The ECB came up with the perfect Valentine’s gift for County Cricket, one which expressed their feelings for it in no uncertain terms. There were neither flowers nor hearts here, instead a list of venues for Tests, ODIs, T20 Internationals, domestic trophies and the ECB’s much heralded, but rather less keenly anticipated, T20 Competition from 2020 to 2024.
The Test venues see a return to the traditional six venues – Lord’s, the Oval, Edgbaston, Trent Bridge, Headingley and Old Trafford – with recent hosts Sophia Gardens, the Rose Bowl and the Riverside missing out.
Credit where credit is due, this makes a lot of sense to me. The six grounds selected are the best for Test cricket in my opinion, although those who missed out after investing heavily to host tests, with the ECB’s encouragement, have reason to be less pleased. The other caveat is Trent Bridge missing out on an Ashes Test in 2023 as well as in 2019, which is a crying shame. Not only is there a great atmosphere at Trent Bridge Tests, but England’s record there in recent years, particularly against Australia, is excellent and why the ECB want to give that advantage away, not once but twice, is beyond me.
The ODIs and T20 Internationals are split across the Test venues, plus the three recent grounds that missed out, Sophia Gardens, the Rose Bowl and the Riverside, and the County Ground, Bristol. Two of these, the County Ground and the Riverside, will get an ODI each year.
The one glaring omission from the shorter formats is the County Ground, Taunton, which hosted its first T20 International in 2017. Somerset CCC have spent a considerable amount redeveloping the ground, in part for the opportunity to host international cricket. To have achieved that ambition in 2017, but then have future opportunities taken away is an almighty kick in the teeth.
The venues of the “As yet unnamed T20” competition, as it appears to be known at the moment while the ECB marketeers smooze potential sponsors, are no surprise at all: the six Test venues plus the Rose Bowl and Sophia Gardens. They are the ECB’s favourites, with Sophia Gardens thrown in so that the governing body can say that it has fulfilled its remit of “England and Wales”, while on the other hand taking Test matches away from one of the countries in its jurisdiction.
For someone looking in from the outside it would be hard to see how a selection that leaves large swathes of the country without a venue nearby, with 25% of teams in London and none in the whole of either the south west or the north east, has even considered where potential supporters may live.
The reason for this, of course, is the ECB was never going to risk upsetting the big boys, nor the likes of Sky who prefer the comfort of the bigger grounds. As for existing supporters, well, they are a bit of an irrelevance as the ECB is confident that the new competition will attract an entirely new audience. They want to get away from the ‘boozy night out’ image of the T20 Blast and attract families instead.
Does the new fanbase exist? We’ll only find that out in 2020 but grounds like the Oval and Lord’s certainly contain a good proportion of work nights out or similar for the T20 Blast and replacing them is not going to be easy, especially given cricket’s low profile. There will be some games on free to air (ten, including the final) to improve the profile, but this is not even a quarter of the games that Australia’s Big Bash gets in a country where cricket is far more popular than it is here (notleast because all cricket is free to air). Current County members cannot be relied on to attend, given they are broadly against the new competition, which devalues the County game by its very existence. Of course, some in the areas where the new competition will go along, but it will be a small proportion who pay over and above County membership to watch T20.
And so to the final betrayal in the ECB’s Valentine’s message: the domestic 50 over competition. We already knew that this competition would suffer by being played concurrently with the “As yet unnamed T20”, but with 100 or so players unavailable because they will be playing in the T20. To add insult to injury, the ECB’s list tells us that the final for this will no longer be held at Lord’s but at Trent Bridge.
Taking away the opportunity for players and supporters to experience a Lord’s final kills a bit of the game. Sure, it will still be a final but without the setting of Lord’s it won’t mean quite as much. I remember the finals I’ve been to at Lord’s, the incredible surge of joy when Gloucestershire have lifted trophies and the elation evident on the players’ faces: that will never be replicated at Trent Bridge. As Durham’s Chris Rushworth tweeted after the news came out:
“No final at @HomeOfCricket can’t imagine I’m the only cricketer that feels slightly gutted by this! Showpiece of a county players season IMO. I’m lucky enough to have played and won a final there, it will be a big loss on the calendar! “
There is no doubt that there will be many who welcome the ECB’s announcement, but they are within the media, the Counties who stand to lose least and the higher echelons of the game who will profit if it is successful. For the supporters it is simply a betrayal, the confirmation that the ECB cares not a jolt for County Cricket fans. Many of us have long felt that: we’ve seen the County schedule switched again and again, Championship matches pushed out to the extremes, and now a new competition which, if successful (and that’s a big if), could be a death sentence for the County game as we know it.
It’s a crying shame that supporters are far more cynical about the ECB than the County executives, most of whom voted the new T20 proposals through (with Middlesex and Essex voting against and Kent abstaining) in return for £1.3m. It didn’t take too long for things to begin to sour after that vote. In December, Elizabeth Ammon reported in The Times that the Counties who would not be hosting were upset that the model of ownership proposed for the competition (a subsidiary company of the ECB) was not what had been agreed (ownership by the Counties plus the MCC). This change could affect future changes to the T20 competition and freeze out the Counties.
I’d wager that there will be further betrayals to come, now that the votes have been bought and the tournament agreed or, to put it another way, after the turkeys voted for Christmas.
hackneyhaz.com 