Will England Play At All This Summer?

Today Alex examines the ECB’s proposals for quarantine cricket. Can you see any cricket being played this summer? 

There’s a report in The Guardian that the England Cricket Board are trying to resurrect test cricket this season by effectively getting players to play in ‘cricket quarantine’ for nine weeks. This could make the Pakistan and West Indies series possible.

According to the report – which doesn’t seem to sound like tabloid-like lunacy – said that England’s Test cricketers have been told to expect daily temperature checks, COVID-19 swabs, as well as an “enlarged squad of 25-30 players”.

The two tests would be played at the Ageas Bowl in Southampton and Old Trafford in Manchester (if you believe that Old Trafford is in Manchester, not Salford!). In addition to this, there will be six ODIs and six T20s.

The reason for this is simple: If there is no cricket played in England in 2020, Harrison has said that the game faces losses of £380m. In April counties said that the losses would be a horror show, with the combined counties facing a £85m loss. Now, although the ECB has pledged £45m to help them, the losses will still be devastating.

Even if you don’t like the concept of The Hundred, you can accept that losing a tournament like that will really, really hurt them. Throw in the lack of T20 and one day matches (I think less about County Championship games because they are rarely sold-out), and that’s a short, sharp kick in the box.

Of course, there will some kick-back to this. Sportsmen will be nervous about leaving their families and may need a lot of convincing that the environments will be safe.

Manchester City’s Sergio Aguero’s, for example, has been very about the prospect of returning to the field: “The majority of players are scared because they have family, they have children, they have babies,” he told Argentinian TV station El Chiringuito. “When we go back, I imagine that we will be very tense, we will be very careful and the moment someone feels ill, you will think, ‘what’s gone on there?…It does scare me.”

Although there are obviously differences between football and cricket – you don’t see cricketers with their arms all over each other at corners – there are times when cricketers stand in close proximity to each other. Plus there’s the problem of handling and shining the ball.

Having said that, we haven’t heard any English cricketers raise concerns yet. All we’ve seen are conversations between Stuart Broad and other cricketers, as well as Jos Buttler doing pilates with his wife Louise, who got short shrift from the media for saying that she was lucky to have a live-in nanny, which made life easier around the house.

As much as people think that English cricketers would give such plans the umpire’s middle finger and opt instead to hunker down or play in private nets, there’s also a few alternate reasons why they would play.

First of all, there’s the simple wallet factor. Via the central contracts, the ECB pays 10 English Test cricketers £600,000 each, and if you’ve got a white-ball contract you get either £275,000 or a further £275,000. In purely financial terms, their wallets will be hurting a little more because they took a 20% reduction in pay over for May, June and July, with the donation going to ECB in an effort to help lower-level players.

The IPL is also up in the air. If the IPL decide not to honour any of their players’ contracts for the season, or the ECB doesn’t allow players to go to India and play there for COVID-19-related reasons, then….ouch. Ben Stokes could lose £1.45m, Jofra Archer £809,000, Buttler £542,000, Jonny Bairstow £249,000, and Moeen Ali £192,000.

Added to that will be battles with sponsors which could become legal nightmares. Cricket bat manufacturers will be suffering from a lack of cricket this year so we may see some players take the field with plain bats without sponsors’ labels.

But this is why I think the players should and will play some cricket this season. One: boredom. Joe, Jos, Eoin, and Jofra can’t play sodoku and FIFA at home forever. They’ll be as eager as anybody to get out there and continue life as normal.

Secondly, if they are guaranteed an as-close-to-safe environment as possible, they’ll have the chance to resume their careers and fly the flag for England once again.

Alex Ferguson

14 comments

  • Just to be clear. Old Trafford is in the borough of Trafford … not Salford.

    • And not Manchester.

      If I want to check a weather forecast and it’s not an absolutely local one, I do choose to look up Salford rather than Manchester.

      But I suppose for foreigners, including those immediately south of Cheshire and definitely those east of the Pennines, Manchester will be easier to find on a map.

  • Unless they play behind closed doors can’t see how any cricket is possible. Even then how can the players and umpires do this whilst social distancing? At least then TV revenue would be available.
    In this country you can’t really extend the season because of the weather and social distancing looks like being here for a few months yet, so there’s no point trying to start a season in late summer.
    The last Boris speech clearly showed how cautiously the government are approaching relaxation of restrictions. Every one will be a test of public trust and if we fail they will be withdrawn again. The key factor in policy seems to be how to avoid going backwards, which is as it should be.
    The ‘wallet factor’ is not a comparable issue as in the short term the government is dishing out cash like there’s no tomorrow. Sportsmen tend to earn a decent wage, so can cope financially better than most with what is a temporary state of affairs. It’s the self employed who are struggling a lot more.
    The boredom factor hits everyone, why should sportsmen be a special case? What if one player gets the virus, it could hit the rehabilitation of all sports. Is that worth the risk for a mere game of cricket.

  • As I suggested in my comment on the last thread, the ECB’s–and also your–attitude to this is probably overly optimistic due to its Anglocentrism.

    The situation is less rosy than you, the ECB or the UK media (who are largely parroting the ECB’s press releases) like to suggest simply because external factors are involved.

    The Australian government has been saying that no-one will be allowed to enter or leave the country till mid-September.

    There are currently no flights into, out of or around the Caribbean. Who knows what the attitude of the five to ten regional governments there–or CWI–will be to coming to the UK, where their cricketers have a higher risk of dying from Coronavirus if they get purely because of their ethnicity? Who knows whether the players will want to come?–and, if WI send a third team to England as they did to Pakistan two years ago, what effect would that have on the TV rights?

    Why would any team come to the UK when the death rate from Coronavirus per inhabitant is around 100 times higher than for any other Full Member apart from Ireland? Even people from inside the cricket establishment–Alec Stewart, for example–are starting to realise this.

    Even with the IPL, you raise the possibility that Stokes et al might be stopped from going by the ECB. What about by the Indian government or the BCCI, to protect a country that has a death rate of over 200 times less than the UK?

    One other point–despite what the ECB would like us to believe, cancelling the Hundred would not result in much of a financial loss, if any. Even if they pay their bribe (sorry Tom, “dividend”) to the counties in full, the lost TV money is equal to the competition costs. In general, the Hundred is forecast even by the ECB to make a £12m loss until 2025 (at the monent!–the loss has almost doubled since February, so it may well go up much more)–so if it doesn’t happen the ECB will generally be gaining money.

    • It is impossible to compare death rates between countries due to different reporting protocols, availability of testing to confirm infection (a huge factor in the sub-continent), politically inspired misreporting (admittedly most significant in Russia, some US states and India) and the differences in death practices (countries with higher proportions of home deaths will report lower figures). Comparisons will only be possible in retrospect based on excess mortality data, and even then there will remain some uncertainty.

      I agree with your broad thinking that there are obstacles to a restart, but to rely on the published numbers as justification without looking underneath them is falling into the trap that I spent an entire career trying to get underwriters to avoid.

      • Whilst I agree with you in that it is impossible to compare between countries, I am distracted entirely from your good points by your apparent suggestion that Russia, some US States and India are less trustworthy than China ?

        • Easy to overlook the obvious! My apologies. Surprised the comment about the US has not been challenged – but as I based it on comments from a doctor friend in Georgia I took it as well sourced.

          • Understood. I do agree that it is easy to overlook the obvious and I know you knew that. But it does show how easy it is to be distracted from an otherwise excellent post.

            I rather suspect that there are SO many ways being used to report the figures apparently legitimately that I am not sure that I believe any of them.

            I wonder whether the German figures are based on the same kind of calculations that their car manufacturers used !

  • The WI series looks very dubious to me for a whole host of reasons. I think an expanded Pakistan series is more probable although by no means certain.

    They seem to have added Edgbaston and the Riverside as possible venues. The latter’s isolated location finally proves an advantage!

    Some England cricketers have commented on their willingness to play in these conditions, especially I seem to remember Mark Wood.

    Some of the talk of regular testing I find rather un-thought through. Firstly, some people who’ve not experienced or seen the test don’t realise how invasive and unpleasant it is. It’s not just poking a cotton bud half an inch inside a nostril. Secondly, the tests are extremely inaccurate with a false positive record of 50-80% and there have been positive results for tigers, goats and even fruit. It also doesn’t discriminate between types of coronavirus and quite a sizeable minority of the population carry various coronaviruses at any time. In short, it seems that if there is a genuine testing regime, both sides will be a lot below full-strength (which talk of an England squad of 30 seems to recognise). England are already likely to be without their captain because of his wife’s pregnancy. How many big name players can be missing before the whole exercise starts to look rather farcical?

    • There has also been a positive result for a vegetable, widely reported since he is in No10 (the old Spitting Image sketches seem particularly apposite at this time!). But coming back to cricket – any idea why Edgbaston is added (as there are no onsite accomodations, it is in the middle of a built up area and the car park is being used as a testing site)?

  • It takes 300 people to stage a Test Match for a start so it’s hardly behind closed doors. Plus would overseas players want to self isolate for 14 days? No, but they will have to. The Gov’t indicated yesterday that corporate hospitality could start in some way in July. Yeah well. The whole speech last night was a jumbled mess of a one foot in the door appriach. They don’t have a proper exit strategy, never did, and the results of this lockdown will cause far more deaths long term due to serious economic depression, mental illness and serious conditions remaining unchecked, than the CV ever will. Cricket this season? Well I’d be delighted with a few September games, but I think 2020 is doomed to be a complete right off, especially with the ineptitude of this Gov’t. The 100 next year? Who in thier right mind would stage a loss maker when the very fabric of the game is under serious threat.

  • I’ll just reiterate what I just posted on Twitter.

  • They can play closed doors with proper promotion of the game to local sports channels. It may be done by taking shots from fans homes and can be displayed on the giant screen at the ground. It encourages both fan and players.

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