There are an awful lot of reasons why cricket should never try to ape football. But there’s also one extremely good reason why it should.
Whatever you think about football’s commercial and aesthetic sensibilities, the plain fact is that compared to cricket, it just has more common sense.
Take for example the way football is run as a spectator sport (and it just happens to be the most popular one in the country). The officials in charge of its fixture lists have made a rather significant observation: people can only watch matches when they’re not at work, which usually means the weekends, and specifically, Saturdays.
Not for nothing was one of football’s most influential early fanzines entitled When Saturday Comes. Even allowing for fixtures scheduled for either Sunday or Monday evening to accommodate Sky Sports and the Europa League, football spectating is still almost entirely a Saturday pastime. This coming Saturday there will be seven Premier League fixtures and thirty five in the Football League – a total of forty two matches out of a maximum possible forty six.
As those in charge realise, Saturday is the most suitable day for most people to watch live sport. And failing that, Sunday is.
It’s just a shame that the England and Wales Cricket board – and the eighteen first class counties – haven’t cottoned on to this rather simple fact.
During the 2014 English domestic season, apart from one round of fixtures in mid-August, there will be only seven county championship matches which encompass a Saturday. Of the twenty five Saturdays in the season, just nine will feature Championship cricket.
For drawing our attention to this extraordinary piece of scheduling, we are indebted to Paul Carew, a reader of The Cricketer magazine. As he wrote in their letters page, “surely one of the most basic concepts for attracting audiences is to schedule the event when most of us are not working”.
Alas, the ECB either have no grasp of what real life entails, or they have no interest in the public being able to watch cricket matches. They probably think we just get in the way.
You can’t imagine things being organised like this in any other sport, never mind any other walk of life. Outside cricket, the principle of putting on a show is that you work around what’s best for the punters. That’s why the NFL don’t schedule the Superbowl for 4.00am on a Wednesday morning; or why West End theatres stage their shows in the evenings, not at lunchtimes; and why the Glastonbury festival takes place in June, not December.
The majority of this season’s rounds of championship fixtures begin on Sundays. While that does mean you’ll get one weekend day of play, it also ensures that the matches will end on a weekday. So whenever there’s an exciting finish, no one will be in the ground to see it.
Wouldn’t it be far better to vary the scheduling, but always anchor the match around the weekend? Some rounds could begin on Fridays, in order that the ‘meat’ of the game be spread across the weekend. Others could begin on Saturdays, enabling spectators to watch either or both of the first two days. And a third tranche would commence on Thursdays, so you might see the last two days.
But as Paul also points out, it’s not just the championship which gets overlooked on Saturdays. There are only eight Saturday county Twenty20s in 2014, and a mere four 50-over matches.
Why on earth is this the case? However complex the juggling act involved in balancing the fixture list, the bottom line has to be that spectators are able to watch the action. Otherwise, there is no point. It’s a question of first principles. The ECB has to build the scheduling around Saturdays, not let the logistics dictate terms.
County cricket is hardly so strong and well-attended that the authorities can deliberately arrange the matches for the exact times we supporters aren’t able to watch them. Neither can it rely solely on an audience of pensioners and the unemployed. Even the proverbial two men and a dog need to earn a living.
The bottom line is that each county plays 80+ days of cricket over 20ish viable weekends, so 50% of cricket will necessarily be played during the week.
Most weeks will feature 5 days of cricket and 2 days off: one 4 day game, one short format game with a day off in between. Now you can either organise this so that the short format game is midweek and the 4 day game is over the weekend or vice versa.
The ECB has not unreasonably concluded that given that next to no-one attends CC games at the best of times, the best way to maximise spectators is for a big Friday night crowd and Sunday-Wednesday CC game, where hopefully you might at least get a few spectators out for the Sunday.
Bear in mind that a lot of potential cricket fans are also amateur cricketers who play cricket every Saturday so this works around their schedule quite nicely.
If they really want to maximise spectarot awareness, the counties might wish to consider day-night CC games, with half price (£5?) admission for the 6-9pm evening session.
Interesting article Maxie. My understanding is that the ECB deliberately schedule matches to avoid clashes with football and other major sporting events so a larger potential audience can concentrate on cricket (rather than anything else) when matches are actually on. In effect, they’ve given up competing with the big beasts. Whether this is prudent or not, I’m not entirely sure.
They’ve been tinkering with the fixture list for years now and never seem to crack it.
Do you know why? THERE IS TOO MUCH CRICKET.
Maxie – my understanding of the new county cricket schedule is the ECB are trying to make it more regular and easy to understand. Hence the majority of T20 games – likely to get the biggest attendance – are on a Friday night to catch the after work crowd.. If everyone knows that’s when they’re on it’s easier for people to plan for. Yes this means Saturdays are sacrificed, but as County Championship games tend to be watched only by diehards it’s not the loss you may initially think it is.
Thanks for your comments. But I still don’t see why – even by the ECB’s logic as you describe it – that there should still be so little cricket on Saturdays. Why not have the T20s on Saturdays? Easier for children than Friday nights. And during the summer, Saturdays don’t particularly clash with big sporting events, no more than Sundays do. The five days on, two off explanation doesn’t quite work – because the schedule largely involves them playing Sunday to Wednesday, having Thursday off, then playing on Friday, then having Saturday off. Surely playing the T20 on Friday and then beginning the championship on Saturday makes more sense? I also don’t buy the idea of working around club cricketers – that’s far too small a group of people to base your schedule around, and ignores/excludes those who are too young/old/unable to play, which is the majority of cricket fans.
Rightly or wrongly, it is seen to be unfair/undesirable to have a side playing T20 on a Friday night and then starting a CC match barely 14 hours later, especially considering they might be travelling the length of the country in those hours.
If you want to see high quality cricket, the players need a day in between formats to rest/travel/switch modes.
Which means you either do a Friday and Sunday-Wednesday or a Saturday and Monday-Thursday, or I suppose a Thursday and a Saturday-Tuesday. None are perfect, but the first option seems to work best for me.
So basically you’re opinion is right regardless of what other say!
“I also don’t buy the idea of working around club cricketers – that’s far too small a group of people to base your schedule around”
Too small a group of people. According to the last ECB survey, 908,000 people play cricket for a team, I imagine a high majority of these teams take to the field on Saturday’s.
Yes, a small group of people.
I go back to my original comment, we play too much cricket for the amount of time we have to squeeze it in, the ECB will never create a schedule to please everyone.
I personally feel this summer looks the most coherent for years and it should be given a chance.
My fondest memories of cricket growing up, besides the occasional trip to a Test Match, was watching Sunday League cricket. 40 overs, done in 5 hours, and a perfect way to spend a weekend afternoon (and before all those ghastly powerplays and fielding restrictions). It seems that cricket administrators used to care about the fans but now just can’t give a toss. The lack of Saturday cricket is beyond me. But with the 3 formats I can understand their difficulty in scheduling. Speaking as an ex-pat who has now lived in the USA for 35 years, and follows cricket and baseball, it saddens me to see a sport — English County Cricket — that has so little support. I mean, can it still really be called a sport, and not just a recreation, when no one comes to watch? Is it perhaps time for a new 2 innings format — a 30 over first innings and a 60 over second innings (win-lose-draw format) — all done and dusted in 2 days? It would fit nicely into that Saturday-Sunday slot…..
[…] 25th. Why, we wonder, is virtually no county cricket being played on Saturdays? […]