The Photo The ECB Doesn’t Want You To See

See the poor sod in the photo above? His name is Dave. And Dave’s depressed.

Like many people who grew up watching cricket in the 1980s and 1990s, Dave has seen English cricket change irrevocable over the years. And now his favourite competition, the county championship, has been shunted to the fringes of the season so that a shiny new initiative with slick marketing can make money for what Dave calls “the cricketing capitalist elite”.

“It’s not fair” says Dave, with tears welling up in his eyes, “I’ve been watching first class cricket at the county ground in Bristol for thirty years. My Dad was a Gloucestershire fan. My Grandad was a Gloucestershire fan. And my Great Grandad was a Gloucestershire fan too. But I can’t see my lad coming down to watch Chris Dent see off the new ball next year. There’s a chronic shortfall of people and the weather will be absolutely frightful”.

People like Dave believe the county championship is now on the verge of “breaking point” due to years of “criminal underfunding”. And he’s angry about The Hundred – the aforementioned initiative which has forced first class cricket into the spring and autumn months.

“This heartless policy is literally leaving older supporters out in the cold” cries Dave, with the tears now flowing down his face like Victoria Falls after a storm. “Those in power don’t care that we’re all going to get cold and wet.”

Dave makes a compelling case. With the average age of county championship fans well above 90 years old according to figures released last month by the ECB funded think tank The Institute For Bristol Studies, cases of premature death at cricket grounds due to hypothermia and pneumonia are bound to sky rocket.

None of this, however, seems to concern ECB chief executive Tom Harrison. When shown the harrowing photo of Dave yesterday morning at a Hundred rally, Harrison seemed reluctant to engage. He refused to look at the photo, claiming he hadn’t yet had his daily bacon butty, and claimed he was going to “get breakfast done” before addressing the issue.

When Harrison eventually returned he stuffed the photo in his pocket and argued that whilst Dave’s predicament is indeed tragic, other people’s experiences of cricket are very different. He then quickly promised not to invest a penny of the ECB’s £1.1 billion broadcasting windfall into forms of the game that Dave actually likes. The heartless bastard.

Realising that he might have come across as somewhat unkind, Harrison’s team quickly dispatched Ashley Giles to Bristol to smooth things over. However, events turned sour when Gilo encountered a handful of angry cricket hooligans sporting #OpposeThe100 t-shirts outside the county ground.

After enduring several rabid taunts of “put Giles in the wheelie bin” there were reports that one irate fan had punched England’s MD in the mooey. However, it turned out that he’d just bought him a coffee.

This harmless kerfuffle shouldn’t detract from the very real harm being done to ordinary people by the ECB though.

“I’m gutted” says Dave. “The county ground used to be a vibrant place – the heart of the community – with children, friends, families all enjoying some healthy all-day entertainment for less than a tenner. But now it’s a ghost town. All the money’s gone to the Welsh Fire down in Cardiff.

“The ECB just don’t tolerate ordinary county supporters like us anymore. And if there’s one thing I can’t tolerate it’s intolerance … and the bloody Welsh”.

But isn’t this just what Tom Harrison might call progress? Shouldn’t Dave just accept that times change and the world moves on? “Not on your nelly” says Dave’s wife Liz, who’s acted as his carer ever since he realised that Gloucestershire won’t win a single match next season now they’ve been promoted to division one.

“They say wealth trickles down from the top” says Liz “but I don’t see any evidence of that. All I see are foreign cricketers coming over here and driving up wages”.

Liz likens the cricketing capitalist model to a Mr Softie ice-cream. “It’s all looks great when it comes out of that mysterious machine in the van. But then the suns starts to melt it, the ice-cream turns to sticky goo, and it runs down the sides of the cone and onto your hands. Ewww.”

As you try to figure out that analogy – I’m afraid it was lost on us – I’ll leave you with one final thought. Is it right, in this day and age, where the top players are millionaires and thousands of ordinary supports live in county cricket poverty, to introduce yet another money-spinning competition?

The bottom line is that cricket should be for the many not the few. But since not many people love the game anymore (according to the ECB) isn’t it about time the authorities did more to look after the eccentric few?

James Morgan

11 comments

  • Sorry James but if there were enough genuine interest in the county championship the money would have stayed there and not gone to ‘invest in a sustainable future’ elsewhere, as I’m sure the current crop of administrators would have you believe.
    Unfortunately for this confused and rapidly declining country, the reboubtable Dave is a rare species and not considered significant enough to bother with when planning for the future. There is no longer a niche for Dave, he is expected to adapt to the prevailing trends, decided on by unelected phillistines, who are only capable of one eyed business enterprises.
    Who knows the whole trend may blow up in our faces as we clamour greedily for more yesterday, but I fear the present fast paced environment we are led to believe Is a virtue is here to stay, like it or not. SORRY!

    • It’s just a piss take. I wasn’t trying to make any particular point that hasn’t been made before.

      I should just add that there’s most definitely huge interest in the county championship. A couple of years ago, when Middlesex won, the county cricket page on the BBC was the second most viewed page on the entire BBC website. Obviously not a lot of people attend games, but this could be explained by the timing of games (midweek starts), the time of year when the weather is poor, and the fact that there’s no marketing for the competition whatsoever.

      Attendances at out grounds are also a good indication of the popularity of the championship. Crowds are often very healthy and there’s a great atmosphere. More marketing seems to go into these games and they’re definitely treated as more of an occasion imho.

      • It’s too important an issue to be just a piss take, as it concerns a decline in the human capacity to savour anything. To me this has been bought on by the advent of instant technology, where our entire lives, in work or leisure are governed by our capacity to respond to the prevailing trends which are dictated by profit and power from the likes Microsoft and the mobile phone which are constantly telling us that we can’t exist without them.
        I genuinely fear for the future as we grow up without capacity to live without them. At least our generation had knowledge of life pre tech, with interests to match. The next generation to age will not.
        Cricket, as we know it, is I fear one of the inevitable casualties as we strive for instant gratification.

  • Dave is clearly a product of Russian collusion and should be deported immediately! Apparently he was seen reading the entire works of Tolstoy during a Will Tavare innings. That and the snow on his boots in Bristol in March are enough evidence for any right thinking person.

    Meanwhile in an attempted diversion, the ECB are claiming someone punched Tom Harrison (although it was by mistake – the guilty party was quoted as saying “I’ve never heard of him because I hate cricket although if there was a new, shorter form of the game played by city franchises in the school holidays I’d pay a fortune to watch it”).

  • I believe the picture is fake. We are repeatedly told that CC cricket is watched only by one man and a dog, yet there is no sign of the dog. Photoshopping?

    • No. There is a new tournament for dogs, women, children and other sentient beings whose brains are too simply structured to appreciate the subtleties of cricket as it’s been played up till 2019, so the dog will be watching that. This picture was taken at a Championship match.

  • No one will watch games that are scheduled in the cold/wet periods and set in the working week. There is plenty of interest in the CC but it’s not shown on tv and it’s not realistically accessible. Hence low viewing figures which dumb businessmen simply use to beat it over the head.

    The only real reason one day or 2020 is more attended isn’t because of the formats (some of course prefer shorter games).. it’s becAuse it’s more able to be viewed and attended due to scheduling.

    Put all cc games on free internet streams with the ability to play on demand (so not just live) and you’ll soon see the demand is there

  • I have watched more T20 than CC over the last couple of years at least.

    But that’s because I have to work and don’t want to take time off work to sit out freezing in April or getting soaked in September.

    Despite all that I still won’t be watching Manchester Munchers.

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