I was listening to LBC this morning when I heard cult broadcaster James O’Brien go on another Brexit rant. He’s like a broken record. I don’t blame him, as political passions are obviously running very high at the moment, but at least it got me thinking.
The first thing I thought was “oh shit, I bet I sound just like this bloke when I go on about The Hundred”. Sometimes it’s hard to be objective when you’re so fired up about stuff. The blood boils, one’s heart rate increases, and suddenly you’re calling someone you’ve never met a corrupt bastard.
My second thought was “I don’t necessarily agree with this bloke but at least he’s making an attempt to analyse Brexit and explain why it’s happening”. In other words, he was trying to put his finger on exactly what caused this political crisis rather than just having a moan.
I find James O’Brien fascinating because he’s a really intelligent and highly articulate guy. His mind operates in a quirky way and I love how his polemics are basically just a stream of consciousness that lays his marmite personality bare. I have no doubt that he’s 100% genuine. He’s always interesting to listen to whether you like him or not.
However, I believe his credibility is somewhat undermined by his extremely simplistic interpretation of Brexit. I don’t listen to him every day, so I apologise if I’ve got the wrong impression, but he frequently argues that Leave is nothing more than a billionaires conspiracy. He paints a picture of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees Mogg scheming behind doors in darkened rooms, deliberately telling porkies to advance their own wealth, and then high-fiving each other when the naive public falls for their malevolent ‘con’.
What’s more, angry James seems to argue that the architects of this con know damn well it’s a con but they simply don’t care – presumably because they’re the spawn of Beelzebub, are bereft of moral fibre, have no conscience, eat babies, and lack the ability to emphasise with anyone other than their hedge funds.
If you’re angry about Brexit this narrative is highly seductive. But in reality it’s a simplistic and immature playground conspiracy theory. Even if one subscribes to the view that political Brexiteers are motivated by greed, it’s ludicrous to ignore all other factors such as a person’s ideology, Weltanschauung (or worldview), sense of national pride, or their political ambitions and tribal loyalties. According to James O’Brien we can forget all that. His explains everything in terms of “they’re just conmen running a con”.
I dislike this perspective because it’s lazy. There’s no room for politicians simply being wrong, or simply cocking things up, or even politicians simply being like everyone else in believing what they want to believe. Instead everything is reduced to personal attacks on the integrity of those you disagree with. Whatever your political leanings I think we can all agree that such an approach is hardly constructive.
And then it struck me.
Maybe my own blog (which has been extremely critical of the ECB at times) occasionally comes across like James O’Brien having a tantrum about Brexit. Some of the comments I’ve seen on social media certainly do. They give the impression that the county championship is being marginalised and the The Hundred is being introduced simply because the ECB are a bunch of evil bastards. I think we can all do better than this.
A few years ago I did a PhD on critiques of US imperialism and turned my thesis into a book. I’ll quickly try to condense one hundred thousand words into three short paragraphs. And I promise there’s a point to this (!)
Until about 1960 the vast majority of American scholars argued that the United States was a philanthropic nation that only got involved in foreign matters to spread peace and democracy around the world. The Cold War was therefore portrayed as a valiant and selfless attempt to curb the evil and expansionist Soviet Union. This interpretation was obviously a little rose tinted.
Everything changed, however, during the Vietnam War. Suddenly intellectuals on the Left began to portray US interests overseas (which the US occasionally intervened to protect and enhance) as a new breed of imperialism. Orthodox observer recoiled in horror and many of these revisionists were treated like pariahs and investigated by Joseph McCarthy’s acolytes. In time, however, some of their arguments became accepted and a rather happier post-revisionism emerged.
The study of US foreign policy evolved so much during this period. Scholars began to consider a whole host of factors: economic, political, ideological, and psychological. It was part of a much needed renaissance in American thought. These revisionist critiques added so much – but with a few notable exceptions. Some naive (mostly student) dissidents argued the American policy was solely driven by a conspiracy conceived by the heads of major corporations. They ignored everything else and attributed complex conflicts to a handful of arch capitalists high-fiving each other across boardroom tables as a million Vietnamese perished.
Consequently, because I don’t want those of us who oppose the direction of travel in English cricket to fall into the same trap as the angry American kids, I’d like to start a grown up debate on what really motivates Graves, Harrison, and Co. It’s simply not good enough to call them money grabbing *****. Simplistic arguments convince precisely nobody and the insults turn moderate observers off.
So let’s be entirely honest. And let’s try to actually make some progress and move discourse forward. Do I like Colin Graves and Tom Harrison? I really can’t say. I don’t like what they’re doing to the game or their plans for the future, but I don’t know them personally so I really have no idea what motivates them. Maybe they’re well-intentioned but wrong? Maybe they’re well-intentioned and will be proved correct? It’s unlikely but it’s possible.
What I don’t want to see in this thread is a simplistic narrative that portrays the ECB as malevolent snake-oil salesmen deliberately ruining cricket for their own ends (or for pure fun). Harrison in particular has been involved in the professional game as a player and administrator for a quarter of a century. I can’t believe someone who has given his life to cricket deliberately wants to destroy it.
So why are the ECB making the decisions they are? Maybe it’s ego and the desperate desire to be seen as innovators? Or perhaps they now realise, belatedly, that their predecessors made a mistake by selling out to Sky all those years ago and removing live cricket from free to air TV. Maybe they really think no terrestrial channel is interested in broadcasting live cricket anymore because the game’s profile has fallen so low since 2005; therefore The Hundred is a well-intentioned way to attract television bosses once more and reverse some of the damage? They might even acknowledge privately that first class cricket will be damaged but consider this a price worth paying.
Maybe, just maybe, they admit to each other what humongous mistakes have been made, and that they’re sad about the fact that English cricket is now thoroughly dependent on Sky’s dosh? After all, they’ve got too many county mouths to feed and nowhere else to mind a meal ticket.
Another theory that does the rounds is that Graves and Harrison wouldn’t mind if The Hundred creates super counties and eventually kills off a few of the smaller clubs. If this happened then the pressure of sustaining eighteen first class counties would be eased. Maybe, just maybe, they wouldn’t be doing this through malice but because they’ve come to a painful realisation that a slimmed down domestic structure might actually be better for English cricket in the longterm? I obviously don’t agree with this view (or much of the above) but I’d feel better if I at least understood what their thinking was.
I won’t mention names but I once received an email from someone who had friends in high places (including former government ministers) and who claimed he knew the ECB bigwigs personally. He said my cricket writing was a grotesque and completely inaccurate portrait of people he guaranteed had English cricket’s best interests at heart. My response was that I had never questioned their integrity, I just thought they were plain wrong about everything. I’ve had similar exchanges with top brass employees at Sky who simply couldn’t understand why “I hated” them so much. Again I put them straight by saying that I loved Sky’s coverage but feared their monopoly was damaging.
What struck me is that all these people (from what I could tell) were absolutely convinced that they were in the right. They cared about cricket; they believed they were doing the best things for the game. I just couldn’t understand their perspective and vice versa.
This is why it’s such a shame that the public have seen so little of the market research the ECB keeps telling us about. We’ve heard that young people have changed; we’ve heard that the world has changed; we’ve heard that cricket needs to evolve or die. I really wish this evidence would be published so we can start a grown up debate about the findings. Because the ECB’s research is being kept under lock and key, all kinds of rumours and counter-claims fill the vacuum.
The purpose of today’s debate, therefore, is to try and be objective and show a little empathy for those we disagree with. Let’s put ourselves in Graves’s shoes and Harrison’s Julius Marlows. What are the ECB really thinking behind closed doors? Why are they really introducing the Hundred? What’s their mindset? Why do they think they’re right and we’re all wrong?
If we can understand where they’re coming from, then perhaps we can point out the holes in their logic, try to convince them they’re wrong, and perhaps save the domestic game from impending disaster.
I agree it’s a long shot, but nobody ever won an argument (or won hearts and minds for that matter) by simply dismissing their opponents as charlatans and conmen.
James Morgan
I try to put myself in Grave’s & Harrison’s shoes
Maybe I have a hole in my head
That is why, I want to kill the existing blast played by 18 counties and create new super competition played only by 8 counties
The bottom line is, what they’ve done and what they are doing is not helping and is likely to make the problem worse. So they’re either dishonest or incompetent or a mixture of both.
Your comments about Sky remind me of mine about Manchester United a few years ago. I liked their football but hated their monopoly of winning things.
It’s difficult to know what Graves and Harrison have in mind without them providing any information but I guess they want the best for cricket as they see it. One problem for cricket is the competition from other sports. To give you an example from West Indies 45 years ago (or so) a 400m runner chose cricket over athletics. Batsmen would probably have preferred Michael Holding to have stuck with running! These days he would have chosen running. Usain Bolt could probably have played cricket for West Indies as a fast bowler (he bowls very like Courtney Walsh). So you have to pay the elite enough to stop them leaving. See also Duanne Olivier.
“See also Duanne Olivier”.
See him playing for England in 2022 it seems. Why does the ECB have to bother developing British talent when it can simply poach a new opening bowling attack from poorer nations? (And again this isn’t to say CSA and WICB are blameless in losing players).
Okay, here’s my view. A number of counties have struggled financially. Graves personally bailed out Yorkshire by risking about £10m of his own family’s money. He is a
cricket loving businessmann who helped Yorkshire recover and thinks he can do the same for the whole of the English game. Those who voted him in (more than once) also think so. Harrison is likewise a cricket loving guy who is very good at negotiating deals for sports bodies and wants to help Graves get cricket to a better place from a business perspective but also a cricketing perspective. Other people at the ECB are also, as in any big organisation, generally pretty good at their jobs without being spectacular. However the ECB have very little money to play with and they care about the game and people in it, so don’t want to cause a dip in revenues that would cause lay-offs. Instead, they want to get more money into the game. They recognise that cricket needs some FTA TV and some modernised initiatives to make it more attractive and easier (for those lapsed fans without Sky, kids and girls/women) to get into the game. They know that T20 makes far more money for counties than the red ball game, so want to create more short-format cricket. At the time they kicked this project off, the Blast was not doing that well and the IPL was doing brilliantly. It takes a few years to launch a new competition, during which time the Blast started getting substantially more popular, but they were already too far down the road to change course. So they are going ahead with The 100 and the “new participation product” linked to it and various other initiatives. My hope is that it’ll get loads of lapsed fans who don’t have Sky back into the game, and also their kids and more girls & women than ever before. Clubs will suddenly be healthy again. The new fans will start to seek out their local teams and will go to watch live. More money in the game will make it possible for minor counties to be helped to become fully blown professional teams, and there will ultimately be a pro team to go watch in or near every major city in the country.
“Okay, here’s my view. A number of counties have struggled financially. Graves personally bailed out Yorkshire by risking about £10m of his own family’s money.” So cricket is run as a charity case. How noble. How utterly sustainable.
“He is a cricket loving businessmann who helped Yorkshire recover and thinks he can do the same for the whole of the English game. Those who voted him in (more than once) also think so.” Or the alternatives on offer are worse.
Harrison is likewise a cricket loving guy who is very good at negotiating deals for sports bodies and wants to help Graves get cricket to a better place from a business perspective but also a cricketing perspective. “That is like suggesting that marathon runners would be better off specialising in the 100 metres dash, because the audiences love the 100 metres more than the marathon. Brilliant strategy to improve marathon runners’ lives.
“However the ECB have very little money to play with and they care about the game and people in it, so don’t want to cause a dip in revenues that would cause lay-offs.” So let’s rob 99% of all member nations of the ICC of all the money they need to sustain the overpaid structure in England (eg. the Big 3 stitch up, and the stitch up to pay for Afghanistan and Ireland’s Full Members’ benefits out of all the money that was earmarked for the Associates). That is really making cricket a global sport.
“Instead, they want to get more money into the game.” By forcing 99% of the playing nations to become prostitutes to the ECB’s greed. Brilliant.
“They recognise that cricket needs some FTA TV and some modernised initiatives to make it more attractive and easier (for those lapsed fans without Sky, kids and girls/women) to get into the game.” In other words, the retards who apparently can’t count to six and the threats to cricket in England who are considered the biggest risks in England to the sustainability of the game (ie. those who use online streams, rather than sell a kidney to afford a Sky subscription. But rather than admit that they have deliberately tried to alienate 90% of the population, they come up with this marketing-gobbledy-gook to appear visionary.
“At the time they kicked this project off, the Blast was not doing that well and the IPL was doing brilliantly.” How do you define brilliantly? Being engaged in matchfixing is a sign of doing brilliantly? All kinds of ownership issues, blantant breaches of basic tenets of avoiding conflicts of interests? Or filling stadiums out with 10s of thousands of people? Part of that is / was due to the collapse of other sports in India (hockey being a prime example). Also because stadium capacities are much bigger in India. Also India is aiming to have 30 international cricket stadiums (which is completely unsustainable, unless India will be hosting 3 or 4 touring countries at the same time – yeah, good luck with that).
“My hope is that it’ll get loads of lapsed fans who don’t have Sky back into the game, and also their kids and more girls & women than ever before.” You do realize that the only accidental thing that happened that the ECB claims full credit for in the past decade is that participation numbers among women and girls have gone up tremendously? And I am sure you’ll agree that the domestic calendar for women looks spiffy in 2019.
“Clubs will suddenly be healthy again.” Like running 220kV through a corpse is suddenly going to make the corpse look healty again, I presume?
“The new fans will start to seek out their local teams and will go to watch live.” That is assuming that people come for the cricket, and not the drinks. Which on the evidence of the Blast is a rather optimistic appraisal. As for the presumed retards who apparently can’t count to six, or fathom any number bigger than 100, that seems optimistic at best. If T20 basically failed at that (since it only started at the professional level in 2003), how will this lobotomised but not significantly shorter version of the game magically turn things around?
“More money in the game will make it possible for minor counties to be helped to become fully blown professional teams, and there will ultimately be a pro team to go watch in or near every major city in the country”
Which will only be filled by all the South Africans, West Indians and New Zealanders that money can buy, so that the Sky cricket rights will be worthless (counties can pay more in salaries to these players than those nations can pay them for international contracts). So congratulations! You have destroyed international cricket. Do you want a free cookie for that?
For the life of me I cannot see mums and kids attending the 100 on a Friday night. I don’t know any Mum’s that have the slightest interest in cricket. I personally think the ECB needs restructure from the top down. Having been involved in albeit amateur support most of my life, to me this is the worst governing body I’ve ever come across which seems to be trying to destroy the game they propose to represent.
I’ve know idea what goes through Harrison and Graves’s
heads, but I’d guess its mostly money orientated. They have a contempt for traditional supporters and won’t even discuss things with us. It’s a we know best dictatorship, bit like the EU. There’s enough crap in society without pouring more fast food down the publics throats. A bit of considered education might not go amiss. Sorry for being rather negative but I have little time for these rather unappealling people and organisation.
I expect in the first year or two, at least that fans at the ground will be mainly current fans. The “mums & kids” comment mentioned by Andrew Strauss was, I believe, based on research done for the All Stars programme. Matt Dwyer, who was Head of Participation at the time, talked at All Stars roadshows about how their research had shown that mums tend to be the primary decision-makers when it comes to organising their kids’ activities, so if you want to get more kids playing, you are wise to look at making it easy and attractive for mums. All Stars does this extremely well. I expect with the New Competition, that many families who don’t currently have Sky will watch, and it’ll be mums, dads, girls and boys watching at home and then getting interested in cricket and wanting to play at clubs. That, I and just about certain, is the ECB’s plan.
Friday night at the end of the week when mums and children are knackered. I certainly would not have taken my two out on. Friday evening and pretty sure my daughter wouldn’t do it with her two either.
Very interesting piece James, and a welcome break from the very one-sided diatribe against both the ECB and Sky that this blog has been for so many years.
I would like to believe that the ECB top brass are doing what they think is right for the game, even if we don’t agree with their views. I certainly don’t buy into the conspiracy theory that it’s all to line their own pockets – I doubt that individual board members have personally gained financially from their decisions.
Having said that, I do think that they have been blinded by the success of other sporting events, and thinking that they need to do the same to compete. The Sky-fuelled behemoth that the Premier League has become will have no doubt influenced their decision to give Sky a monopoly on English cricket, and the Hundred is clearly motivated by a desperate desire to copy the IPL and Big Bash rather than believe in their own product.
I do believe that there may be some benefit in trying to engage with the ECB more rather than simply criticise everything they do. Maybe you could reach out to them and offer a board member an interview?
I have never seen this blog as a one sided diatribe about Sky or the ECB and I’ve been reading it for a lot of years.
That apart, you do make good points.
They are businessmen. They’ve decided all this to make more money short term. They couldn’t care less about cricket participation because there are enough now if they stopped playing tomorrow who would continue to pay sky and go watch games to line their pockets.
Players don’t care, they just see money signs and will do whatever their pay masters say
Apart from their salaries (and Tom Harrison’s is in line with those of other sports – I found an article comparing them recently), what do you think any extra revenue they generate will be spent on? The ECB is non-profit organisation. All money gets re-invested in the game. I read so many people on Twitter say “the county championship would be popular if they just marketed it better”. You can’t do that with no money. You have to try to get more money into the game. That books down to two possibilities: a) play more of the type of cricket that is profitable – ie T20 or similar, and b) if you can’t just spend more on advertising, you have to make the product itself better; you have to ask questions, challenge assumptions and innovate.
” I read so many people on Twitter say “the county championship would be popular if they just marketed it better”. You can’t do that with no money”.
I agree that there are some over-optimistic claims about what marketing can do for the CC. However Sky are currently paying for the CC and refusing to show it. It’s hard to believe the CC wouldn’t be attractive to some cable channels. It may attract a fairly niche audience but it’s one with plenty of time and disposable income. Such coverage would be a form of advertising.
This has always been the problem with the Sky deal, not that the ECB sold some cricket rights to them but that it is a monopoly. The Sky/FTA “debate” is sometimes used to obfuscate this. If Tom Harrison is such a brilliant negotiator with TV companies (and it’s the only reason he’s got the job with his £607,000 p.a. salary which your attempts to porttray the ECB and all in sail in her as pillars of benevolence somehow failed to mention) let him tackle this.
BTW that salary level is a reminder why it’s difficult to be too concerned if he’s upset about attacks on his “integrity”. He’s not short of consolation.
Pretty sweeping comments Mr Cricket. The idea that players don’t care seems ludicrous to me. They have made a career choice, this is not just a job. Their continued presence in the game depends on individual results. It is much more difficult to succeed consistently in limited overs one innings games than the relatively unrestricted 4 day game, where you can take your time, learn the game and even afford failure in one innings and still make enough of an impact to have an effect in each game.
Why criticise the players for ‘seeing the money signs’. How many of us do exactly the same in our jobs. Why do we seek promotion, which normally means more stress and crap. There has to be compensation and that is largely the money.
The other thing that really annoys me is the way we use the term ‘businessman’ in a perjorative sense. Like you I guess I have a lifetime of working behind me and have a number of jobs, most of which involved contact with what would be called businessmen. I have found as many types of individuals amongst them as I have amongst my work colleagues. Of course they have a different remit but that doesn’t make them greedy selfish individuals per se. They have to be inclined that way in the first place. Just because people are engaged in organizing money making schemes doesn’t make them corrupt. I have come accross many civilised caring people in the upper echelons of companies who are genuinely concerned about other employees. I am sure the ECB will have their share of these and who love the game as much as any of us.
Nice try.
The truth is O’Brien runs into trouble when he argues with someone smarter than him, who actually, unlike him, knows what they’re talking about. See his youtube 20 min slaughtering by Rees-Mogg, simply embarassing.
But at least he occasionally can’t avoid debate (on his terms, on his show), whereas Harrison and Graves are completely unable to make their argument in public – is that because it’s so good? I don’t think so.
Harrison was a mid range TV exec he would never have made a shortlist for a job as ECB CEO, if Graves’s sole motivation wasn’t maximising revenue. Graves is someone who copy catted his bosses business when he was about 40, without any of the legacy costs, and became the 150th richest man in Yorkshire. He seems to imagine this makes him a visionary genius. Does it? We’ll see – but if he’s wrong (and he is) he will have destroyed our national game.
“…he will have destroyed our national game.”
Bit far fetched. What is the worst that can happen? If the 100 really does turn out to be a disaster, it wont be that hard to change things back to how they were.
The worst that can happen is that it undermines the blast, and as a result several counties go bust, leaving large swathes of the country with no professional cricket at all, and accelerates cricket’s decline into complete obscurity in those areas, to the point where there are no longer enough players to maintain county leagues.
Best case scenario is that no one turns up, it’s abandoned after one year, and it’s just a waste of half a decade and several millions of pounds and does no further damage.
If something as relatively trivial as the Hundred can destroy ‘our national game’ then that game can’t be strong enough to be called our national game. If it fails it will fail pretty much from the word go, once the novelty has worn off, in which case things can return to ‘normal’. If it succeeds then it wil be adding to the game’s profile. If county.cricket takes a back seat as a result it will be because there’s not enough interest to sustain the cost of staging it. We already seem to moving in a direction where the county game is no longer being touted as the breeding ground for test cricket. We are producing a white ball test team that it has to be said is entertaining at the very least and has had some moderate successes. I can’t believe in the halcyon days of the Edwardian game the likes of Jessop would have been frowned upon in the test arena in this way.
Sometimes it is just plain simple…
Don’t see the point in further debate about The Hundred as it’s a done deal anyway. Don’t see the point in trying to understand Harrison and co. as the ECB isn’t a democratic institution and has no obligation to be publically accountable. I have no doubt all the protagonists would claim to be cricket fans and as they’ve all been involved in the professional game in some form for years, they’re not exactly ‘Johnny come latelys’.
I have been banging on for some time about seeing what happens when the event occurs, so making our judgements from facts not prejudice. Brexit has bored the public to death as nobody really knows what will happen whether we leave or stay in some form. The Hundred is now doing the same on this blog. We just hear the same views from the same people regurgitated to no effect. Let’s wait for something real to get our teeth into. Speculation is not in itself interesting or productive.
+1
I just hate seeing a prostitution of a great game by supposed unaccountable “experts”. Maybe I’m an idealist, but some things are more important than money.
Like it or loathe it, professional sport is a business, competing in the free market for customers. Generations hence people will be getting nostalgic for the ‘traditional’ form of the game played now. ‘Prostitution’ of the game has been there ever since it’s Victorian predecessor was used as a gambling den. What we have now is the result of generations of wealthy individuals controlling the game for their own ends. Ironically it was only the advent of post war professionalism that brought the game a greater measure of structure and respectability. The game for the game’s sake if you like.
Yes Mark and the business aspect of professional sport is largely responsible for stuffing it up, look at football. As you say rightly individuals controlling it for their own aims rather than the greater good.
While we’re about it folks can we ban the B word (Brexit) from here. Thanks
If there was no business end to it there would be no stadiums to play in or professional players to grace them. We would all be restricted to pretty low key club cricket, patronised by the rich. The game you and I love is the product of businessmen getting involved to finance it.
Just a point about footie, a game I also love. The Premiership is now the envy of the world, why? Because businessmen have got involved in the boardrooms to finance the wages and transfer fees for many of the greatest players the game has ever seen, so we can have the privelidge of watching true world class entertainment and not the insular and predicable old first division, where matches were often played on poor pitches as players tried to kick lumps out of each other. Who do we remember from that era? mavericks like; Best, Bowles, Marsh, Currie, Hudson, Worthington, George, Francis and Gascoigne. Why? Because they could produce something that you never forgot, often out of nothing. Were they appreciated by the game’s hierarchy, emphatically no! How many caps did they win between them? not many. It was a time of teams like; Arsenal, Liverpool and Forrest, none of them overburdened with exciting talent. Nowadays they would be appreciated and encouraged to express themselves. So look at football and appreciate what a different planet it now operates on.
Envy because of the money. Nothing more, nothing less.. do not confuse successful marketing and money deals with quality
The more money you invest in a sport the more quality you are likely to attract. It’s called market forces. You have to pay for the best. It’s not just about marketing. You can’t just simplisticly dismiss money as a broadly negative influence. Talent has always followed the money.
Businessmen will think like businessmen. And usually their plans are based on past models – in this case franchise cricket. The Hundred is a cheaper spin off. They don’t care about Test Cricket or Championship cricket which they’ve recently described as “niche cricket”. The fact that four and five day cricket are more highly skilled doesn’t interest them. They want a simple form of cricket to sell. It’s all about selling and marketing a product. Sport is not a simple entertainment – it is meant to test the participants. If skill levels drop then the sport is debased. If you want to take the debate to a higher level it’s a question of values. There is a lot to argue about the ethics of business and the short termism which governs it. It’s not in the long term interest of cricket if we lose the forms of the game which develop the sport at the highest level. The ECB should be guardians of the game not self licensed entrepreneurs looking for cheap returns. Their governance is beyond poor – it uses all the jargon of business to justify decisions. The Hundred deserves to fail and is likely to because very few cricket fans find it appealing and it flies in the face of County allegiances which are the bedrock of the game. You cannot replace real loyalty with synthetic loyalty. Will Durham fans travel to Yorkshire for a hundred balls of a super franchise? In effect they are disenfranchised. It’s been constructed as a portal for kids but only for 8 scattered teams. There was the Blast which has 18 portals which could have been marketed and made more visible. Cricket is a sport you fall in love with – it has to have good reasons for that. Cricket was taken off free to air TV and the result was a whole generation of kids didn’t get to see it at a vital time. It was cultural suicide. But the lure of money was supposed to compensate. It didn’t. We are right to be suspicious of the motives of the ECB and the lengths they will go to getting their way including crippling Durham. George Dobell tried to expose them and was threatened with court action. Private Eye which also carried the same conclusion however was never challenged with threats. We are talking about self interest and exploitation, No governing body should have close ties with clubs that allow for doubt, I don’t think we’ve been as close to corruption since the years of Clarke and Stanford, And it’s all in the pursuit of franchise cricket. It’s true – as has been claimed – the IPL has been bedevilled by corruption – it’s a sad comment on society.
We need to be careful about the blanket use of the word ‘corruption’. There are many cultural aspects that make a difference. Morally corruption depends on the intention over the act. For example I have worked in accounts offices for companies trading abroad where amounts were set aside as personal gratuities for agreeing contracts ( cash under the table if you like ) To the protagonists this was just a show of respect between them and considered polite and quite ethical. Yet if the sanctimonious press over here got hold of it it would appear as anything but standard business practice, as if it happened here it would be considered corrupt and we are arrogant enough in the west to assume we have the moral high ground over our 3rd world neighbours, whom we assume still live in the Middle Ages.
Be suspicious by all means but corruption requires evidence of intent, which is rarely apparent.
If Graves and Harrison actually told the public what they were thinking and why they’re doing what they’re doing, we wouldn’t have to try to read their minds.
No other institution in the country could get away with having so little accountability.
The marketing controls over individual sports like boxing, darts and snooker are almost totally driven by unelected promoters like Barry Hearn, who can make or break a career by insisting players sign up to exclusive contracts. This effectively nullifies the various boards influence, as they have no power to attract these players without the promoters permission. These promoters have no accountability, merely giving the players the kind of deal they can’t get elsewhere. Hence we get the splits in governing bodies which produce tiers and division in sport. Despite all this potential negativity who can deny we are in a golden age for each of the above, though it is concerning that there appears to be very little up and coming talent on the horizon, as very little of the generated revenue goes back to the grassroots.
I see both sides of this, but it’s really a question of degree I think regarding how much business should or shouldn’t influence sport. But the ECB has no accountability to anyone including cricket supporters, that’s what bugs me. I don’t like petty dictators,but I do like people with a genuine love for sport running the game. There’s enough men in £2k will suits talking business jargon that they think gives them the edge on us mere mortals.
The problem is that these fat cats provide the ‘nitty gritty’ the game needs to function at this level and the mere paying punters don’t as gate receipts are not sufficient to sustain overheads. I guess if I was one the fat cats I would expect some measure of influence over how my investment was directed.
The one thing I will say is if county supporters got together to pool resources, financial and professional, maybe they could find a representative place on the board, at least it would give them a voice and some inside information. My experience of this with Warwickshire, where we had a couple of no confidence votes from supporters groups in the 70’s is that egos take over and things get personal. Supporters clubs in footie are commonly active with newsletters but little decision making influence and are still little more than pressure groups. What is needed, as supporters are the core of any professional sporting club, without which there would be no point to their existence, is more direct influence. Most clubs have plenty of professional individuals as members who are more than qualified to make judgements about policy. It’s a question of organising themselves into something that forces respectful acknowledgment and there’s the rub. The boards are not going to encourage what they see as amateurish outside interference, disrupting their running of the club, even though, especially in footie, there are many strange decisions made by apparently successful boards of businessmen who would certainly not have been so successful had they made similar decisions in their own boardrooms, especially concerning the panic appointment of managers.
Cricket has a real enough problem with trying to get more kids playing the game and then take enough of an interest that they would spend some time watching it. To the extent that the ECB is trying to address said problem then good, but the 100 seems like an unnecessarily aggravated way of doing it. If a new competition was really needed (??) then T10 played by the 18 counties would probably leave the game in a happier place.
I have no desire to get into the minds of Graves or Harrison. The former came to New Road with a bunch of subordinates and told us that he was a Yorkshireman and passionate about cricket. When I eventually got a chance to speak I told him that I was also a Yorkshireman and passionate about cricket, (cue old Monty Python sketch).
Yorkshire cricket supporters are generally quite passionate about the game (see Wars of the White Roses). It doesn’t mean that they are right. Read almost any Linkedin and the subject will claim to be passionate. A very overused term. Graves is a very forceful guy, used to getting his own way. I don’t know what makes Harrison tick but I suspect the real driving factor for both is POWER, rather than personal financial gain.
What I’d like to hear is some truth. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve heard Gordon Hollins twice say that the Hundred is not for us (existing cricket fans) but we’re being treated like mushrooms. (And b****cks to Brexit, while we’re at it).
“A few years ago I did a PhD on critiques of US imperialism… ”
I try to avoid Politics here but if they’re ATL I think some BTL response is appropriate (although ultimately it’s James’ blog and if he wants to delete this then fair enough).
I have a Masters in C20th US HIstory. I enjoyed the course at the time but in recent years it’s bothered me that the course didn’t mention Operation Northwoods, Operation Ajax, Operation Condor, MK Ultra, Gladio, the Safari Club, the Phoenix Programme, the Council on Foreign Realations, the Bilderberg Group and many other examples. The reading list didn’t include Carroll Quigley’s ‘Tragedy and Hope’ or Frances Stonor Saunders’ ‘Who Paid the Piper?'(and these are not particularly outre works).
The most convincing explanation of this seems to me that the academic/mainstream consensus is part of the problem. It’s a gate-keeping device designed to keep debate within certain limits. Whether this has occurred by accident or design doesn’t really matter (it’s probably a bit of both). What matters is that we become aware of the paradigms we operate within (and we all do) and that we re-think periodically if they really stand up. If this post leads one person to do that, it’s time well spent.
And now to get back to worrying about Hampshire’s batting this season….
Mmm…Interesting but I haven’t a clue what this means, aside from Hampshire’s batting problems!
Because history and text books are written by the winners and the educated wealthy, it is never going to give you a balanced picture of the true nature of anything. Our education system has a slavish devotion to orthodox text book theory, never encouraging us to question the contents.
For example you could make a very convincing case for flat earth theory using simple experiments from the likes of Tessler, a scientist every bit as worthy of respect as Einstein, who has been consigned to a backwater by an establishment concerned that many of his theories undermine the validity of some our most basic scientific ‘knowledge’. The esblishments response to his questions have always been less than convincing. Ego plays a huge part here, as anyone lauded for a significant breakthrough in any field is not going to appreciate someone trying to pick isolated holes in it, so undermining the entire idea.
You worry about Hampshire’s batting, I worry about Warwickshire’s bowling being picked off by England.
Interesting stuff Simon. I’m glad someone engaged with my academic stuff!
I chose to study critiques of imperialism because they challenged orthodoxy. To call the USA an ’empire’ and to talk of American ‘imperialism’ was extremely radical in the 1960s. The New Left critiques in particular were essentially Marxist interpretations which attributed US expansion to economic determinism. And as you can probably guess, it was rather dangerous for one’s career to put forward such theories during the Cold War McCarthyism era. The guys I studied were essentially historians although I also mentioned some political scientists and sociologists (plus the occasional cultural icon like Norman Mailer).
Where did you do your MA? I did all my studies at Southampton. I ended up turning my thesis into a book which was published by the University Of Wisconsin Press. I called it “Into New Territory”.
I don’t know if you’re of an age to remember a prickly interview Parkinson did with John Wayne in the 70’s, where he tries to trip him up over his right wing leanings and particularly his ‘links’ with the McCarthy Hollywood ‘witch-hunts’ of the 50’s, where incidentally he did not name names, he just stayed silent and broadly supported the investigation into what he saw as a leftist takeover of scriptwriting, keen to be critical of the establishment so undermining what he felt was their democratic duty. To him it was unamerican, as many of those new wave writers had come over from Europe to escape Hitler and his country had given them refuge and a good living. I’m not defending his views, Wayne never professed to be a towering intellect, he just reacted in a way only those brought up as Americans could understand. I still feel there has yet to be a book written from McCarthy’s point of view by someone, reflecting the times, who is still broadminded enough not to just jump on the liberal bandwagon, so fashionable by modern historians. You cannot give modern sensibilities to this, you have to set the scene before you describe the events to give any sort of real perspective. This is what I mean about History text books. They’re all done in hindsight, giving the authors a spurious wisdom.
The slow decline of cricket reminds me of the grenfell Tower disaster. Noone actually meant for it to happen, but it was entirely foreseeable, entirely preventable, but preventing it required effort, or conflicted with other agendas, and in the end they just didn’t care enough to do anything to stop it happening.
Ecb apologists used to attempt to defend Clarke and Downton, now they have changed tactics and admit Clarke and Downton got it badly wrong but attempt to defend graves and Harrison as making the best of a bad job.
No doubt in five years time, they will change their tune once more and admit graves and Harrison got it badly wrong, but defending whatever idiotic decision their successors are making. And so it goes.
You know that the ECB is in it just for the money when they say that the way up for upcoming nations is T20 and not ODI meaning that the World Cup will always be an exclusive club.
With the present structure of the game I would welcome the demise of the ODI in favour of T20, though for me the best format of limited over cricket was still the original John Player 40 over package. If we could have test and county cricket filling the gaps left by ODI, along with an enlarged 20-20 I think that would be a better balance. Anonymous middle of the road ODI’s are getting tedious, whereas 20-20 reflects our ‘life is loud’ modern approach to entertainment better. This way cricket gets the best of both worlds supporter wise.
The EU Parliament has passed the European copyright directive which includes Article 11 “the link tax” and Article 13 which is… well, nobody seems quite sure. It has to clear the European Council next month and then member states have two years to implement it into their domestic laws. The UK of course may no longer be a member of the EU by then although personally I wouldn’t bet on that.
This has quite serious implications for blogs like this depending initally on how WordPress decide to respond.
Yeah, I know it’s tiresome to re-fight these old battles but this one is so egregious I couldn’t let it pass:
” it was Cook’s first hundred as a Knight, though he was dropped on 60. As ever, it was a lesson in how not to give your wicket away even in a game with nothing riding on it – the personification of getting a job done, well” (Derek Pringle)
No re-tweets about Essex batsmen retiring graciously when they got their hundred against students and that failing to do so must be rampant ego? But that was 2015 and another batsman….
The media can twist anything favourably or unfavourably depending upon their agendas and prejudices.
Well, like Brexit, you are right, there is no simple answer. If you went to my impoverished hometown on the NorthEast coast you would find a whole swathe of people who feel disenfranchised. The town has been a Labour ‘job for life’ place which eventually made people so angry at getting nowt from Westminster that they voted for Ukip in droves and out of the Common market. As for the ECB, as I have written elsewhere, the business men and women co-opted on to The 100 committee are go-ahead tech and digital marketing entrepreneurs. They have sold a dream to Harrison and Graves in a language they do not understand but sounds fuckin awesome! The message includes the proviso that there will be many naysayers but they will be proved wrong so stick with the programme. They have literally been brainwashed.