Extraordinary times. Cricket’s ‘ticket sales crisis’ is now a mainstream news story – making the BBC 10 O’clock News, and page 9 of Monday’s Evening Standard.
Admittedly, it’s mid-August and newsrooms need all the material they can lay their hands on. They’ve exaggerated the story, which has now taken on its own news-momentum. The more outlets pick up on it, the more others will follow – and a few days’ poor ticket sales snowball into a national crisis without the facts actually changing. You’d be forgiven for thinking no one at all had turned up to watch cricket this season; in fact, the Oval is sold out for Friday and Saturday.
However, it’s tremendous to see the issues of ticket prices and supporter-exploitation dragged out into the open, and acknowledged by people of influence. The ECB will never read or care about bloggers like us, but they will be genuinely embarrased by the current media coverage. When a commentator as respected and widely-followed as Jonathan Agnew is giving you a public pasting, there’s nowhere left to hide.
As we’ve argued before, test match ticket prices are scandalously high and must be brought down for the democratic good of cricket. But the prices are only one factor behind this summer’s lower turnouts.
The cause, our instinct suggests, is a combination of exorbitant prices, too many international fixtures (which spread a finite audience too thinly) and one very significant factor which neither the ECB nor BBC can easily acknowledge in public. Pakistan aren’t very good. Not only do spectators know this series won’t be competitive; Pakistan have no big names, precious little stardust, and overall very little box office appeal. Most fans would rather wait to spend their £80 until one of the big guns are here.
The mainstream media luxuriate in the notion that T20 and the IPL are to blame. It’s a seductive narrative: the glitzy, modern, bite-size version of cricket is supplanting the fusty, austere, old-fashioned format. We find that hard to believe. Do you know any English supporter who’s abandoned live test cricket because of the IPL – or many who could even tell you what happened in this year’s tournament? Compare the impact in this country of the 2005 and 2009 Ashes with any of the three IPL competitions to date. Most likely, we have become so obsessed with the Ashes that all other series pale into anticlimax by comparison.
County T20 is a slightly different matter: as a day out, it’s a formidable rival to test cricket: cheaper, easier, more local, and just as good an opportunity to enjoy a few beers with your mates against a vibrant cricket backdrop.
One factor has so far been completely overlooked in all this: there is no English cricket on free television. The longer cricket stays on Sky, the more it slips from the national consciousness, and the less spare cash fans have available for a test match ticket. The ECB expect us to pay through the nose to watch England on TV, or lose interest because we can’t afford to watch, and then still fork out huge sums to see the team in the flesh. Put simply, they’re having a laugh.
Ultimately, it all boils down to the greed and opportunism of the ECB, who act like a private company exploiting profit margins, not the custodians of the game they’re actually supposed to be. 2005 and 2009 were smash hits, so goes their reasoning, so let’s fill our boots: ratchet up ticket prices, flood the schedule, and hawk off the TV rights to the highest bidder.
An often-used phrase in the last few years has been the danger of ‘killing the golden goose’. But the mentality goes deeper, and is more pernicious. The purpose of cricket is not to make money. The purpose of cricket is cricket itself.
Maxie Allen
Maxie do you have any proof that cricket on Sky is causing the decline in test audiences?
Perhaps you should also look at the scheduling of this one, why start on a Wednesday?
No, not proof – it’s a supposition. But surely it doesn’t help. There is a finite amount of money which cricket supporters are able to spend following the game. The more of that you take out in TV subscriptions, the less available for attending matches. And if fewer people are able to watch cricket on TV, the less interest there will be generally in the England team – especially for children too young to remember it on C4 or BBC.
Maxie’s right about Sky, in my humble opinion. I watched most of the IPL at work / home, not because I’m massively enthused by it, but because I love cricket and it was free-to-air. Meanwhile, our own T20 competition largely passed me by until finals day, and I have no idea what’s going on in the Pro40. The scheduling is insane, apart from anything else.
If the ECB is determined to keep Test matches on satellite TV, perhaps they should insist that at least one of the domestic limited over events is on terrestrial …
That is a good idea. There should be at least some cricket on free-to-air TV. Surely a deal can be struck for some county cricket at the very least. Or maybe some of the endless one-day matches England seem to play these days. I enjoy Sky’s coverage, but they shouldn’t have a monopoly.
Interestingly, you can subscribe to Sky Sports for a year for the price of a test match ticket! You could also buy a third world country.