the times | Thursday May 26 2022 2GM 69CricketSport
The first Test between England and
New Zealand at Lord’s is not sold out as
the rising cost of living takes its toll on
cricket.
As of last night, there was a limited
number of tickets available for the first
three days of the Test match, which
begins next Thursday, and a significant
number still available for day four. Day
five will be “people’s Monday” with
reduced-price tickets on the gate.
The struggle to sell out Lord’sElizabeth Ammonup and running, from mid-April to mid-May;
championship cricket should follow from mid-
May to the end of July and a white-ball month
should be scheduled in August, with the
remnants of the first-class season scooped up in
the opening fortnight of September.
International cricket should mirror the
domestic schedule, with Tests played above the
championship in June and July and ODIs and
T20s played above the short-form
competition(s) in August. It leaves the question
of how the Blast and Hundred can co-exist.
India and Pakistan offer the template of a T20
domestic tournament feeding into the franchise
version, but they enjoy longer seasons and more
cricketers.
The Hundred will continue to prosper, given
the advantages, but if it is the only competition
in August, one televised match a day leaves too
little cricket. The Blast played alongside would
be a stretch on resources, but may be the best
option when the schedule is considered in the
round — the Blast taking T20 cricket to all
corners of the land, acting as a feeder into the
Hundred but benefiting from a juicy block in
school holidays too.managing director, and Marcus North, whom he
beat to the job, and those with experience of
other sports. They will meet once more, feed
their “high-performance principles” to a steering
group, comprising county chief executives,
England and Professional Cricketers’
Association representatives, who will then
propose the schedule for the summer of 2023.
The players have already aligned themselves
to some core principles: that 18 counties should
be maintained; that the Hundred should be
central to the season; that the Blast should
remain an elite competition; that the quality of
cricket should be as high as possible; more of the
championship should be played in the summer
months; the county chief executives will have
their balance sheets to mind and England
representatives, such as Key, will be prioritising
high performance. Many of these desires are
competing and conflicting.
It would be sensible to think structure and
scheduling first and foremost, with each format
played in a block, out of which high
performance would follow. The flow of the
season seems reasonably straightforward to me:
a block of 50-over cricket should get the seasonBlast can survive
- but as a feeder
for the Hundred
I
t was one of the clips that went viral last
season. Jordan Cox of Kent, airborne,
palming back a ball that had already
crossed the boundary into the hands of his
team-mate Matt Milnes. Behind, in the
Hollies Stand, the usual assortment of the fancy
dressed — the Donald Trumps, Fairy
Godmothers and bottles of Stout — and the
inebriated, stopped their revelry for a moment
on T20 finals day at Edgbaston to take in the
brilliance of they had just witnessed.
Following tradition, it fell to last year’s
champions, Kent, to get the 20th season of
domestic T20 under way yesterday. The
competition has been through various iterations
over the years and has remained the financial
lifeblood of the county game despite the
frequent changes, although for how much
longer remains to be seen. Late nights in a
still-chilly May are not how things were
envisaged at a time, before the Hundred, when
it had the run of the joint.
When the competition was launched in 2003,
the group stages began on June 13 and 45 group
games were completed in a dozen days, with the
inaugural finals day five weeks later. This year
there will be 133 matches all told, stretching
from late May to mid-July, with three rounds of
County Championship games squeezed in
between, plus four Tests, five ODIs and three
T20 internationals, all against a variety of teams,
imposed above. Competition, for eyeballs and
the wallet, at a time of great financial squeeze, is
fierce.
The Hundred, meanwhile, will enjoy the block
of August when children are on summer
holidays and hard-stretched families will be
drawn to intentionally cheaper tickets and
summer evenings, as well as the obvious
narrative thread that will be easier to follow,
with one televised game every night. The
competition is less fierce then too, with two
Tests and the denuded 50-over competition
played alongside.
This week, we reported that counties are
concerned about the negative impact of the
Hundred on ticket sales for the Blast this year.
The ECB counters this by saying that is not a
true picture across the board, that ticket sales
per day are as strong as they have ever been and
that its marketing attempts have been more
concentrated than before, with adverts run
across TV, cinema and its social mediaplatforms. Can two short-form competitions co-
exist happily? We are about to find out.
One result of the squeeze on the calendar
after the proliferation of formats is that cricket
supporters get drawn into false and damaging
culture wars — county v franchise, 100 balls v
T20, and so on — which amplifies the
impression of division. Nobody should think
that 20 balls either way is a deal-breaker when it
comes to the success or failure of a competition.
A prime slot, concentrated timescale,
affordability, visibility, strong narrative and a
marketing push matter far more.
Scheduling really matters. The first stage of
the County Championship has just finished, for
example. The standard has been variable and
there have been too many dull draws. Yet it has
enjoyed a domestic window of its own so far.
The Indian Premier League, running for longer
than The Mousetrap, draws a very different
audience, and those interested in English
domestic cricket have been encouraged instead
to follow the championship with regular
Thursday starts, weekend finishes and every
match streamed for free.
This regularity and visibility has allowed
storylines to develop. The renaissance of
Middlesex in Division Two, the strength of
Surrey in Division One; the race to a 1,000 runs,
led by a hitherto unheralded journeyman, Ben
Compton, and Shan Masood, Derbyshire’s
overseas player from Pakistan. Masood has been
one of the many from Pakistan who, unable to
play in the IPL, have been highly sought by
counties. Harry Brook, the young dasher from
Yorkshire, has been flying. Even the England
players have turned out.
Forget the format for a moment. I suspect
cricket followers have enjoyed the somewhat
old-fashioned simplicity to the opening month
and a half of the season. It has felt refreshing to
follow one storyline rather than the jumble that
is more common now.
Until the relative calm of August descends
when the Hundred takes over, the next two
months will bring a bewildering mix of formats
and content — the latter being the most apt
word to describe the held-over Test match
between England and India.
All of this should give Andrew Strauss’s high-
performance review some food for thought. It
met for the first time last week and included
those from cricket, such as Rob Key, the newMike Ather ton
Chief Cricket Correspondent
HARRY TRUMP/GETTY IMAGESSam Billings holds the T20 Blast trophy aloft after Kent beat Somerset in last year’s final at EdgbastonLord’s struggling to sell out the first Test
coincides with reports that sales for the
Vitality Blast, which began last night,
are significantly down on 2019 sales.
A number of England supporters
have told the Cricket Supporters’ Asso-
ciation that the price of tickets,
combined with the rise in travel costs
and other expenses, make attending
international fixtures prohibitively
expensive. The price of Test-match
tickets at Lord’s, which has a capacity of
31,180, range from £70 to £160, while
restricted-view tickets are priced
between £45 and £100.Trent Bridge, host of the second Test,
which has a capacity of 17,000, is report-
ing a full house for the first three days,
with availability for days four and five.
Prices range from £25 to £85.
Sky Sports will be paying tribute to
the late Shane Warne during the first
Test with a two-part documentary
entitled Bowled Shane that will tell the
story of the 2005 and 2006-07 Ashes
and will be shown during the lunch
intervals. MCC will honour the
Australian legend by renaming the Sky
commentary box in his honour.Brook and Root seal victory
The England new boy Harry Brook
continued his prolific start to the
season by hitting an unbeaten 60 from
27 balls as Yorkshire got their campaign
off to a winning start with a seven-
wicket victory over Worcestershire.
The 23-year-old shared an unbroken
partnership of 87 with Joe Root, the
stand-in Yorkshire captain, to seal the
win with 11 balls to spare. Root was play-
ing the first of three Blast matchesbefore joining up with the England
squad next week and looked in fine
form in scoring 35 not out off 24 balls.
Kent began the defence of their
trophy with an eight-wicket loss to last
year’s runners-up Somerset at Canter-
bury. Jack Leaning hit an unbeaten 72
to help Kent recover from 33 for four.
Lewis Gregory was the pick of the
bowlers, taking three for 25 to restrict
Kent to 162 for six. Somerset made light
work of the chase with Rilee Rossouw
hitting 81 not out and Tom Abell 48 not
out to win with five balls to spare.Vitality Blast round-up
Elizabeth Ammon