LEE PAYNE

Tag: edgbaston

  • 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.

  • The ECB’s new Twenty20 tournament could be make or break for cricket in the UK

     

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    The new Twenty20 tournament would co-exist with the current T20 Blast

     

    The England and Wales Cricket Board have announced a Twenty20 competition to begin in 2020 – their attempt at getting more people interested in cricket.

    It has caused controversy, with some saying it will be the beginning of the end for county cricket and others saying it will keep the game alive in the UK.

    While the domestic game currently has 18 major counties, the proposed tournament will contain eight teams with squads of 15 players each. The teams will most likely take on the names of the cities they are based in, doing away with Surrey and Yorkshire and perhaps introducing London and Leeds.

    This eight team, city-based structure mirrors the hugely successful Big Bash in Australia and the Indian Premier League.

    The plan is for 36 matches to be played over 38 days in the school summer holidays, and for 8 of those matches to be live on free-to-air TV.

    The timing of the tournament could help to attract the best players in the world to it, as only England play regular international cricket at that time of year. Squads may miss England players but will be allowed 3 overseas stars.

    Here are a few thoughts I have about this proposal.

    County cricket is dying anyway

    The County Championship, the oldest and purest cricket championship, has been attended by almost nobody for decades. Counties have a few die-hard members, and some of them will get a few spectators in at the height of the holiday season, but other than that matches are played in front of empty grounds, rendering the four-day competition next to pointless. The Twenty20 tournament is not threatening to end the Championship, but might make enough money to keep it alive. Each county has been promised £1.3 million as part of the proposal.

     

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    A County Championship match takes place in front of not many people at Edgbaston

     

    Will enough matches be on free-to-air TV?

    English cricket has not been live on free-to-air TV since 2005. Since the ECB made the game available only to people who could afford a Sky Sports subscription the number of schoolchildren getting into cricket has dropped dramatically. They know they made a mistake, and while they can’t do anything about it until the end of the current rights deal in 2019, they have ringfenced 8 of the 36 matches for FTA TV in the proposal. I wonder, is that enough? Will it be eight of the early league fixtures, making it difficult to follow, or will it include the semi-finals and the final? Only time will tell, but it seems you’re still going to need a pay TV subscription to have much of an idea of what’s going on.

    Two Twenty20 tournaments could mean overkill

    The ECB are not proposing to replace the current T20 Blast with this city-based tournament – they intend for them to co-exist. This year, the T20 Blast (which does feature all 18 counties) will take place over seven weeks. The new tournament would be planned to start almost immediately after the Blast – I have a feeling even a massive cricket fan like me could get fed up of watching Twenty20 after 12 solid weeks of it.

    While there are questions to be answered, I think overall this is a positive step from the ECB and a genuine attempt to inject new life into cricket in this country. They’ve got three years to get it ready – the future of the sport could depend on them getting it right.