Thursday switch costs £300,000
WHISPER it quietly in the vicinity of Headingley’s Western Terrace, whose patrons tend to pride themselves on creating the most raucous atmospherics in Test match cricket, but nowhere makes noise like the Eric Hollies Stand.
Under bright and unbroken sunshine yesterday the giant traffic cones, chickens, convicts, cardinals, superheroes, wrestlers and revellers bounced beach balls, ran up and down the aisles, and made a racket of which they could be rightly proud.
Yet the sight of empty seats in their midst and replicated throughout a ground was not only hugely disappointing for Edgbaston but a salutary lesson for the ECB.
It is hard to imagine a day better set up for Test cricket than that which presented itself yesterday.
Not only is the Premier League season a week from starting, the opposition here, Pakistan, was high quality and the match situation, with England leading by 17 runs at the start of play, offered hope to all three outcomes.
In short, selling tickets for a Test Saturday like this ought to be like shelling peas. It was not, though, as evidenced by figures that showed a crowd of 15,875 out of a capacity of 24,500.
Yet Edgbaston should be offered sympathy not criticism because they have been asked not only to pay top dollar for this match but then had their hands tied behind their backs whilst The Oval picked their pockets.
Warwickshire bid for this Test back in 2011 but it was not until last summer that they were told, in order to guarantee that The Oval got a preferred Thursday start for the fourth Test next week, that they would be starting it on a Wednesday.
It had the effect of splitting their natural first-day crowd over two days, on Wednesday and Thursday, and also decimating their Saturday crowd who, in the days of three- and four-day Tests, were reluctant to pay for a match that might have only half a day’s play in it.
Edgbaston chief executive Neil Snowball (inset) admitted that there has been no offer of compensation for any loss – despite registering disappointment with his ECB counterpart Tom Harrison.
“What you want in any business is certainty for planning purposes and we would push for a change in the way the system of allocation works in the future,” he said. “We have let them know our concerns.”
The loss in revenue arising from the switch from Thursday to Wednesday is in the region of £300,000.
Edgbaston is the biggest English cricket stadium outside London and deserves to be full on a day like yesterday.
And, if the fancy dress shops in Birmingham did okay, the bars were not empty and the Hollies regulars did their best, the occasion could have been much better.