Provinces must pull rabbit out of hat to lure crowds to T20s
There has been plenty of entertainment during the Cricket SA T20 Challenge as well as a few mismatches, which might suggest that SA’s player resources are as stretched as its finances in sustaining 15 professional provinces, but these are early days and a crescendo may yet happen.
An undeniable theme, however, has been the meagre attendances. Thousands are watching the live-streams of games thanks to Pitch-Vision but live audiences make or break tournaments and most venues have been all but empty. A suggestion was made that too much emphasis has been placed on the “sideshows”. The opposite may, in fact, be true.
Outside the Indian Premier League most T20 leagues aren’t making anywhere near as much money as you believe. The impression of success, however, is critical to their chances of actually becoming profitable, so there is little talk of financial reality.
Hosts for the Cricket SA T20 Challenge who ignore the “sideshows” do so at their peril. Most viewers of T20 matches worldwide are doing so in a peripheral fashion. In most cases, when groups of friends gather to “watch” a match, it is merely on a TV in the background.
At the risk of offending professional players and coaches, T20 matches make a useful addition to the “atmosphere” of a bar where colleagues and mates congregate to catch up and eat. Weekend braais are complemented with a match on the TV inside providing a passing point of interest with each visit to the kitchen or bathroom.
Not being the major attraction should not be seen as a “weakness” for T20, but a major strength. Though tacticians and strategists will insist that each ball of the T20 during an innings can change the course of a match and that they are as individual as fingerprints, the truth is different for the rest of us. The formulaic predictability of the format is its greatest strength because, mostly, we know there will be an exciting finish.
The trick, then, may be to replicate these environments inside the match venues. Or at least to be sharply aware of the desire of many fans to mingle with friends, eat drink and chat while the cricket is going on rather than make the financial and social commitment to “watching” the game.
That commitment will no doubt be made in the closing overs and, who knows, perhaps more fans will be attracted by the actual cricket, from the start, in the future.
OWN FRIDGE
SA sport has a history of exclusion rather than inclusion, but it is not alone with that problem. You see it every time you attend a match. Security guards (they shouldn’t even be called that) have been briefed for decades to stop and deny” rather than “welcome and
“assist”. All of their training is focused on preventing fans from sitting in the wrong (better) seats.
It is, of course, a privilege-based system. Those fans hardy enough to brave the bucketseats with limited hospitality inevitably gaze upward towards the empty hospitality boxes and President’s Suites, never having experienced the luxury of an intimate environment with their own fridge and sandwiches.
How about filling a venue from the top down rather than the bottom up? If there are only 500 spectators, why not give them an experience to remember rather than forget? The kick-on effect for future attendance figures might surprise everyone. Regular travellers will know the thrill of an upgrade from Economy to Business Class, or from a standard room to a suite in a hotel. Cricket could try something similar.
There are many reasons why such a strategy change “won’t work”. The elite wouldn’t want boisterous youths chanting and singing in their midst. Let them do that “outside” in the cheap seats. But if the marketers and managers can’t see the pay-off, or find strategies to make it work, they are in the wrong job. Problems are easy to identify; solutions take more skill.
This is not a criticism of SA’s provinces, quite the opposite. From social media evidence alone, it is obvious that many provinces are trying hard. “Two for the price of one” beers might attract the “wrong” sort of crowd but a rowdy audience is better than none at all.
It’s too easy to say that the SA20 has sated the country’s appetite for domestic cricket, that there simply isn’t sufficient capacity of interest and income to sustain another tournament, especially one as optimistically long as this one.
But before that conclusion is reached, if it is reached, the provinces must be certain that they did everything in their power to make their venues and match days an attractive and welcoming proposition with at atmosphere offering plenty more than T20 cricket.