WHY CITY T20 IS RISK WORTH TAKING
Derek Pringle gives his thoughts on the ECB's radical plan
It has been billed by some as a revolution in cricket but since when did creating a second T20 tournament to take advantage of a fertile broadcasting landscape equate to revolution? Opportunism more like.
Granted the model for the proposed tournament, an eight team city-based competition, will rip up the old constitution. But while counties will not necessarily have a playing stake in the month-long competition (the current constitution says that every competition must be open to all first-class teams), they will have a financial one, which is why, when the vote came at Lord’s on Wednesday only three, Kent, Surrey and Sussex, dissented.
When Colin Graves succeeded Giles Clarke as the chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board last year, he promised radical change to the counties, several of whom are close to bankruptcy.
As a result, Tom Harrison, an expert at brokering broadcasting deals, was brought in as chief executive with the main task of enriching the counties. This second T20 tournament, with a projected worth of £40 million ring-fenced for county clubs, purports to do just that.
What not to like then? Well, plenty, it would seem.
The current T20 tournament, the NatWest Blast, has seen attendances swell this year, up by 14 per cent over 2015. Many of the smaller counties without Test match grounds have made a successful feature of Friday night T20 to the point where it is their one profit-making scheme.
Under the laws of rebranding, this new T20 product threatens that.You only have to see the must-have clamour from the market for the latest Apple iPhone, and the sudden social toxicity taken on by older models as a result, to know that the NatWest Blast will be seen as jaded and become diluted as a result.
Of course, county cricket might be immune but not if, as Graves has stated, they are looking to grow interest in cricket among the young. On that basis, be prepared for an upgrade every two years.
Then, there are the other competitions like the County Championship, to consider.
Take Essex, recently promoted to the First Division. Although yet to be thrashed out, the new T20 will almost certainly be scheduled to clash with Championship matches (four or five matches is the current consensus). Although Essex acknowledge that their principal role is to produce cricketers to play for England, the best way to do that is to remain in the top division.
They are not a big club so lack the playing resources of counties like Surrey, Lancashire or Yorkshire.
But if they lose, say, three or four players to the city team for the new T20, and Alastair Cook to England (Tests are likely to be on at the same time), they will be trying to stay up in Division One playing 30 per cent of their red ball games with a severe Happy compromised side. For smaller
countries like them, that cannot be fair.
While many in cricket feel the proposal is just evidence of the further dumbing down of cricket, not everyone feels disempowered.
One committee man at a small club reckons that squads will just have to be bigger to reflect this new reality.
But if that is the case, the £1.5 million counties will each receive as a result of this new competition is likely to go towards new players’ wages, which will solve few of the financial problems many currently face.
An ‘Us and Them’ antipathy already exists between those counties with Test match grounds and those without. As an illustration of the difference, let us take the £1.7 million every county currently receives annually from the ECB (this is a ball park figure as it varies slightly due to various incentives).
For a club like Essex, this represents about 40 per cent of annual turnover though for Derbyshire that figure rises to about 70 per cent.
At Surrey, with their long-term staging agreement for international matches at the Kia Oval, the ECB handout represents about ten per cent of turnover, a disparity that is only likely to increase with this new T20 tournament.
With the ECB looking on enviously as the Big Bash routinely attracts crowds of 40,000-plus, matches in the city-based T20 will have to be staged at Test grounds, or venues like the Olympic stadium, if attendances are to be maximised.
For that, those grounds will receive a £300,000 staging fee as well as the ancillary profits made at such events from drink and food etc.
This new T20 may offer a much wanted revenue stream to the counties but the bigger clubs will still be enriched at the expense of the poorer ones – something unlikely to play well when the county chairmen of the smaller clubs take the proposal to their memberships over the coming weeks.
To be relevant, rather than just a shiny new toy with which to gener- ate new TV income, the city-based T20 must involve England players.
Although India’s board are unlikely to allow their players to appear (they are very protective of the Indian Premier League), up to three overseas players per team will probably be allowed.
But if England’s finest are not available, due to bilateral commitments, it will be difficult to see the point of it all save for explicit profiteering.
If these are some of the gambles being taken by introducing a second T20 competition to an already over-crowded fixture list, it needs to be tried.
Graves is a sensible man who, while cherishing county cricket, has not been so blinkered as to see that it was becoming untenable in its current form.
As a friend of mine said to me recently with regard to his son. “He and his friends will watch a fastmoving three-hour match involving sixes, direct hits and athletic catching, and where the result is in doubt right until the end, but they won’t watch a day’s play in a Championship match.”
A new, all-singing, all-dancing T20 competition is a risk – though when the future is put as starkly as that, one probably worth taking.
With the ECB looking on enviously as the Big Bash routinely attracts crowds of 40,000-plus, matches in the city-based T20 will have to be staged at Test grounds