Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss?

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Do you want the good news or the bad news?

Good news: Giles Clarke is going. Bad news: not entirely.

Back in November we looked at a fascinating report by Nick Hoult, in the Telegraph, about Clarke’s likely future. The counties – the kingmakers of English cricket – have finally had enough of the old rogue and will deny him a further term of office as ECB chairman.

The story’s now moved on and things have developed. Hoult today wrote a follow-up piece which puts plenty of flesh on the bones.

Colin Graves is poised for a five-year term as the chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board when sweeping changes to the running of the game in this country are proposed next week.

A two-day meeting of the 18 county chairmen at a hotel in Northamptonshire starting on Monday will discuss proposals for Graves to replace Giles Clarke as chairman.

The king is dead. Expect scenes like these outside the Grace Gates.

None of this is official as yet, but Nick Hoult’s recent exclusives have been unerringly accurate. So I reckon we can take most of it as read.

The next part sounds vaguely promising.

The agenda is also likely to include discussions around the potential for a Twenty20 competition along the lines of the Big Bash in Australia, the selling of cricket content to a free-to-air broadcaster, how much to keep behind a paywall and a cost-cutting review of the ECB’s operations. “I hope it will be a healthy debate and I would not rule anything in or anything out,” one source said.

There’s no ‘if’ about restoring English cricket to FTA television. There’s no alternative unless you want the game to die. It must be Graves’s top priority. How serious about it are the counties? What we don’t want is a limp sop. Plonk half a dozen Royal London group games on Channel 5 and the ECB can say: “you asked for some free cricket and we gave you some – just be grateful for that”.

What are your thoughts about the Big Bash line? Does this mean remodelling our existing T20 tournament along BBL lines, or creating a second T20 event? Right now, the Big Bash has intensity because of a punchy format which makes it feel special. The T20 Blast waddles along all summer till it feels like a chore.

Rejoicing in Clarke’s merited downfall is one thing. The next chairman is another. Will Colin Graves be any better than his predecessor? Is he wiser, more selfless, more far-sighted and more democratic? Will he recognise the importance of the supporters who pay the bills?

I really want to keep an open mind. But the means of Graves’s ascent to power augur ill.

A new role for Clarke will be proposed which will see him become the ECB’s first president, with the responsibility of representing the board at the International Cricket Council. If the proposals are approved by the county chairmen next week, they will then be formally put to a vote at the ECB annual meeting in March.

The succession of Graves, the multi-millionaire chairman of Yorkshire, follows months of lobbying to try to avoid a potentially bitter election battle with Clarke.

A deal suits both sides. For Graves, being elected unopposed enables him to take office without having made promises to win votes. For Clarke, it means he can fulfil his ambition of becoming the next chairman of the ICC. Losing an election would have cost him his place at the ICC table and ended his time in cricket and there has been a growing sense in the last few months he would have lost a vote with change needed.

Here we go again. Mutual back-scratching. A squalid backroom deal. Handshakes and trebles all round. Everyone’s a winner.

Seriously, this is how the ECB elect their leader? Don’t worry with that tedious voting business, we’ll just carve it up in secret. Old sod in charge refuses to clear off? Let’s make up a fancy new job for him.

Stalin was elected by more transparent processes than these. The grubby little deal is a catastrophic start to Graves’s tenure. The last thing the ECB needs is another furtive stitch-up. The organisation is sick but the medicine is simple and free. Transparency. Openness. Democracy.

ECB elections for chair only have a tiny constituency – eighteen counties and the MCC. But a genuine contest might still have brought brought a degree of catharsis. By setting out their agenda and visions, and grappling with the issues, a few of the most pustulent boils could have been lanced. But that opportunity has been squandered.

We don’t know who proposed what. Graves might have stayed out of the negotiations. If he actively sought a deal, though, rather than face Clarke in an election, he’s a coward.

How dare the ECB reward Clarke for his crimes against cricket by creating a vanity post for him? The man himself is beyond disgrace. Unwanted, discredited and rejected, he still refuses to exit the stage with dignity.

As a parting shot to Clarke, who can forget this wonderful video? (With thanks to Boz and Dmitri)

Hoult’s piece has one other interesting facet.

It is likely that counties will be told to get their houses in order financially, with the ECB warning they will not continue to bale out strugglers.

The five-year term enables Graves to plan until 2020, a key cut-off point. Over the next five years England will host a World Cup, Champions Trophy, two Ashes and an India tour – their most lucrative fixture list ever. After that, the calendar will be less attractive, meaning problems have to be addressed now. Ninety per cent of the ECB income relies on one source, its broadcast deal with Sky, and it is felt that has to change.

The Sky millions indulged the ECB and created a dependence culture. The board are so reliant on the broadcaster’s cash they’ve forgotten how to raise any other kind of revenue, apart from ticket sales. Cricket managed for cope for decades before Sky came along. The sooner the ECB can shake off that reliance and learn again how to survive in the real world, the sooner we can get cricket back where it belongs – on television.

36 comments

  • Maxie – thought provoking. i suggest we’ll have to wait and see about whether these changes are for good or ill.

    There is recognition that something’s need to change but reform is always difficult. It does look like they want to break the Sky dependency and move back towards FTA TV. But how do they balance the loss of revenue against losses of the county game.

    I’ve seen a suggestion that loss making counties may be left to fail. Uncomfortable but perhaps a necessity?

    As for a election, I can see the benefits. However this may have result in compromise and promises to secure votes that may prevent the necessary changes. Actually the ‘voters’ have spoken if Graves takes up the role.

    We can only live in hope until we hear more from Graves once he’s got his feet under the boardroom table.

    • Just one other thought. You talk about the ECB getting back intoh the e real world re Sky. Most popular sports in the UK are on Sky. It’s worked for some, why can’t Cricket make it work.

    • I’ve often found myself wondering if organising England domestic cricket into teams by county is a mistake. It seems to lead to far too many teams, which lowers the overall standard of cricket played by having more inferior-quality players involved in order to make up the numbers. If the number of teams came down to, say, 9, we’d have (99 x 11 = 99) players involved instead of (18 x 11 = 198). C.f. the Aussie system.

      • You want to put 50% of cricketers out of work for no apparent reason?

        How many professional football teams are there, 200? And yet you think cricket can’t sustain 18 teams? wtf.

        • It seems to work very well for other countries – countries whose international teams tend to play better than ours. I think a bit more ruthlessness would be good for English cricket – even if it’s not so good for individual cricketers.

          The same goes for your football teams example – the vast majority of those 200 or so teams are shit. But if you were to take the best players from all of them and pool them into a smaller number of teams, you’d end up with each team having a larger number of world-class players, therefore the overall standard of football would go up. Simple.

          • It’s about the concentration of talent. If you’re a young, top-quality player, you learn more by playing in and against teams that consist entirely of other top-quality players than you do playing in against teams of mixed quality players. So having a greater concentration of talent at domestic level would produce better (and tougher) young cricketers for the selectors to choose from when picking the national sides.

  • Graves the same as Clarke? The man who rebuilt YCCC? You must be joking.

    Okay, the coup seems to have been a it too bloodless for some, and Clarke’s head will not appear on Graves choice of Lords or Headingley battlements, he might have even have been bunted upstair, sadly often the way of modern commerce.

    But he is gone/going. There is a new broom in town. A Yorkshire one. Things are going to change, for the better (though that won’t take much)

  • How many times do I need to say this: we tried a compressed month long T20 competition, and it was a complete disaster. If you’re relying on the same group of enthusiastic fans to attend the majority of your games and act as advocates to their friends and family, cramming all your home games together into a single fortnight is a big fat fuck off. They’re going to attend two, max.

    The tournament works fine as it is. The standard is excellent and the games are generally competitive and entertaining. The problem is not the format, the problem is the lack of tv exposure and hence zero national awareness.

    • Compressed T20 seems to work very well in India and Aus. 33,000 people at Melbourne a few days ago…

  • Back in November we looked at a fascinating report by Nick Hoult, in the Telegraph, about Clarke’s likely future. The counties – the kingmakers of English cricket – have finally had enough of the old rogue and will deny him a further term of office as ECB chairman.

    The England team may not have a good spinner at the moment but the ECB does. This story was leaked or should i say the result of good journalism two days after the death of Philip Hughes.
    Call me cynical but?

  • On the issue of our T20 competition vs. Big Bash / IPL, my understanding is that domestic cricket in Australia and India was barely watched by anyone in the years before T20 came along. It was therefore much easier for the Aussie and Indian boards to create a brand new, bolder competition with city-based franchises, as they were building an audience from nothing. In contrast, English county cricket has forever been wrestling with the problem of how to attract a new, younger audience without alienating their traditional support – a dilemma which becomes ever more apparent as T20 takes off elsewhere and meanders along here. If we were coming up with a domestic cricket structure today we would never base it on counties (some county cricket grounds are no longer in the counties they represent, and Middlesex ceased to exist as a county 40 years ago) but like it or loathe it, we’re probably stuck with a structure devised in the 19th century. Difficult to see how we could create a city-based T20 competition without pissing off half the cricket fans in the country.

    • I think if you were starting from scratch you’d probably make it a regional structure with about 12 teams. But the 18 county structure is not beyond help.

      The main problem with the county structure is that it only covers half the country, and the counties that do have professional teams make absolutely no effort to attract fans from outside of their little bubble, which is just stupid, frankly.

      The main problem with the current setup is that you can divide the population into 2 groups:
      a) Those that attend county T20 games and are generally enthusiastic about the product on offer, and
      b) those that aren’t interested in cricket and probably aren’t even aware such a competition exists.

      Fiddling with the structure or bringing in a few more famous* names is not going to suddenly make 40million people magically aware of the existence of cricket.

      *famous to existing cricket fans. There are no genuinely famous cricketers anymore.

      People who think football is popular because its players are well-known, whereas cricket is unpopular because its players are largely unheard of by the man in the street, have got their causality backwards.

      County cricket struggles with attendance because when it was on tv, its product was poor so no-one watched it. Now its product is excellent, but its no longer on tv so no-one is aware of this.

    • A small sample size I know, but I’ve attended two days of domestic State cricket in Australia – a Shield Game at the SCG and a 50 over game at the MCG. One on a Sunday, the other on a Tuesday. Both were every bit as “well attended” as a county game of similar standing in this country. They just don’t look it in grounds that hold 40k and 90k.

      I also attended two T20 games this season, and both were interminably dull, low scoring, non-tense affairs. In the first, the team batting first had 66 after 16 overs. Our “product” isn’t that great, whether we like it or not. Everything is worth a try to see how it goes, but with 18 teams, we spread ourselves far too thin. No-one else has that many teams for a reason for their headline T20.

      • Anecdotal evidence. I’ve attended hundreds of T20 games that have been absolutely riveting, I’ve also seen plenty of IPL games that were dull as ditch-water.

        Statistically, the probability of a close finish is slightly higher in the T20 cup than in the IPL. I repeat: there is nothing wrong with the product, unless you particularly enjoy waist high full tosses and dropped catches, which the IPL specialises in.

    • Aaron is in front of me as usual on these things. It seems that there was an option in the latest TV contract to extend for two years, and that option has been taken up (and announced) with Sky ONE DAY after Hoult carried his piece on Graves. So now Colin won’t. it seems, be able to do naff all until the next contract is up for negotiation, and the coverage from 2020 onwards would be affected.

      Obviously I am not au fait with the contractual terms, but given the current contract has exclusivity for Sky on all domestic cricket, so I assume the option to extend contains such exclusivity?

      Five years to wait, then…..

      http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2015/jan/08/sky-sports-england-cricket-team-tv-deal

      • Hoult also wrote this:

        “The five-year term enables Graves to plan until 2020, a key cut-off point. Over the next five years England will host a World Cup, Champions Trophy, two Ashes and an India tour – their most lucrative fixture list ever. After that, the calendar will be less attractive, meaning problems have to be addressed now.”

        The calendar will be less attractive, apparently. Except that every four year cycle includes an Ashes, and presumably an India tour. The five-year period 2015-19 is *freakishly* lucrative, because it includes Ashes in the first and fifth years, our World Cup has come round (after 20 years!) and we were going to host the inaugural Test championship, which has been replaced by our second consecutive Champions Trophy. And we’ve chosen to give India five Tests in 2018 in spite of the bloody terrible 2014 series (I’m prepared to call it the worst five-Test series I have seen in this country in 33 years – India finished worse than the 1985 Australians, which I didn’t think was possible).

        Honestly, are the ECB really planning on the basis that the next five years *aren’t* a complete freak? That they’re going to somehow try and make up for it after 2020 by… well, I can guess and I bet you can too. Are we assuming, five years ahead, that SA, Pak, NZ, SL and WI will not have world-class players we might be eager to see (instead of yet another Australian ODI team)?

  • Cricket being on Sky isn’t the only reason for the lack of enthusiasm for the county game. Football has been on Sky for years and its doing alright. The main challenge is apathy caused by low attendances at championship matches, a lack of allegiance to a team (many have a football team, even if they are not keen football fans – can we say the same for cricket?) and central contracts dictating that there are a lack of stars on show.

    • Football is still far and away the most broadcast sport on terrestrial tv, it completely dominates the press, blares out of every pub, and it has a dedicated subscription service for its fans.

      Cricket has nothing. There’s more indoor bowls shown on tv than cricket. How are you supposed to form an allegiance with a team when you have no idea who they are or who plays for them?

    • While you are correct about Premiership football being on SKY and football staying popular, there has over the last 20 years been a healthy diet of non Premiership football on terrestrial TV. ITV has shown Champions league football most Tuesdays or Wednesdays. The FA cup and the Carling cup have been on both the BBC and ITV. So too World cups and European Championship games. The BBC has had highlights of the Premiership games on Match of the day.

      Contrast that to cricket where there has been no live cricket. Test match/ODI/2020 English domestic or international cricket has been blanked out to viewers. The only concession was test match highlights on channel 5 for 30 mins each night of match. ODI world cups and 20/20 world cups have also been hidden from view.

      While one can understand the financial attraction for the ECB of Sky’s carve up, cricket is very much a minority sport. It is not played in schools like football, and therefore if no exposure is shown to a younger audience it will die a slow death. Particularly in today’s world where there are so many activities of choice for Kids to choose from. Regardless of TV coverage only 3000 people turned up at Birmingham for the semi final of the London cup. These used to be big games in the domestic season. And Sky’s commentators were quite alarmed about the poor crowd at the start of the final at Lords.

      A generation has been lost to the game. It may never get those people back.

      • Spot on Mark, especially with your last sentence! The ECB has disenfranchised a generation of kids, teenagers and young adults. The 2005 Ashes was on TV 10 years ago, when cricket was being proclaimed as the “new football” with 13 million (I understand?) viewing at one point. I’d love to see what the Sky viewing figures were for the Sri Lanka Tests for example!
        The ECB have chucked the baby, bathwater, and the bloody bath out the window. Is the state of cricket in this country all the better for their greedy acquisition of Murdoch’s filthy lucre…absolutely not at all!!!

  • Just a few thoughts AB. A lot of those football clubs are semi-professional, aren’t they? And I bet they attract more supporters than any cricket county. Who pays the wages of all the cricketers? It certainly doesn’t appear to be county members or supporters. A dose of realism is required. I bet most of the pro or semi-pro footballers get paid less than the average county cricketer – I would love to be proved wrong, though.

    Also don’t forget that the counties as a whole owe roughly £45m to local authorities. If the counties default on those debts, it could get ugly…eg local authorities building over cricket grounds. I cannot see any way that these debts can ever be repaid, after a review of the latest ECB financial summary. Cricket is in a dreadful state. It needs about a dozen more oligarchs or millionaires such as Bramsgrove and Graves to help it out.

  • Sorry to be late to this party – no computer! I’ve been ranting and raving about the stitching up for his master’s voice, Giles (damn him) Clarke. County Chairmen have shown themselves to be gutless when it comes to Clarke; Utterly gutless! So a right old carve up. I won’t hold my breath that new man (or I should say men) will get rid of Downton and the rest of the morons that has turned England Cricket into an international joke. I don’t mind admitting that I am seething here. Sorry.

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