Cricket’s decline due to football’s financial muscle

The editor of Cricket Statistician analyses recent events

When I was a boy I watched cricket on television… and as a matter of fact I still do because I can afford a subscription to Sky.

Some boys still do: some boys still play (I know this, having stood out last night on a cold field watching my grandson playing for the local U11s B team).

But it is unarguable that for a generation the game has become irrelevant.

But it seems to me that the argument that it is the loss of free-to-air viewing of cricket that is the problem is too simplistic. Although 2005 was the last hurrah for cricket as a game in which most people were interested, the problem goes back further than that.

In the Fifties, cricket and football were still not that far apart in popularity.

Boys’ comics gave both almost equal treatment, and the packs of cards they gave away were of cricketers in the summer and footballers in the winter.

Far more people watched live football, and even then substantially more played it, but people could watch cricket on television, five Test matches a year and almost complete.

For football, Match Of The Day began showing highlights in 1964, but live showing of league matches did not begin until 1983 because the Football League believed that if a match was on television nobody would go and watch it.

It was not until 1992, with the Premier League, with Sky, and with the unexpectedly successful showing of Serie A on Channel 4, that we began to move towards the present position.

And it is very clear that the popularity of football did not fall away when live transmission of League games moved away from free to air TV.

In the two or three channel days, cricket held by far the lion’s share of sport on television.

The BBC had Wimbledon and there was already substantial coverage of the Olympics, but these were for very limited periods. The first sport I actually remember watching (at our next door neighbours in about 1951) was speedway.

But that never became an obsession and only turned up late at night.

Much of the Test cricket of the Fifties was, frankly, very dull. Scoring rates of around two an over and nearly all the slow scoring records for Tests date from this time.

But it was what there was, and we all watched it.

In retrospect it seems clear that it was the new financial muscle of football and the publicity it attracted that is a major reason for cricket’s decline in England.

It is easy to forget that at the time Sky had been losing money and putting its corporate shirt on football seemed a desperate gamble.

The more time passes, it becomes clearer that 2005 was a complete one-off, a kind of perfect storm with the recapture of the Ashes by a team that looked exciting, Steve Harmison, Freddie Flintoff, Kevin Pietersen and all.

That should mean that something like this could happen again.

Perhaps.