “over 100,000” in 2022 and “just over 97,000” in 2023. Likewise, there has a slight decrease in girls within the programmes from 27,000 in 2021 to 26,752 in 2023.
From these figures (and the ECB doesn’t release broader participation data), you could honestly make the argument that The Hundred is hurting junior cricket participation in this country.
Conclusion
Everything about The Hundred ranges from a missed opportunity to a fundamentally flawed concept. Even the women’s competition, the one shining beacon of light in the whole thing, fails to lead anywhere else beyond attracting an audience for itself.
Obviously it works out pretty well for some people. Anyone employed as a marketer or PR consultant in North London, for example, or the eight ECB executives who pocketed a huge bonus cheque. A large selection of mediocre men’s T20 cricketers also have good reason to be thankful.
Beyond that, the greatest success The Hundred has had is in persuading people to say that it’s successful.
Thanks for reading. If you have any comments on this, the Test series or anything else, please leave them below.
I have taken the unmitigated liberty of posting on this, my old home, but which I have not contributed for a couple of years. It’s been a while of mad transition in my life, moving out of London, devoting my sporting life to non-league football, and losing a stack of weight through necessity! About time. The other thing that has happened is I have just lost the appetite to watch cricket. I don’t hate it, I just felt the game, and its authorities rather had contempt for the likes of me and weren’t backwards in coming forwards about expressing their love of money more than their pastoral care for the sport. That’s OK with me, because after all, I am just one person and responsible for my own choices and my own life. I still follow Surrey, even though I live in Hampshire now, and I still like test matches, and have no strong feelings either way on Bazball. It’s good to watch, it’s maddeningly reckless at times (and has cost us one test series, possibly two), but best of all it really winds Australia up! That’s the best bit.
But why now, why today to write on here. Well, as I was scouting around past anniversaries on the internet, I was alerted to something that reminded me of this time of year in 2014. I suddenly remembered that February 6th was the anniversary of starting this site. I mistakenly thought it was 10 years ago, but forgot there was one year of How Did We Lose In Adelaide before that all kicked off, while it was well and truly kicking off. Then I wound my brain forward and remembered, we had two other anniversaries – on 4th was the KP Announcement, but I had missed that, but the 9th. Oh yes. The 9th was the day that Paul Downton and the ECB, frankly, told all cricket supporters who didn’t agree with their high-handed, nonsensical thought processes, to in the words of my piece at the time
“There in lies the true inner feelings that the ECB have stated loud and clear. Pay your ticket money, your sky subscriptions and shut the fuck up.”
As the years have rolled on, we did warn you. At the time too many were saying “they meant Piers Morgan” to which I replied, they should have said “Piers Morgan” then, because there were thousands of others who were as up in arms, but the ECB lumped them all together and caused me to go into apoplexy. Of course, the Cook Crew were keen to back the ultimate wisdom of Mr Difficult Winter himself, and were shown to be the sheep they were when he was booted out a year later after a spell where he couldn’t stop putting his foot in his mouth, breaching a confidentiality agreement, bowing to the obvious about Cook in ODI cricket about 9 months too late, being in charge of the Team England at the 2015 World Cup and then being sacked. That he has found a form of redemption at Kent has been good. I don’t wish anyone permanent ill. I was calling that out for the stupidity that it was.
He was replaced by Tom Harrison, who, and I hate to say I told you so (no I don’t), but I BLOODY WELL TOLD YOU SO, was the ultimate drowning man clutching at serpent syndrome. This empty suit, this evangelical, overpaid, overrated, greedy mad man has wrought so much damage on English cricket, we should make his reign a world heritage site for hubris. When he went, no-one wept. Not even he did as he trousered an obscene bonus and walked straight into another job, no doubt to cheese them off (It’s the Six Nations, isn’t it? How is he going to recast that? Reduce the games to 20 minutes a side and have 9 players?). When he came in , he used that magnificent first presser to kill off the KP kraken, allow Andrew Strauss to bring his personal grievance into team selection (remember that ridiculous job offer for the ODI team for Pietersen) and just show us it was plus ca change time.
Meanwhile, he embarked on the Hundred. A decision that caused a schism in the sport, and had me on the other side, as usual, from him and his money-grabbing caretakers of the sport. I may have gone over the top, and even been far too angry about it in hindsight, but when you see stuff you love being vandalised and you having no control over it, that’s hard to take. I couldn’t keep quiet. Until I was beaten.
A Simply Charming Man
As the years went on, I became further outside. My anxiety and panic means the thought of attending a T20 or test match strikes me with terror. About as much as the cost of it! Also, I don’t like events where I can’t eat what I want, drink what I want etc without being held hostage by rip off merchants flogging “beer” at nigh on £8 a pint. It’s this culture in sport that turned me to non-league, where you are accepted and part of the firmament. It brings me closer to sport, to the players, to the administrators and the management. You feel part of it, not a consumer, but almost a participant. Not in the playing way, of course not, but as part of the collective. County cricket had this, to a degree, but it didn’t make money for its true stakeholders, the owners, administrators and players, so it had to go. It is in its death spiral, and unless it reclaims some of the key ground lost to franchise drivel, will always be second fiddle. If we loyalists accept that, and enjoy the competition for what it is, and not worry about justifying it in a defensive way, we have a chance of enjoying something we like. Take it from me, I don’t see the best players in football, but the competition is much much more exciting. It depends what you want to watch sport for.
So I outside the cricket the public wants. That’s fine by me. I came at peace with that a couple of years ago. I will never forgive those who chose to oppose my view in snivelling devotion to a cause against a player they hated. KP has been tiresome since he went into media, but he’s entitled to his view. Horrible to feel powerless, isn’t it, when you hate his media appearances and can’t get rid of him out of the comms box isn’t it? When the decision doesn’t seem to reflect the majority of your public’s opinion? How you just wish he wasn’t there? That your majority view rules. Well that’s how it felt to be cheated of two more years of Pietersen in the test and ODI arena. He wanted to miss meaningless ODI series for the IPL, but now we see South Africa send a second team to New Zealand to play a home T20 series, and the West Indies haven’t fielded their best test XI in 20 years. Still we hear the plaintive cries of the need to protect the premier form of the game, but England, maybe Australia aside, it just isn’t, because it doesn’t make any money.
I gave my soul, and some of my sanity, to cry out repeatedly against what was happening. KP was they symptom, not the sickness – no-one cared. It was a power play, showing that the ECB controlled this, not you. You did not matter. Remember how Gary Ballance was the saviour until he wasn’t? That it seems to be, even post-retirement, that there wasn’t that much smoke to fan the flames of the dismissal (don’t talk to me about the book – six months after) is even more disconcerting. I could see what was coming. It was Tom Harrison. It…..was…..Tom……Harrison. You were warned.
I am relatively well, the whole era damaged me mentally, I know that. I don’t miss the day to day involvement, although I still love writing. I don’t have TNT so don’t get to follow the winter cricket, and my job is so much more time-consuming that despite working from home a lot, I barely follow home series on TV (yes – I am serious about home working despite what tedious liars tell you, so are most of us). I still love reading about the game, collecting old Wisdens and Playfairs, wallowing in the history of test cricket. I have no interest in T20. Once you’ve seen one six battered 100 metres, or the juggle catch on the boundary called the greatest ever, you know another one will be along somewhere next week being called the same. I don’t care who wins, I have no emotional investment. Following Phoenix Sports tells me how much emotion means. I do feel that for Surrey. But not enough. And not in T20.
So 10 years ago Paul Downton told us what he believed, what Giles Clarke, Hugh Morris, and the cadre of supine media who got in behind them thought. The fans were trash, to be milked, to be talked down to. If I played a small part in raising a voice, it would not have been in vain. But I am on the negative side of that ledger. What it brought me, and which I have been crap at recently, is the comradeship with Danny, Sean and Chris on here. We are all fans of cricket, we all care about different things in the game, and we probably disagree on more than we agree. But we are united in one thing. When Downton said what he said, we knew which side of that particular ledger we were on.
I don’t think I’ll be making any predictions in this post.
England went into the last match against possibly the best team in the world with a debutant spinner, another spinner with one Test under his belt, an injury-prone bowler as their main spin option plus a single fast bowler who could only be expected to offer very short, sharp spells. Oh, and Joe Root who is apparently an allrounder now. To top it all off, they conceded a first innings lead of 190.
And then they won.
What does anything mean now? Experience, form, preparation, home advantage. They’re all lies, I guess. England’s trio of specialist spinners will have 3 Tests, 41 first class matches and 85 first class wickets between them, and they’re facing India. A week ago I’d have been worried. Now? I’m mainly confused, although not quite a believer to the extent some people appear to be in suggesting England are favourites. There’s literally nothing in the history of cricket which can explain what’s happening in front of our eyes. The closest I can get to expressing it is this picture:
I memed. That is what this team has driven me to.
Feel free to leave your comments below. I’m just setting my alarm clock for 3.55am…
After almost six months of exclusively white ball cricket for England, and a decidedly lacklustre six months at that, it is time for the England Test team to once again grace our televisions. Well, some of our televisions. If subscribing to Sky Sports has been a severely limiting factor on who can or chooses to watch live English cricket nowadays, then this series being on TNT Sport (BT Sport rebranded) will restrict viewership even more.
The run up to this series has also seemed oddly muted. The ECB opted to have a ten-day training camp in Abu Dhabi rather than play full matches against teams in India itself. This decision has been justified by the England camp by suggesting that this allows the batters and bowlers more time actually practicing their skills as opposed to just two or four innings in a typical pre-series warm-up. Certainly there is (some) logic in this approach. Host countries are certainly not above using gamesmanship with touring team’s preparations, providing pitches and opponents totally unlike what awaits them in the series for example. At the same time, the majority of the squad won’t have played a full red ball game in six months and may lack ‘match sharpness’ at the beginning of this series.
Both teams have been affected by events at home, with Harry Brook and Virat Kohli leaving the series (at least temporarily) due to personal reasons. I agree (for once) with Jonathan Agnew that this represents a welcome change from the status quo in professional cricket. Decades ago, a cricketer would have been risking their entire career if they left mid-tour due to a family tragedy or the birth of their child. They would have been portrayed in the media as ‘soft’, ‘lacking fortitude’ and ‘weak’, and it would certainly hurt their future chances of selection.
Of course, this evolution within cricket isn’t really due to more enlightened people within teams and the media as much as it is about the shifting power dynamics in the game. Twenty years ago or more, cricketers were really not paid very much. They were dependent on being selected for the national team to pay their bills, often with minimal savings or investments. Governing boards and the often petty selectors would hold this over players even thinking about taking a break. Between both lucrative central contracts (thanks to increased TV rights values) and extensive T20 league opportunities, top cricketers are rarely in desperate need for a pay cheque. Kohli is presumably set for life at this point of his career, but even the relatively young Brook could be in a financial position where he never has to work again at the age of 24. Certainly if he is as frugal as the stereotypical Yorkshire resident is portrayed.
Brook’s omission paves the way for Ben Foakes to return to the side. It was always likely, I would say, given the likely pitch conditions England will face through the series. Foakes is one of the most impressive wicketkeepers in the world when at the stumps, and with the idea being mooted that they will play three spinners (plus Root) and one pace bowler in the first Test that will be a vital skill. At the same time, sources within the team were saying that it was possible Bairstow would have the gloves just a couple of weeks ago and it certainly wouldn’t be out of character for McCullum and Stokes to go with that approach again.
One entertaining aspect of Foakes’ return is the effusive praise he has received from his captain.
“[Ben Foakes] can not only do things other keepers can’t, but also make them look incredibly easy. […] He’s a very special talent behind there and having someone like that who can maybe take a 2%, 3% chance, that could be massive in the series.” – Ben Stokes
Yes. This is what we were saying eight months ago. If only Ben Stokes was Test captain then, he could have selected Foakes for the Ashes.
All of which brings us to what may become a significant controversy through the tour. Shoaib Bashir, a 20 year-old spinner who has played in just 6 first class matches and was named in the England squad for this series is not currently in India because his visa application has been delayed. The reason for this delay is simple: His parents were born in Pakistan. There is a separate visa application process for anyone with Pakistani parents where they have to provide extensive personal and financial details, and it typically takes at least 6 weeks (and often more) to be completed. Bashir’s selection was announced just over 6 weeks ago.
The singling out of a single England squad member due to their ethnicity on a tour has drawn some parallels with the Basil D’Oliveira affair in 1968. The attempt by the South African Apartheid government to prevent the ‘mixed-race’ D’Oliveira from entering the country as part of the England Test team led to the the tour being boycotted entirely. This is, for many reasons, unlikely to happen here.
Not unlike between players and selectors, the balance of power between nations has changed dramatically in the past two decades. India are now the financial superpower of cricket, in respect of both other boards and individual cricketers. The ECB revenues when India tours England are on a par with Ashes summers, which is one reason why this is a 5-Test series. They are also seeking funding for The Hundred from IPL team owners. If they upset the BCCI then they might only agree to a 2-Test tour in the next cycle, potentially costing the ECB over £100m. Players are presumably also mindful that anything they say in this situation could risk them being unofficially blacklisted by IPL teams and missing out on millions themselves.
Of course, these conflicts of interest are nothing new. In the 23 years England refused to tour Apartheid South Africa on moral grounds, a lot of English cricketers ignored the boycott primarily due to the large amounts of money on offer at the time. Graham Gooch, Geoffrey Boycott, Mike Gatting, Simon Hughes, John Emburey and Chris Broad amongst many others went there to play cricket. Ultimately, there is a fairly broad acceptance that most people (and organisations) have their price and Indian cricket is more than wealthy enough to pay it.
At the same time, English cricket has been rocked by multiple discrimination scandals in recent years which makes the ECB’s response in this matter more critical than ever. It is easy for the ECB to pay for photo shoots and T-shirts proclaiming their principles and moral foundations, or a few token payments to schemes intended to improve equity within the sport. The senior players can talk about how inclusive the dressing room culture is nowadays in the England camp. One of their teammates is being openly and blatantly discriminated against, and they appear (at least publicly) to be doing nothing. This is the impression that people will take away from this. The ECB says a lot of the right things, but does nothing when it is time to act.
Bashir’s absence will have a tangible effect on the England Test team and perhaps this series. He was the only full-time off-spinner included in the squad, with Leach, Ahmed and Hartley all spinning the ball the other way. He has triple the first team experience Rehan Ahmed had when he made his Test debut, and it’s certainly not unrealistic that Bashir would have been selected if available. In that sense, the Indian Government’s application of their stringent immigration laws has materially affected the outcome on the field.
Perhaps the result of this series should be marked by an asterisk to note that England were prevented from selecting their first choice team?
If you have any comments about the post, the match, or anything else please leave them below.
It’s been over a year since Brendon McCullum and Ben Stokes took charge of the England Test team, and it’s fair to say that it has been a success. Won 13, Lost 4, Drew 1. It is a historically good record. They won 3-0 against the previous World Test Championship winners last year, defeated the number one ICC ranked Test team, and then became the only team in history to win three Tests in Pakistan. Drawing 2-2 against the new World Test Champions would have seemed like a remarkable achievement 14 months ago, but now feels like a disappointment.
As American football coach Bill Parcells once said, “You are what your record says you are.” England are an impressively strong Test team now, and almost everyone (aside from Australians) would have to concede ‘Bazball’ works.
The interesting thing for me is defining what ‘Bazball’ is. There are two popular uses of the term. The first is simply as a truism, that Bazball is anything that a team coached by Baz McCullum does. The second is that it centres around a mentality of mindless aggression, particularly in terms of the batting. Neither seems particularly fair to me. For all the laid back approach, the golfing away days and so on, there does genuinely seem to be a lot of thought and insight into how England are playing now.
Breaking With Tradition
It is a fascinating aspect of almost all sports to me, how orthodox tactics become so entrenched within a game that coaches and players are almost risking their careers if they try something different. The example I would use is American football (sorry Chris). After a team scores a touchdown (the equivalent of a rugby try), they have two choices: To kick the ball through the goal from 15 yards away for one point, or attempt to score another touchdown from two yards away in a single play for two points. The kicks are scored about 94% of the time, and roughly 50% of plays from two yards out work, which means that the latter nets teams 0.06 extra points per touchdown on average. The funny thing is that almost everyone in the sport knows always going for two points is the better, more productive choice for many teams but no coach is brave enough to do it.
The reason is that many prominent voices in the sports media (and, let’s be honest, a lot of fans too) can’t wait to attack anyone who doesn’t play the game the way they think it should be played. Typically this means how they remember it from their childhood. This resistance to change can leave sports stagnant and unable to adapt to new realities. So it is that the ‘normal’ defensive approach to Test batting has persevered through decades, centuries even, to the present day.
A lot has changed in Tests over the past fifty years. Pitches are flatter, covered, and more consistent now. Batters have larger bats, helmets, and extensive training in scoring shots thanks to T20 cricket. The professionalism, fitness, and preparation for modern players are leaps and bounds beyond what was the case even twenty years ago. And yet, despite all this, most people’s perception of what an ideal Test batting innings should look like has changed very little.
The funny thing is that I look back on Test cricket, with the benefit of hindsight, I do see hints that point to why England’s Bazball batting is working now. Whenever an edge flew over the slips and the commentator would always say “If you’re going to flash, flash hard!”, because everyone knew that aggressive shots were less likely to be caught in the slip cordon. Perhaps more pertinently, the few stand out innings by greats such as Pietersen, Sehwag or Lara where they would just go berserk and the opposition seemingly had no answer for how to deal with it. The field would be spread, chances fell into gaps and everyone would applaud the audacity and effectiveness of the batting whilst simultaneously assuming that it wouldn’t work with lesser mortals, or in most conditions.
The conventional approach to setting a field in Test cricket is simple. For your good deliveries, place catching fielders where edges from a fend or prod might go. For your bad deliveries, place a few on the boundary to minimise the opponent’s runscoring. I remember hearing someone summarise the differing approaches of red and white ball cricket several years ago. In Tests, you have defensive batting against attacking bowling. In T20s, you have defensive bowling against attacking batting. With Bazball, that no longer applies. Deliveries on or near the stumps are just as likely to be scored off as any other, which means that the opposition have to radically alter their own tactics. As it stands, even teams with strong bowling units seem unable to counter this England batting lineup.
The new batting approach also seems to be helping England’s batters develop whilst in the Test team. When McCullum and Stokes came in, Joe Root was the only player in the squad to have a Test average above 40. For several years now, promising batters would come into the England dressing room only to become progressively worse over time. Now, both Ben Duckett and Harry Brook have career Test batting averages above 40.
My suspicion is that England’s batting malaise over the past decade has been caused in part by overcoaching. Batters have been given complex (and often conflicting) guidance from coaches and analysts within the England setup, which meant that they didn’t have any sense of clarity what they should be doing at the crease. This led to indecision, being fractionally late in their shots, which led to wickets and loss of confidence. That loss of confidence led to even greater hesitancy, and their batting average spiralled as a result. Bazball’s batting approach, to attack the ball whenever possible, simplifies the mental process at the crease. A confident attacking stroke is less likely to lead to a wicket than an indecisive defence, as well as obviously producing more runs as a result.
Returning To Tradition
Regardless of the previous section, it would be foolish to suggest that everything about England’s approach to Test cricket has to ‘reinvent the wheel’, so to speak. Some things are traditional because they work.
This year’s first Ashes Test aside, it is an absolute necessity to take 20 wickets in order to win in that format. Whilst the aggression of England’s batting unit has been largely making the headlines, there has also been a similar change in intent from their bowling and fielding. It is noticeable that there have been more deliveries targeting the wickets, and more close catchers being used through the innings.
Where England’s changes to their batting are without precedent in Test history, their bowling approach could almost be considered old fashioned. It was only in 2010 that England switched to ‘bowling dry’, being focused on reducing the opponent’s scoring rate rather attempting to take wickets as quickly as possible. The traditional Test bowling tactic was always to prioritise dismissing the batter over everything else.
The approach can best be described as the fielding captain doing whatever the batters don’t want them to do. Does a batter prefer being surrounded with fielders in close positions, including in their eyeline, over having a few boundary riders which might restrict scoring but also allow easy singles? Do they like having to play every single delivery because it’s near the stumps, or being able to leave every ball from the over? We all know the answer to these questions, which is perhaps why Bazball isn’t getting much credit for the change. Some things are so glaringly obvious that it seems ridiculous teams weren’t already doing it.
Prioritising taking wickets over economy rates presents a number of advantages for the team. It increases the likelihood that England will make early inroads with the new ball, which is particularly crucial if you don’t have some 2018 Dukes balls stashed away somewhere. Shorter innings means a lower workload for the bowlers (as well as less rest for the opposition bowlers), and reduce the probability of a draw. Perhaps most importantly for England, having shorter innings reduces their need for a spin bowler. This is not an area of strength for England, and hasn’t been since 2014.
Luck and Momentum
It’s easily forgotten how fortunate England were to win their first two Tests in the Bazball era. In both matches, New Zealand lost one of their bowlers to injury during the game. Root and Bairstow’s fourth innings heroics, whilst tremendously impressive, were against an overstretched and tired bowling unit. Those wins seemingly gave the England side a huge burst of confidence, particularly after a lacklustre winter, and allowed them to believe that their approach could work against the best teams in the world.
One of the interesting parallels to observe with Bazball is its similarity to England during Trevor’s Bayliss’ time as head coach. Selecting aggressive batters, playing batters out of position, picking inexperienced players on a hunch. These are all things which failed five years ago, but seem to work now. There are two obvious differences. One is the captain. Ben Stokes is far more attacking and proactive than Joe Root. The other is England’s form. Players coming into the squad now have a luxury which hasn’t been the case for over a decade; They are joining a team which is more likely than not to win the match. That is huge.
Success often seems to breed success in sports. Football teams with recent triumphs are just able to win 50-50 contests, snatch undeserved points or otherwise come through pressure unscathed. There’s an inbuilt confidence throughout the squad that they can recover from any position, no matter how dire. This England team has that, and it’s just plain fun to watch.
When It Doesn’t Work
If there is one thing which annoys me about batting in Test cricket, it is the half-hearted fend or prod to a delivery which is short and/or wide of the stumps. I simply don’t see the point in it. The best case scenario is that the ball hits the face of the bat and there’s no run, which would also be the outcome if the batter left it, but with the risk of catching the edge and losing a wicket. It is a high risk, low reward shot, and England are still guilty of playing it pretty often. I would rather they threw the bat at it, and at least score some runs, than keep doing it.
That’s right, I’m complaining that England’s batting isn’t aggressive enough.
On the same theme, there have been times in games when the team’s confidence and commitment to the Bazball approach has deserted them. On Day 5 in the first Ashes Test, England had virtually every player on the boundary whilst Cummins was on strike rather than actively trying to take his wicket. He’s Australia’s number 8 and you would normally back your bowlers to dismiss a lower order batter relatively cheaply, even with an old ball. Instead, England gifted him single after single just for the chance to bowl a few deliveries at Nathan Lyon. After the previous 12 months, it was an oddly defensive and archetypal England captain’s choice to make.
The failure to fully commit to doing what their opponent would least like them to do at any given point is perhaps best exemplified by the declaration on the very first day of this Ashes series. With 6 overs left in the day and Joe Root steaming along at roughly 10 runs per over, Ben Stokes declared. Given the choice between Joe Root continuing or essentially dismissing him and having to face 4 overs in relatively benign conditions, I feel certain Australia would have chosen the latter. This was a rare moment in Bazball when I just couldn’t fathom any logical reasoning behind Stokes’ decision.
Australia will also have been delighted by England selecting a patently unfit Bairstow over Foakes as their wicketkeeper. That choice arguably cost England the series, with Bairstow missing as many chances as he took in the first two matches. There are two aspects to this decision which made it questionable even within the context of Bazball. The first is that it ignored the strategy of being aggressive as the fielding team. Ben Foakes is a threat to the opponent’s batters in a way Bairstow wasn’t even at his physical peak. Not unlike having a short leg or silly mid off, both fielding positions Stokes is more likely to employ than his predecessors, even the knowledge Foakes is behind them plays on the minds of the batters.
The other issue is the lack of loyalty shown to Ben Foakes. He was England’s first-choice keeper for the first year of Bazball, a period in which they won all but two matches. He played well with both bat and gloves. He did everything asked of him, and was still dropped for an unfit replacement. For a team which has put great stock in standing by underperforming players and not changing a winning formula, it just felt incredibly weird. And it’s going to feel even weirder in 4 months’ time, when England will almost certainly select Ben Foakes as their wicketkeeper for the next Test series in India.
It may be a choice which also harms Bairstow in the long run too. As the only England men’s player who is seemingly in the first choice team for all three formats, as well as being an integral member of Welsh Fire’s squad in The Hundred, he looks set to play at least 7 consecutive months of solid cricket. He is a 33 year old wicketkeeper who has just returned from a serious injury. No one doubts his commitment or desire, but it may not be wise to put so much strain on him.
There’s definitely more good than bad with regards to England’s Bazball approach, but there is always room for improvement. With over five months until their next Test match, likely on dusty Indian pitches, I have no idea what will happen next. Who they will pick, how they will play. But that’s a lot better than being certain they will lose, as I was 15 months ago.
Thank you for reading. If you have any comments about the post, or anything else, please post them below.
So there we go, 2-2, honours shared but Australia return home still hanging on to the urn by their fingertips. Not quite a classic series, but only because the Old Trafford rain ruined the possibility of a denouement, and as a result the destination of the Ashes was already known going into the final Test. The matches themselves certainly were, only the curtailed Old Trafford game was one sided, the rest were nip and tuck throughout.
And yet it was a missed opportunity for England. The Manchester rain would have been insurmountable no matter what, and the complaining about declaration timing is fairly irrelevant set against the reality of losing two days to the weather. If that happens, you’re just not going to win very often. Equally, the response to bad weather on too much of the English media side was to rail against the cricketing conditions that have prevailed for a century and a half – such as ridiculous suggestions for a spare day. It rains sometimes. It’s unfortunate, but it’s as much a part of the game as winning the toss and batting on a glorious sunny day. It happens, deal with it.
With that match aside, England certainly could have won 4-0 with only a slight shift in outcome, and while Australians could legitimately say they could have too, the difference is that throughout the series it was England who were the ones pushing, and making the running. It was their mistakes that gave Australia their openings, their fluffs that cost them matches. With England 1-0 down I argued (https://beingoutsidecricket.com/2023/06/26/working-six-to-leg/) that the Bazball approach was the best chance of beating Australia – at the end of the series I remain of that view, and equally sanguine about the fact that such a high risk approach also engenders mistakes. Selection might have been contentious, but there were no easy solutions, and too many seemingly wanted to pick twelve players to get around that, something even the Australians were bound to notice. As it turned out, many of those players dismissed early on as the ones to remove had a huge say in the outcome of the series – particularly Zak Crawley who was showing consistency and improvement all the way through, and before his huge century. It is for him to kick on from here, and a single successful series doesn’t mean he will, but his shot selection has improved out of sight, not because he’s playing fewer of them, but because he is committing to them. Edges flying over slip from full blooded drives is exactly how he should play, he gets into trouble most of all when he’s hesitant.
All this talk has been about England, and for good reason. This series is one that has happened to Australia, pretty much from first ball to last. They have resisted extremely well, particularly early on, but they were the ones under assault and trying to fend England off throughout, which made their 2-0 lead feel very odd (and perhaps explains the anger at mistakes of the kind that happen in cricket), and made England’s comeback less surprising than it might have appeared from the outside.
Any Ashes series that is competitive carries its own narrative (as an aside, this is why Australian fans create their own amid the boredom of a thrashing of the England team down under), the twists and turns highlight individual instances and players and it’s ever unsurprising that Stuart Broad inserted himself into the story. A player who has been more than just his statistics throughout did it again. The switching of the bails in both innings, and subsequent wicket the following ball each time was so very Stuart Broad. Some cricketers seem to have the ability to shape reality around them far beyond their on field skills. Ian Botham once returned from a ban and the first ball he bowled was a slow, wide, half volley – unaccountably snicked behind by (I think) Bruce Edgar. Narrativium was a glorious Terry Pratchett concept, amusing in itself, and sometimes a little hard to deny when you see it happening.
Broad bowled beautifully throughout the series, though showing his age as it went on and he tired somewhat. A year ago he had looked toothless and coming to the end, certainly compared to Anderson who somehow seemed to be getting even better. The switch in fortunes for the pair this summer could not have been more stark. Perhaps that is why it felt a surprise when Broad announced his retirement first, mere days after Anderson had insisted he was going to carry on. Broad’s explanation that he wanted to go out on a high made perfect sense, but then so did Anderson’s that he wanted to continue for as long as he could. People are different – some former Test cricketers play club cricket into their seventies, others never pick up a bat or ball again after retiring from the top level. At Anderson’s age, it is impossible to have a poor series without being considered to be at the end, and maybe he is, but if he wishes to continue and try to prove otherwise, then there’s no reason not to allow him to, as long as selection remains on merit. Being available to go to India in the winter is quite the commitment from him.
But this piece is to be primarily about Broad. He was, perhaps, just a little below the level required to be called a great, but longevity itself should never be underestimated as something to praise without qualification. Some of those with better records would not have such had they played for as long as he has, while his overall statistical record has been one of gradually undoing the damage of a fairly poor start. To look at his average over the last decade or so is to see a player who has been exceptional, and the only reason for refusing the tag of greatness is because that truly should be reserved for the best of the best, irrespective of the trend towards greatesteveritis. He occasionally went off the boil, and struggled, particularly in the daft “enforcer” period, but he was also capable of spells that really were great, and as a result struck a note of fear into opposition hearts constantly just in case it was one of those occasions. Stuart Broad Day was a concept familiar to fans all over the world for a reason, when he was on song he was completely irresistible.
If the refused tag of greatness is to be qualified, his batting might well be the reason why. His bowling record is extremely good, but had it been allied with the batting prowess he showed in his earlier years, to the point where he was close to being considered an all rounder, then he would be propelled to the top of a great many lists. His 169 against Pakistan remains extraordinary, not just because of how he did it, but also because of how different his batting looked subsequent to being hit by Varun Aaron. He became a genuine tailender in those latter years, and it has to be wondered how hard England worked with him on his batting to overcome it. Strangely, it picked up just a little bit in the last few years when it had looked for a time that he would be a true rabbit, even below Anderson in the order. Speculation all, for the mental difficulties he confessed to after that injury cannot be gainsaid by an outsider, we simply do not know truly how hard it was for him, as it clearly was.
Therein lies a particular irony. As his batting declined, it became more celebrated. The occasional echo of past glories as he would lash bowlers into the stands became a meme, something to be looked forward to by cricket followers all around the world. An “Is Stuart Broad Batting?” Twitter account was set up, and amassed by the end nearly 16,000 followers, a level of silliness that ended up actually causing a sense of loss from many with the final tweet, viewed an astonishing 1.2 million times at this point.
Perhaps that’s one reason that set Broad apart. Another is certainly his combativeness, something that irritated plenty in the earlier years when he was viewed as a cocky upstart. Either he changed or we did, or both, because over time the barbs were laced with an acute sense of humour, most of all when they were aimed at the Australians, for whom he became the ultimate pantomime villain.
That it can be said it was a pantomime villain rather than a real one can be defined by the way no one, apart from the terminally dense, could get truly irate about a player not walking after an edge, while wandering into the Gabba press conference carrying the morning newspaper slating him under his arm was delightful. As for his delicious dig at the sandpaper affair by wondering why Australia had changed a method that was already working for them, it all merely adds to the appreciation level that has seen him approach national treasure status in recent times.
He will reappear in the commentary box, and it’s to be hoped he maintains the asperity, for there is no shortage of anodyne observation already. Whether he also goes down the celebrity route, Strictly et al, is to be seen. But he does leave a hole in the England attack that will not be easy to fill, and perhaps more importantly, a hole in the sense of fun for everyone watching. He is going to be missed, and for a retiring sportsman, perhaps that is timing it best of all.
I had intended that my next post would be about Bazball, what worked from it and what didn’t. Then Yorkshire CCC’s ‘punishments’ were announced and that really needs an immediate response.
For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, the Cricket Discipline Commission (the ECB’s semi-autonomous body used for disciplinary issues) published their sentencing for Yorkshire CCC yesterday. Having plead guilty to four charges of bringing the game and the ECB into disrepute, their punishment was:
A 48 point deduction in the County Championship
A 4 point deduction in the T20 Blast
A £400,000 fine
These are large numbers, a historic punishment when looking at the headlines, but there is a catch: In practice, they are all virtually worthless. Both of the points penalties, whilst potentially large in impact, apply to the 2023 season only. Yorkshire CCC are already in Division 2 of the County Championship, and were in 6th place (out of 8) before the deduction. The difference between finishing 6th or 8th in Division 2, with no possibility of demotion, is practically nothing. £300,000 of the £400,000 fine is suspended for two years and, barring a “further serious breach of cricketing regulations”, will not have to be paid at all. This means that what Yorkshire CCC will actually have to hand over is £100,000.
By far the most laughable part of the sentencing was the deduction of four points from the 2023 T20 Blast. A competition which finished two weeks ago, and in which Yorkshire CCC had already failed to qualify for the playoffs. It’s like if the Welsh men’s football team were to be given a retroactive punishment of a million points in World Cup qualifying between 1962 and 2018. Aside from forcing media companies to update a league table for an already finished tournament (so far the BBC has updated their table for the Blast, but ESPNcricinfo hasn’t), it makes literally no difference to anyone’s lives.
In effect, the only meaningful aspect of the punishment handed to Yorkshire CCC yesterday was a £100,000 fine.
One thing that many have questioned is whether this punishment is fair. There are two principles behind this question: Retribution and proportionality. Retribution is a simple concept, people have an almost visceral desire to see the wicked suffer and the righteous prosper. Being given a fine which amounts to 0.7% of their 2022 turnover, even if their massive debts mean that this might still feel like a significant sum to them, seems insubstantial to the general public. Given that Yorkshire CCC’s mishandling of racism complaints has caused this issue to overshadow much of the last three years in English cricket, and cost the ECB and its clubs many millions in the process, there was certainly an appetite from many for a severe penalty to be applied in this case.
Proportionality also relates to humanity’s sense of natural justice. There is an instinctual understanding that murder is worse than assault, which is worse than verbally abuse, which is worse than littering, and that the level of punishment should reflect this. If a person is given a more lenient sentence than someone perceived to have have committed a less serious offense, then that will likely be seen as unfair and unjust.
This is why the CDC’s previous rulings regarding counties are being compared to Yorkshire’s punishment. Here are a selection of counties’ penalties from recent years:
2019 – Somerset CCC receive a 12 point penalty in next season’s County Championship (which ended up being in 2021 due to COVID-19) due to uneven bounce in a match at Taunton.
2022 – Essex CCC receive a £35,000 fine (0.7% of their 2020 revenue) for failing to properly investigate an racist phrase allegedly used during a 2017 board meeting.
2022 – Leicestershire CCC receive a 2 point penalty in the T20 Blast for an accumulation of minor offences during matches, which knocks them out of the quarter finals.
2022 – Durham CCC receive a 10 point penalty in the 2022 County Championship for a player using a slightly oversized bat.
All of these transgressions feel far less serious than what Yorkshire CCC were found guilty of. The four charges which the CDC upheld said that Yorkshire failed to act following clear evidence of racism within the 2021 racism report, attempted to cover up their wrongdoing through the intentional destruction of evidence, and failed to adequately respond to complaints of racism (not just from their own players) over a span of at least seven years.
All of these counties, and perhaps several more I haven’t mentioned, might feel hard done by today. Not only were Essex CCC fined a similar proportion of their annual turnover to Yorkshire CCC for just a single mishandled complaint, but only 30% of their fine was suspended compared to 75% for Yorkshire. Leicestershire CCC were literally knocked out of a competition, ironically allowing Yorkshire to qualify for the playoffs in their place, through their points deduction, because of a send off and a bowler accidentally doing two full tosses. Somerset’s points deduction being applied to the following year rather than the season the offence took place in (and which had already been completed) clearly has a greater impact on the team and its players.
You will have probably noticed that I didn’t include the most egregious punishment that a county has received: Durham CCC in 2016. The simple reason is that this was exclusively done by the ECB board and not the Cricket Discipline Commisssion. Not unlike when the ECB withdrew and then reinstated international matches at Headingley in the winter before the 2022 season, there was no pretense of being an independent or quasi-legal process. The ECB’s executive saw something they did not like, a county asking them for financial help, and acted with impunity. The total list of sanctions applied to Durham were:
Summary demotion from Division 1 of the County Championship, having finished 45 points clear in fourth place.
A 48 point deduction from the following season’s County Championship.
A 4 point deduction from the following season’s T20 Blast.
A 2 point deduction from the following season’s One Day Cup.
A strict salary cap to reduce team costs from 2017-2020.
The loss of Test match status in exchange for a £2m one-off payment.
It should be said that the CDC does not have the authority to enact many of these. In terms of cricket clubs, they only have three punishments available: Points deductions, fines, and reprimands. The loss of England matches, salary caps or any other restrictions are beyond their purview currently, although a broadening of possible sanctions is recommended in the ICEC report. Even so, Durham were clearly punished far more severely and over a much longer period of time for what almost everyone would consider a far less serious matter.
Beyond the perception of fairness, any justice system also has to consider the effect of any sentence going forward: Is the guilty party likely to re-offend, and will the punishment deter others from taking the same path?
You could certainly make the argument that Yorkshire CCC are a very different organisation now than they were two years ago. Different personnel, different philosophies, and different policies have made Yorkshire a more welcoming and proactive club. It is very unlikely that an issue of similar scale will occur there in the near future. A cynical person might point out that these changes only began after sponsors began deserting the club, and could perhaps be watered down once they are in a stronger financial position. Hopefully not, but time will tell.
The most damaging part of Yorkshire CCC’s sentencing yesterday is the absolute lack of deterrence it provides. Other counties, and clubs around the country, will look at this punishment and decide it is probably worth the risk trying to ignore, minimise, and destroy evidence of discrimination and mismanagement. If they succeed, then they suffer no bad consequences at all to their reputation and can go on as they did before. If they fail and are caught red-handed, they can pay a negligible fine and make a few changes. It will not instil any sense of urgency or importance to dealing with these issues in club executives and chairs across England and Wales.
Whilst the punishment of Durham CCC in 2016 has been almost universally criticised for the past seven years due to its severity, you could argue that it worked. Every other county knuckled down and did everything they could to ensure that they did not share the same fate as Durham. (It also, perhaps coincidentally, likely made the sales pitch for The Hundred easier as it was sold to the counties as an extra source of income for them.) Deterrence does work.
So what now? The ECB does have the ability to appeal the sentence to the CDC and argue for a more severe sentence. Alternatively, the ECB board is free to impose any punishment they like as they did with Durham in the past. However, it seems more likely that everyone in the higher echelons of English cricket is pretty happy with the outcome. For the ECB, the disciplinary process is finally over and so they can suggest that they followed their procedure correctly whilst drawing a line under the matter. Yorkshire CCC will be ecstatic to have received such a slight slap on the wrist. The other counties certainly don’t want the precedent set of severe penalties for things they may have done in the past, or risk doing in the future. All in all, everyone wins.
Except for anyone discriminated against within English cricket, of course.
Thanks for reading my post. If you have anything to add about it, the Ashes, or anything else then please do so below.
After a Test which ended up being both exciting and one-sided, it might not be everyone’s first thought as to whether the Marylebone Cricket Club will (or should) host matches next year. However, I have not forgotten about the ICEC report into discrimination within English cricket unlike most people in the media. At points within that publication, the MCC was singled out for particular criticism and the notion of withdrawing international matches from outdated and recalcitrant host grounds is presented as a key recommendation. It is difficult to name a cricket club in the whole country more outdated and recalcitrant than the MCC.
Before considering the grounds of equality, diversity and inclusion for this move, there are at least a few other reasons why the ECB might want to move men’s Test matches away from Lord’s on a permanent basis. The first and most obvious is England’s form at the ground: Lord’s is the only ground where England have lost 50% or more of their home Ashes Tests since 2005. England have not lost a English Ashes series in that period (at least until now), and yet they do not perform well in North London. Conditions clearly favour the opposition there in a way that does not occur at other grounds. Australia would never schedule matches at a ground where they felt their opponents had either a psychological or technical advantage. Nor would India. Part of being a strong Test team is using home conditions to your benefit, and England playing Tests at Lord’s does not achieve that.
One explanation for England’s record might be the MCC ground staff’s repeated preparation of ‘chief executive pitches’ which are slow, flat, and almost guaranteed to require five days of play. The second Test in this series certainly conforms to that pattern, in spite of Ben Stokes specifically asking for quick pitches in order to suit both England’s batters and bowlers. Aside from not helping England teams achieve victory at the ground, these kinds of pitches can also produce long stretches of play which are relatively boring in Test matches.
There is also the slope. Test cricket is a 21st Century professional sport and not a PG Wodehouse-esque sketch about a match on a village green where hitting the the post box at midwicket is a four. Lord’s is a multi-million pound sports stadium and the MCC can well afford a spirit level. Dig up the tall side, dump it on the short side and even it up. It’s an embarrassment.
The real reason why Lord’s losing its customary two men’s Tests per year is even a remote possibility is the ICEC report into discrimination within English cricket. There are two recommendations in particular which could (or should) alarm the MCC and its members. The first, which gained some amount of media attention, is that Lord’s should no longer host the annual match between Eton and Harrow. It is notable because this makes the MCC the only organisation other than the ECB which is specifically named as having to make changes within the document, with all of the other recommendations applying broadly to every county team or all cricket clubs in the country.
Recommendation 18 – We recommend to MCC that the annual fixtures between Eton and Harrow and between Oxford and Cambridge are no longer played at Lord’s after 2023. These two events should be replaced by national finals’ days for state school U15 competitions for boys and girls (see Recommendation 38) and a national finals’ day for competitions for men’s and women’s university teams.
Previous attempts to pressure the MCC into no longer hosting these matches led to the members revolting, and forcing their leadership to retain them by calling a Special General Meeting on the topic. Failure to change course now would place the club in the position of openly ignoring the advice of a report into discrimination, which might present very poor optics for the game but the MCC’s members can be very stubborn.
The more serious threat to the MCC hosting future matches might be recommendations about adding EDI criteria to selecting international hosts going forwards:
Recommendation 19 – We recommend that the ECB revises and clarifies its processes and criteria for allocating, suspending, cancelling and reinstating high profile matches to place greater emphasis on EDI. There is clear evidence that being allocated such matches, or having the right to host them withdrawn, is a powerful tool to encourage compliance with EDI. The current process for match allocation (via a tender process against six criteria) expires in 2024 and we have not identified any formal process for deciding to suspend or cancel matches. The revisions should: a) Ensure greater emphasis on EDI in the criteria for allocation, giving EDI criteria equal status to the most important of the other criteria. b) Consider making a bidder’s performance on EDI a ‘gateway criterion’ requiring hosts to meet stretching minimum EDI standards in order to be able to bid for a high profile match. c) Introduce a clear and transparent decision-making process for suspension, cancellation and reinstatement of high profile matches. d) The Cricket Discipline Commission (or any future adjudication body if it is replaced and/or renamed) should have the power to suspend or cancel the right to host high profile matches for regulatory breaches, in particular related to EDI
The reason why such a change to the ECB’s process would disproportionately affect the Lord’s Test matches is that it is arguable that the MCC is the least equal, diverse and inclusive cricket club in the country.
The ICEC report focused on three broad areas which English cricket needed to improve upon: Class & wealth, women & women’s cricket, and ethnic origin & religion.
I don’t believe that it would be hyperbole to suggest that the MCC is the poshest cricket club in the country. Possibly even the world. Whilst there may be clubs which have a higher membership fee (although £500+ per year for members within London is plenty high), there are surely none who are able to command a membership of 18,000 at such prices.
The very structure of the MCC has been created and maintained specifically in order to keep the ‘wrong sort of person’ out. You require the endorsement of three existing full MCC members and a senior MCC official simply to join the (currently 29 year) waiting list. Once there, you have to continue paying £200+ every year as an associate member for those 29 years until enough full members move on and a vacancy opens for you.
Except of course that there is a shortcut available to the very wealthy. When wanting to raise money, the MCC offers life memberships for the princely sum of £80,000. A fortune to most people, a year’s tuition for their kids to others. There is no pretence of fairness or egalitarianism from the club when there is money to be squeezed out of its members.
As an aside, the 29 year waiting list to attain membership also inhibits the MCC’s role as being in charge of the game’s laws. With a minimum age of 16 to even join the waiting list, the youngest people to become members will be 45 (and most will be much, much older). Because of their age, it is unlikely that most MCC members will be active cricketers or have even played a cricket match in the past decade. And yet it is this group of elderly men, disproportionately coming from English public schools, who govern the rules of the sport. Perhaps with a broader membership, closer to the game as its played in clubs around the country, the laws could be made clearer and with less need for the MCC to release statements about their interpretation after high profile events.
Every county cricket club began as a private Victorian gentleman’s club, but it is only the MCC which has been allowed to continue its practices into the 21st Century. In fact, the MCC’s membership policies would see them banned from every ECB league in the country. Every team from the Middlesex County Cricket League Premier Division to the Middlesex 3s Division 6B has to abide by an accreditation scheme known as ClubMark. Originally run by Sport England, ClubMark gives every cricket club in the country a checklist of policies which they should operate in order to ensure the safety of people at the ground and prevent discrimination. One of these (Criteria 3.4) specifically bars cricket clubs from requiring applications to be approved by existing members. There is good reason for this. The people who already know three or four MCC members move in the same social circles as them, are quite possibly related to some of them, and so this severely limits the diversity of new members as they likely share similar backgrounds, views and ethnicities as those already in place. This is why I suggested that MCC being the least equal, diverse and inclusive cricket club in the country is at least an arguable statement. Every single cricket club in every single ECB-affiliated league has to meet the minimum requirements of the ClubMark programme, but not the MCC.
This system of requiring an invitation in order to become a member may have had an effect on racial diversity at the club. London’s population is 48.2% non-White according to the 2021 census, and that certainly does not appear to be reflected in terms of those MCC members who attend matches at the ground. This may not be emblematic of the entire membership, but the Lord’s pavillion is often presented as being the least representative group of the local population within English cricket and this portrayal is probably not without cause.
One key area of the ICEC report was with regards to women’s cricket and its lack of support from the ECB and their members. In the professional era of women’s cricket, beginning with England central contracts in 2014 and the Kia Super League through to the regional teams and The Hundred now, it’s hard to see how the MCC could have put in less effort in terms of hosting women’s matches. In fact, if you exclude The Hundred (since the non-hosting counties are unable to compete for them) then the only one of the eighteen county grounds to have hosted fewer professional women’s cricket matches since 2014 is Cheltenham.
Scheduled Days Of Play (2014-2023)
Ground
Women’s Tests
Women’s ODIs
Women’s T20Is
KSL
RHFT
CEC
Total
Taunton
8
4
4
9
4
6
35
Bristol
4
5
4
5
9
2
29
Southampton
0
1
1
11
7
7
27
Chelmsford
0
1
8
2
11
4
26
Hove
0
2
4
8
6
3
23
Worcester
0
6
1
0
10
4
21
Leeds
0
1
0
7
8
4
20
Loughborough
0
0
0
12
5
1
18
Beckenham
0
0
0
0
14
3
17
Manchester
0
0
0
5
5
5
15
Birmingham
0
0
2
1
5
6
14
Guildford
0
0
0
9
2
3
14
Leicester
0
7
0
0
4
3
14
Derby
0
2
7
1
1
2
13
Northampton
0
1
3
0
4
5
13
Chester-le-Street
0
0
1
0
7
4
12
The Oval
0
0
1
7
2
1
11
Nottingham
5
0
0
1
1
3
10
Canterbury
4
4
0
0
0
2
10
Arundel
0
0
0
3
3
1
7
Blackpool
0
0
0
4
0
2
6
Liverpool
0
0
0
4
2
0
6
Scarborough
0
2
0
2
2
0
6
York
0
0
0
5
1
0
6
Cardiff
0
0
1
0
1
3
5
Chester
0
0
0
1
2
2
5
Sale
0
0
0
0
4
1
5
Wormsley
4
0
0
0
1
0
5
Lord’s
0
1
1
0
1
1
4
Cheltenham
0
0
0
1
2
0
3
The MCC’s decisions on which games it does (or doesn’t) host can be directly attributed to the way in which they have restricted who is able or feels welcome to join. In 2022, less than 2% of their full members (the membership category allowed to vote on issues relating to the club) were women. That means fewer than 366 of the 18,315 full members. There are almost certainly a lot more members who attended Eton and Harrow than women members of the MCC, so it should be no surprise that the match between those two schools has more support within the membership than hosting Sunrisers or the England women’s team. In fact, the MCC even has a special full membership category for staff members at certain schools which accounted for 520 of their members (roughly 200 more than women) in 2022.
Compare the number of women’s games grounds have hosted to how the ECB has awarded lucrative England men’s matches in the same period. The ground which has hosted the fewest days of professional women’s cricket has received almost double the number of men’s Test matches as the next-closest ground, whilst the two grounds which have hosted the most women’s games have been given virtually none.
Scheduled Days Of Play (2014-2023)
Ground
Men’s Tests
Men’s ODIs
Men’s T20Is
Total
Lord’s
89
9
1
99
Manchester
45
10
8
63
The Oval
45
9
1
55
Leeds
45
7
1
53
Birmingham
40
5
4
49
Southampton
30
10
8
48
Nottingham
30
8
3
41
Cardiff
5
6
7
18
Chester-le-Street
5
5
2
12
Bristol
0
5
4
9
Taunton
0
0
1
1
The MCC does not separate how much money it generates from England games from its other income (such as Middlesex and London Spirit matches) and so it is difficult to say exactly how much they receive through hosting two guaranteed Tests plus a white ball match every year. Surrey earned £8,313,000 in 2022 from one Test and one ODI, so the MCC probably makes in the region of £15,000,000 (not including sales of food and drink) in a typical year just from those three men’s games. Thanks to that England match day income, the MCC boasts a higher turnover than counties such as Surrey or Lancashire who have non-cricket revenue streams such as hotels and concerts in order to fill their coffers.
It would not be unreasonable for each of the seventeen other county hosts to look at the MCC and ask why they receive such preferential treatment from the ECB. Their counties host more women’s matches, they abide by the ECB’s guidelines regarding new members, and they have more diverse memberships in terms of gender, age, wealth and ethnicity. Why is the one club which comes bottom in all of these metrics rewarded inordinately with the most valuable prize that the ECB can offer: Hosting men’s Tests?
The first, and perhaps most important reason is money. Whilst the ECB has repeatedly made proclamations about ensuring cricket is a game for everyone, that women’s cricket is a big part of the game’s future, that racism is abhorrent and must be excised from the sport, the single constant which has run through its 26 year history is greed. Lord’s has the most capacity of any English cricket ground and can charge the highest individual ticket prices of any English ground whilst still selling out. It generates the most revenue of any host, and that’s all the ECB has ever really cared about.
The other, more pernicious reason is that the English cricketing establishment and the MCC are intertwined in a way which is virtually impossible to separate. The ECB’s headquarters are at Lord’s, which effectively makes the MCC their landlord. That in itself would appear to be a colossal conflict of interest for a sport’s governing body, and a significant risk if the ECB were to take action against the MCC.
Perhaps the greatest reason why the MCC feel no pressure to make any changes is the person that the ECB have put in charge of responding to the ICEC report, former England captain Clare Connor. Prior to being appointed ECB deputy CEO, Connor was President of the MCC in 2021-22. She was also given an honorary life membership to the MCC in 2009 (worth up to £80,000). It seems vanishingly unlikely that last year’s MCC president is going to propose taking men’s Test matches away from Lord’s, regardless of the strong arguments in its favour.
The degree to which the ECB will act with regards to the ICEC report probably comes down to external pressure, which appears to be almost non-existent at this point. The report was released in the middle of two exciting Ashes series, which has distracted the entire English cricketing media, whilst the UK Government and Parliament are already preparing for next year’s general election and have no time to spare regulating the UK’s eleventh most popular sports team if there are no votes in it. Absent any outside involvement, it seems probable that the ECB will enact the smallest and most cosmetic changes possible just as they did after Azeem Rafiq’s testimony in 2021. In which case, the same issues will continue to dog the sport and we will have to hope that the next review in twenty years or more will create real change.
Hopefully I’m wrong, and even the threat of losing matches might move the MCC into modernising and becoming a 21st Century cricket club with an inclusive and broad membership. I would love for that to happen.
But my lifetime of being involved in cricket has made me very cynical, and I sadly just can’t see that happening.
Thank you for reading this post. If you have any comments or corrections about the post, or just want to talk about the Ashes and Bazball, please do so below.
Being Outside Cricket 
