LEE PAYNE

Tag: channel

  • England are in a World Cup final – I urge you to watch it

    Football and cricket are my two favourite sports, but seeing as Dean Smith’s tactics are continuing to bore everyone at Carrow Road and a World Cup built by slaves is about to kick off in the desert it’s hard to get excited about the former at the moment. So cricket it is. Indeed, cricket is better than football and England are in a World Cup final!

    England captain Jos Buttler completes the demolition of India in the semi-finals

    The T20 World Cup – that is, the global tournament for the short and sweet 20-overs-per-side format of the game – started in Australia on 16th October. The first week saw Ireland, Namibia, the Netherlands, Scotland, Sri Lanka, the United Arab Emirates, the West Indies and Zimbabwe compete in two groups of four for four places in the next round. There were shocks – Nambia beat Sri Lanka (2014 winners) in the very first game and Scotland beat the West Indies. The West Indies were actually eliminated in this first round – the 2012 and 2016 champions were out before the tournament had really got going.

    Ireland, the Netherlands, Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe progressed to the Super 12 stage, where they were joined by Afghanistan, Australia, Bangladesh, England, India, New Zealand, Pakistan and South Africa in two more groups of six. The top two in each group would go through to the semi-finals. Australia, the hosts and last year’s winners, were thrashed by New Zealand in their first game. Pakistan lost a thriller to arch-rivals India, then were beaten by Zimbabwe to leave them on the brink of going out.

    Australia won the World Cup last year but failed to get out of the group stage here

    The weather was a problem early on. The tournament was being played very early in the Australian spring, so rain caused issues in several games – Afghanistan’s two chances to play at the enormous, world famous Melbourne Cricket Ground were both washed out. South Africa would have beaten Zimbabwe had the rain not come down, a dropped point that would prove very costly indeed. The tasty clash between Australia and England did not see a ball bowled. England were stuttering in a run chase against Ireland before the weather forced an early ending, with the Irish earning a famous win on the Duckworth/Lewis/Stern method.

    New Zealand were the early form horses, but England beat them and then completed a nervy win over Sri Lanka to knock Australia out of their own competition and progress to the semi-finals. On the final day of the Super 12s, South Africa suffered a shock defeat to the Netherlands to open the door for the winner of the Bangladesh v Pakistan match to go through at their expense. That beneficiary was Pakistan, into the semi-finals when days before it looked like they were heading home.

    Pakistan are in the T20 World Cup final for the third time – they won it in 2009

    In the first semi-final, Pakistan fielded superbly and their captain Babar Azam and wicketkeeper Mohammad Rizwan enjoyed their best opening partnership of the tournament to see off New Zealand. On Thursday, a feverish India-supporting crowd in Adelaide watched on in shock as England chased down 169 without losing a wicket and with four overs to spare. Jos Buttler’s team hit top gear at just the right time, thrashing the much-fancied Indians. It means the tournament is denied the glamorous, money-spinning grudge match of a final that India vs Pakistan would have been, but England and Pakistan deserve to be there. The two sides played out a thrilling seven-match T20 series a few weeks before the World Cup, with England winning 4-3, so hopes are high for an entertaining final and a worthy winner.

    Up to now, the entire tournament has been hidden behind the paywall of Sky Sports, but they have graciously done a deal with Channel 4 so that the final will be live for all to see on free-to-air television. If you’re not a cricket fan, I urge you to tune in – T20 is fast, exciting and England might just win a World Cup. And that’s not something that’s going to happen in Qatar.

    T20 World Cup 2022 – Final
    England v Pakistan
    Melbourne Cricket Ground, Australia
    Sunday 13th November 2022, 8am GMT
    Channel 4

  • England’s World Cup success can get the country into cricket again

    It was in early January 2003, just before school started again after Christmas, that I first got into cricket.

    I was 10 years old and would get up in the morning to find my dad in the living room watching the Ashes Test from Sydney on TV. On the screen, I could see Michael Vaughan batting for England and can remember thinking ‘this is great’.

    Vaughan’s strokeplay, especially his cover drive, were just so pleasing on the eye. I knew next to nothing about the sport at the time. I didn’t know England were 4-0 down in the five match series. I didn’t know the Australian team was one of the best there had ever been. But I was fascinated by this Englishman artfully approaching these little red missiles being fired at him and making several Australians chase after them. I didn’t want to stop watching.

    Watching Michael Vaughan bat got me into cricket

    I would say I love football and cricket equally. Thankfully, with the end of the football season signalling the start of the cricket season in this country I rarely have to choose between the two. If I had to pick just one, however, it would be cricket.

    So much can happen at any moment in a cricket match. Every ball is an event. There are so many ways for the batsman to score runs and so many ways for the bowler to get him out. Football tends to be mostly tedious until the last ten minutes of a game. And cricket is so aesthetically pleasing – it certainly takes the crown of ‘the beautiful game’ for me. Sorry, Pele.

    I also love how cricket is so incredibly difficult to be good at. You’ve got three disciplines to tackle and it’s hard to be proficient at any of them. The chances of being good at all three are next to zero. International cricketers seem almost superhuman compared to mere mortals like me. Just look (below) at this catch England’s Ben Stokes took in an Ashes Test in 2015.

    Cricket was the new cool in 2005 when England won the Ashes for the first time in 18 years, beating an immensely strong Australia 2-1 in what is unlikely ever to usurped as the best Test series of all time. The game was on the front and back pages of the newspapers and 7.4 million people tuned in to watch the end of the final Test live on Channel 4.

    Since then, the England cricket team has only been visible on live television to Sky Sports subscribers. Prohibitively expensive to many and not likely to be stumbled upon by the casual viewer, cricket dropped out of the national consciousness and the numbers of people playing and watching sank. The conclusion of the final Ashes Test in 2009, only on Sky Sports, was watched by less than two million.

    These are the reasons why this year’s World Cup has been so important for cricket in the UK. The world’s best players have been competing on our doorsteps for nearly seven weeks. Fan parks have opened the tournament up to thousands of newcomers. And to top it all, England came into it as favourites and have reached the final.

    England thrashed Australia in the semi-finals to reach the Cricket World Cup final for the first time since 1992

    It’s hard to put into words what England winning the World Cup would do for the game. How often can we say that England are world champions in any sport? With the match against New Zealand at Lord’s being the first time the England team can be seen live on terrestrial television for 14 years – it’s going to be live on Channel 4 – this is a massive opportunity for cricket to engage with the wider public once again.

    I’d love for a kid to catch sight of cricket on the TV for the first time on Sunday and be captured by it in the way I was sixteen years ago. For Jonny Bairstow or Joe Root to inspire in the way that Michael Vaughan did. After all, success makes you popular.

    • The Cricket World Cup final between England and New Zealand at Lord’s will be live on Channel 4 and Sky Sports on Sunday 14th July, with the first ball at 10.30am.

  • Cricket 4 The Masses

    I found this video on YouTube recently. Uploaded by madmusician91, who must take all the credit for it, the video shows the last few minutes of Channel 4’s excellent live coverage of cricket:

    England had just won the Ashes for the first time in 18 years, in what is regarded as the greatest Test series ever played. Cricket was in the public consciousness like it had not been since Botham’s Ashes of 1981, enjoying popularity akin to football, being talked about across the country. Ironic, then, that that series was to be the end not only of Channel 4’s coverage, but of live international cricket coverage as a whole on terrestrial television in the UK.

    Television was still in its infancy when the BBC decided to show the Lord’s and Oval Tests against Australia in 1938. Very few people owned a television then – and if they did they were rich. Even so, whatever viewers there were got the chance to see Len Hutton score 364; at the time it was a world record and it is to this day the highest Test score by an Englishman. The BBC continued to show live England cricket right up until 1999.

    Test cricket at Old Trafford in 2014 - but you needed to pay to see it on television.
    Test cricket at Old Trafford in 2014 – but you needed to pay to see it on television.

    Pay television first made an impact on live England home matches at this point – Sky Sports shared coverage with Channel 4. Rupert Murdoch’s network had already been showing England tours since 1990, but this was their first foray into home internationals. The rights deal, however, remained in favour of the terrestrial broadcaster. Sky showed just the one Test match each summer, with the other five or six on Channel 4. Sky showed all of the one day matches live.

    In 2004, to some surprise, the England and Wales Cricket Board announced that it had awarded exclusive rights to England home matches to Sky Sports. This meant that from 2006, fans would have to pay to watch England play live for the first time. The deal went ahead despite a campaign to ‘Keep Cricket 4 Us’ and with an extension until 2017 cricket will only be shown as highlights on Channel 5.

    While Sky’s money has been invested in grassroots cricket, with the sport not easily accessible to the general public interest has inevitably waned. The conclusion of Sky’s first live Ashes series in 2009 was watched by just under 2 million viewers, with the average throughout the day at 856,000. Compare this to Channel 4’s live coverage of the 2005 Ashes finale – 7.4 million watched the end of play, with an average of 4.7 million between the lunch break and the close.

    With such a gulf in viewing figures between the pay TV channel and the terrestrial, there remain calls for live England cricket to return to free-to-air television. With no prospect of this until at least 2018, however, it looks like an hour of highlights per day is all we will have to satisfy us for now.