54 1GM Monday August 3 2020 | the times
SportCricket
5
control of the fixture list by implement-
ing what was called the Future Tours
Programme (FTP), a worthy initiative
which guaranteed countries a certain
number of home-and-away series
against every opposition over a ten-
year period. With this, crucially, came a
formal change to how revenues for
tours were divided up. They weren’t.
The home board would keep the reve-
nue generated and they would cover
the costs (the latter cancelling itself out,
supposedly, on a reciprocal basis.)
It is straightforward to see how this
impacted negatively on West Indies.
The television market in these tiny is-
land territories is insignificant — Crick-
et West Indies’ (CWI) yearly TV in-
come at present is roughly £15 million,
dwarfed by ECB’s £250 million, which is
dwarfed by India’s booming market.
Costs are disproportionate, too: CWI
must fly players from region to regionJonny Bairstow is set to play for York-
shire in the Bob Willis Trophy for their
next two matches. The wicketkeeper-
batsman, 30, will return to his county
after tomorrow’s one-day international
against Ireland and will be available for
the matches against Nottinghamshire
and Derbyshire in the North group.
The ECB has confirmed that
England players in the white-ball bio-
secure bubble in Southampton will, in
theory, be available for their counties
for the second and third rounds of the
tournament, starting on August 8 and
15, although counties will need to make
assessments on the fitness of each
MIKE HEWITT/POOL; BOB THOMAS SPORTS PHOTOGRAPHY/GETTY IMAGESAfter a frustrating tropical storm-
induced delay, Jason Holder’s men are
back in their island homes. Before he
left, Holder issued a plea for England to
tour the Caribbean this winter to help
keep the sport afloat there. “Times like
these really highlight the inequalities in
world cricket,” he said, echoing a senti-
ment commonly expressed right now
beyond the narrow confines of the
game.
When we reported Holder’s words,
many of our readers, commenting
under the line, wondered how it had
come to this. How, they wanted to
know, had the economics of world
cricket come to a point where Holder,
28, can be paid roughly a quarter that of
his opposite number, where West In-
dies players are returning to a 50 per
cent pay cut and where one England
tour could be the difference between fi-
nancial survival and implosion?
To understand how paths in
cricket have diverged, you
have to go back to the year I
retired from the game, in 2001.
Before that, countries simply
organised tours between
themselves. The home board
would cover costs and some
countries would be offered fees
to tour subject to negotiation (in
the 1980s and 90s West Indies were a
huge draw). The other revenue
stream, from ICC events such as the
World Cup, was split equally
between full-member nations.
There was no overarching
structure to the fixture list. It
explains how, for example, in
a 12-year, 115-Test career, I
player before selecting them. Bairstow,
who was man of the match in England’s
series-winning four-wicket victory
over Ireland on Saturday, has said he
wants to return to first-class cricket to
try to win back his place in the Test
squad.
“I’ll be going back and playing for
Yorkshire in the four-day comp,” he
said. “I’ll be trying my best, that’s all I
can do, to put myself back in the shop
window to be selected in the Test squad
again. At the moment I’m concentrat-
ing on scoring runs and trying to get a
lot of them and then, down the line,
what happens happens.”
Bairstow was omitted from England’s
Test squad at the start of last winterafter a disappointing Ashes series and
has played one Test — the Boxing Day
match against South Africa at
Centurion where he stood in for Ollie
Pope — since then.
Despite being part of England’s
extended red-ball training group before
the West Indies series, Bairstow did not
make the cut for the final squad and was
named in Eoin Morgan’s limited-overs
party. He equalled the record for
England’s fastest ODI half-century —
from 21 balls — on Saturday and passed
3,000 ODI runs in the process.
Surrey are hopeful that Ben Foakes
will be available for their fourth and
fifth group matches in the Bob Willis
Trophy. The 27-year-old wicketkeeper-batsman is a reserve to Jos Buttler in
England’s biosecure Test bubble but he
may be released on the morning of the
the third Test against Pakistan if he is
not selected in the XI. He could then
play in Surrey’s match against Kent,
which starts the following day —
August 22. Foakes is not part of
England’s white-ball squad so he
should be available for Surrey for their
final two Bob Willis Trophy matches
and all of the T20 Vitality Blast.
Surrey are missing seven players
from their team on England duty but
Jason Roy, Tom Curran and Reece
Topley will be returned to them after
the end of this one-day series against
Ireland.Bairstow returns to Yorkshire to help revive red-ball career
Elizabeth Ammon Fast and prolific
Bairstow is one of only six players with
1,000-plus ODI runs at an average
above 40 and a strike rate above 100AB de Villiers (SA)Average Strike rateJonny Bairstow (Eng)Kedar Jadhav (India)Jason Roy (Eng)Jos Buttler (Eng)David Miller (SA)53.5046.9842.0941.6640.8840.38101.09105.69101.60107.19119.83100.62Time to make
Test nations
equal again or
all will suffer
played only one Test in India. Back
then, India were not seen to be as much
of an attraction in cricketing or finan-
cial terms as they are now and so the
ECB (TCCB as it was before 1997)
organised more matches against teams
who were. I played 33 Tests against
Australia and 27 against West Indies —
more than half of my total Tests — by
comparison.
There wasn’t much money in either
bilateral tours or ICC events until the
mid-2000s. Cricket in this country was
still on terrestrial TV, on the BBC until
1998, and then Channel 4 until 2005.
Satellite TV had begun to transform the
market in India, but nowhere else by
this stage. Channel 9, another terrestri-
al broadcaster, had a monopoly in
Australia. Other markets were small
and insignificant.
The 1996 World Cup brought the first
stirrings to what would eventually
become a massively productive bun-
dling of ICC events. That competition
was the first to raise real revenue —
returning $12 million (now about
£9.2 million) from naming rights (to the
cigarette company, Wills) alone — but
it was not until the World Cups of 2003
and 2007, which were sold to television
for $550 million, that the global game
was seen as a lucrative one.
As there wasn’t much to go
around before 2001, nego-
tiations for tours were
straightforward. Costs
were lower, too. Players’
salaries were, relatively,
much smaller than now.
(My salary in the last
year of my career, the
second year of ECB cen-
tral contracts, was
£60,000). Many boards
still sent their players by
economy-class travel
and sharing of hotel
rooms was commonplace.
Back-room staffs were ti-
ny: half-a-dozen people at
most. Costs, like revenues,
were low.
In 2001, the ICC tookMike Ather ton
Chief Cricket
CorrespondentAtherton is seen in action in
his only Test in India, in 1993
and put them up (single
rooms now and lots of
staff) in hotels which are
themselves, in tourist destina-
tions, more expensive. West Indies
have been hit by a double whammy.
Not just that, but the trends of the
more recent past have exacerbated
these inequalities. In 2014, the influ-
ence of what was then called “The Big
Three” — India, England, Australia —
was brought to bear. The FTP was again
to be negotiated on a bilateral basis, so
the fundamentals upon which it was
sold to the “smaller” nations — ie regu-
lar and mandated cricket — was weak-
ened. A greater share of revenues for
India, England and Australia for the
2015-23 rights cycle was agreed, as was
the principle that the main ICC events
would be staged in those countries only.
Although there was a pushback from
the initially proposed figures, the basisof an equal revenue share for ICC
events disappeared. For the 2015-23
cycle, India receives $405 million
(about £309 million), ECB $139 million
and the rest $128 million each. That is a
lot more equal than what was originally
proposed, but unequal nonetheless. By
staging all the lucrative ICC events,
India, England and Australia also
pocket ticketing and hospitality
revenues.
The main differentiator, of course,
has been television, the revenues from
which have increased exponentially
ever since the Indian economy was lib-
eralised in the mid-1990s. The revenues
in India, England and Australia from
television dwarf those from other full-
member nations. Thus, both revenue
streams — for ICC events and for bilat-
eral tours — have grown vastly more
unequal over a 20-year period.
As for the fixture list? It is incredibly
complex. The most recent ICC initia-
tives — the World Test Championship
and World Cup Super League — are
excellent ideas, but compromised by
competition for space in the calendar.
Once a window for the Indian Premier
League and iconic five-match series
such as the Ashes are catered for, there
is limited room for a properly organised
league of ODI cricket, as the Super
League is meant to be. Each team in the
Super League, for example, plays only
eight out of 12 opponents, thus the first
principle of fairness and equality is
forfeited.
While the FTP was designed to give
“smaller” nations more exposure, we
have a situation where England have
not hosted Bangladesh since 2010. You
can bet your life that any modern
England cricketer who plays as many
Tests as I did will play more than one in
India. So, for some countries, it is a
struggle. Revenues for ICC events
and bilateral tours are unequal.
Costs are not reciprocal
because the Caribbean, say,
is a high-cost region, and
there is no guarantee of
the more lucrative
cricket, because the
World Test Champion-
ship and World Cup Super
League do not guarantee
that everyone plays everyone
else. (West Indies are not due to
meet England in the Super League,
for example.)
Apportioning blame or accounting
for motives does not change things and
while an extra England tour to the
Caribbean would help in the short
term, it doesn’t change the fundamen-
tals. What is needed is a shift back to a
more equitable game. Either this can be
done through a more even share of ICC
revenues, or by home boards paying a
fee to touring teams again, or by costs
being shared more equitably or paid for
from a central pool, so that Test-match
tours are not loss-making as they are in
some territories.
In a game played at the highest
competitive level by so few nations,
competitive balance is vital. Enlight-
ened self-interest demands a rethink.Holder will earn barely a quarter of the income of Joe Root, his
opposite number in the recent series, as captain of West Indies4
Tests played by
Bangladesh in England,
of which the most
recent was ten
years ago