End Game: Cricket’s Dance with Death

It started very like any other season, but this has become without doubt cricket’s annus horribilis.  Last night, a pitifully meagre crowd watched a pitifully meagre cricket match at Cardiff in what should be a warning to ‘the authorities’, to the players and to their agents.

Those who bothered to go to Cardiff watched a game of 196 balls and paid between £35 and £55 pounds for the pleasure, which Third Man calculates was 23p a ball for the average £45 ticket holder, and 25p a run.  But it was the one-sidedness of the affair that was such a ‘turn-off’.  

Those who love cricket are distraught, bewildered and struggling with the effects of this season; its disrupted, inconsequential fixtures, confused competitions, over supply of T20 matches, weak Test cricket, tainted faire and arrogant pricing.

At what stage will someone paying close to £40 a month for a Sky package, including cricket, phone to cancel their subscription and tell the operator to get back to them when England reach Brisbane?

How many people are likely to ‘walk-up’ to watch the remaining ODI’s and how many with tickets will resent their gullibility in having forked out in advance, trusting the ECB to be staging a skilful, aboveboard and entertaining match?

When will a county with a great history and loyal supporters go bust having over bid for an international match and lost a fortune?

It is now more and more obvious that the so called contest with Pakistan should have been cancelled on the Saturday night of the Lord’s Test when officials would have been aware of the material that the News of the World had or even much earlier (as much as a month before the Lord’s Test) when those in authority and positions of trust were made aware of the concerns over match fixing and improper activity and when the ACSU apparently served notices seeking information from certain players.

In this emergency, players from across the globe could have shown their love of the game and their gratitude to cricket supporters by volunteering to form a World XI to honour the outstanding fixtures.  

They might even have done it for the benefit of the millions in Pakistan who are still copying with the calamity of the great floods and for whom international cricket has been a hindrance and not a help.

As it is, in more ways than one, the game is dancing with death.

UPDATE: See also Clive Rice here.

Songs of Experience – Cricket’s Answer

Cricket commentators and specialist cricketing journalists, are not the best people to investigate the extent of corruption in cricket.  They depend on those who invest in or sponsor the game, on the financial worth of the game itself, and on comfortable relationships with present players.  Those who doubt this should write S-T-A-N-F-O-R-D ten million times.

In the present situation Third Man hazards a guess first that the extent of corruption is far greater that anyone with a financial interest in the legitimate game is willing at the moment to admit (gains from spread betting being far in excess of those of eccentric spot bets), and secondly, that, because this is an area of organised criminality, considerable force and threats of violence are involved.

Just as the cricketainment industry dare not admit the extent of the corruption because it might damage their financial assets, so also the invesitagtors and politicians are inhibited from admitting the extent of the involvement of organised criminals because it demonstrates their powerlessness and, in societies with weak legal systems, their possible compromised positions as stooges and placemen.  

Although individual cricketers are responsible for making the first steps, probably based on the forces outlined by Chris Dillow (see again), once hooked in, they can be compelled against their will into further complicity.  They lose the freedom that is at the heart of pure sport and particularly of pure cricketing competition. 

Those of us in the ‘outer’ must keep this continually in mind and refrain from judgement just as Diogenes, The Old Batsman and others warn, but those more closely involved in reporting on the game and in authority must examine how they can best serve the game and its current players.

Last week during the attention given to the publication of Tony Blair’s memoirs, journalists were asking themselves whether they had done enough to communicate the true extent of the breakdown in the relationship of the Prime Minister and the then Chancellor of the Exchequer.  

The truth is that those journalists are insiders in a market for information.  If they ‘tell too much’ they lose their access to that information.  They choose to tread carefully.  That is why specialist journalists and commentators are not the best to ‘out’ the big truths at the time when their publication is most valuable and necessary to us.

The same is true of cricket commentators, former cricketers and journalists.  Yet it is not true of the very big beasts whose position is secure or whose journalistic career is near an end.  Nor is it true of the blogosphere as some excellent reporting already demonstrates.

Cricketers need to be free to compete.  Corrupt practices stem from and thrive on lawlessness and limits to freedom (that is not to excuse them but to explain them).  All of us who cherish cricket have to do what we can in the fight to gain and maintain those freedoms.  There is a moral duty to do what we can in that pursuit.  Some are in very strong positions to achieve this and should begin immediately.

‘Break this heavy chain,
That does freeze my bones around!
Selfish, vain,
Eternal bane,
That free love with bondage bound.’

Earth’s Answer – Songs of Experience, William Blake.

At the Inn Door – A Georgian Bookmaker Gets His Claws into a Young Cricketer

Around the Green Man the bookies hovered like flies on a piece of festering meat.  They were on the look out or the ‘listen’ for a country accent – broad Hampshire or even Kentish.

There was a big match tomorrow and they knew the new professionals would make for the Green Man and Still, on the corner of Oxford Street and Argyle Street , 22 yards from where the Palladium now draws the evening crowds.

Joe Bland was there.  The prime fixer.  Smooth tongued Joe who’d leech on to a new man as he made his way down the busy road from the West.

“You look lost son.  The Green Man?  Yes, look, it is right there.  I’m going in myself.  You must have a thirst on you.  Share a beer with me, lad?  The least I can do to welcome you to Town.  Your first time in London?  Thought as much.”

The new man ducked his head at the small door and bade farewell to the honest sunlight.  Within it was dark and cool, with a strong smell of beer and sawdust.  He blinked and hesitated, not sure what he should do next.  But Bland had his arm round him now and steered him carefully, like the precious item he was, to a bench deep inside the tavern.

“Ho, Joe!  What’ll it be?”

“Small beer for me and my new friend here, Sue, and quick as you can. He’s come all the way from ..?  Where would it be, son?”

“Our parish is just outside Farnham, Sir”

“Now what brings you to Town?  But I don’t even know your name.”

“It’s Billy, Sir.  Here to play cricket at White Conduit Field.  Do you know it?”

“I have a cousin lives near.  I’ve heard they plays cricket there now, but I’m more a racing man m’self.  Don’t really understand your cricket game.”

The beer flowed.  Weak or not it soon befuddled our innocent young William.

“O, you must be a rich man if you plays at cricket.  I hear fortunes are made.”

“Not fortunes, but a decent screw.  Ten times better than I do in the fields back home and lot more fun.”

“Ten times!   What?  Say a couple of guineas?  … A day?”

“No, not a day.  We’re like to play three days in a match as this ‘ne.”

“Three days?  But those Lords, they make hundreds.  I’ve heard them in the Star and Garter, not a stone’s throw from here.  There’s one old bastard, I heard him the other day say he makes six hundred a year from wagers alone.  And you on a couple of guineas.  But don’t you scores the runs for ’em?  Look at your hands, scabbed and bruised, and I bets your shins are sore.  Sounds rum to me.”

Third Man’s Time Machine has taken him back to the early 1780’s.  The focus of cricket is moving from the ‘Old England’ of places like Hambledon and Sevenoaks to the Great Wen, convenient for the Quality who pay the ‘pros’ to strengthen their teams and convenient for others, too.

Chris Dillow, here, examines four aspects of the problem of wages and corruption in cricket.  And at 99.94  a correspondent puts forward a darker explanation.

Proof of Purchase – Taliban and Al-Qaeda Main Beneficiaries of Gambling Accusations.

 

Odd. Mid-offs do not usually look over to the front foot of their bowlers at this stage of a delivery. They are usually looking down the wicket at the batsman.

The News of the World was given proof that a middleman could, for a price, feed them tips about the outcomes of parts of Pakistan v England matches.  The three no-balls ordered up for The News of World were designed to convince the paying ‘punter’ that lucrative outcomes could be and were already being delivered to subscribers to the middleman’s services.  The no balls were proof of purchase.  The real gambling opportunities that they pointed to would be linked to credible betting opportunities, like numbers of wickets to be taken by bowlers, batsmen to score, fifties, or hundreds or dare we admit it 150s.  With spread betting fortunes can be made on unusually high scores and the number of wickets to fall to any bowler staked from any moment in any innings.

Yesterday, Third Man speculated on what might have been had Ian Chappell been Aamir’s captain on Friday.  He did so because at around noon on Friday he thought England would be out for under a hundred, the conditions were so conducive to the undoubted talents of Aamir and Asif.  Even then the disparity between the wickets taken by Aamir and Asif seemed extraordinary.

But he was also increasingly surprised to see Butt take the foot off the England throat.  He could not believe some of the bowling changes and field placings.  Why no sustained attack?  Why no third slip?  Why use your two strike bowlers so sparingly with the new ball?  Why take off Aamir just as Broad reached 99.  Why use a part time leg spinner?  Now, one even has to speculate on the missed chances (two slip chances in an over) and juvenile miss-fields.

That is the effect of the poison that disfigures everything when trust is irretrievably lost in any area of life.

Third Man and many others have been saying that cricket should have been more active in its fundraising for the flood victims of Pakistan.  The immediate misery of close to 20,000,000 people needs to be relieved by rapid global aid.  The medium term consequences to the infrastructure of the areas affected need skills, material, planning, co-ordination and more funds from the international community.  The longer term struggle for the hearts and minds of the Pakistan people needs a global outpouring of goodwill and fellowship.

All three of those necessities to a greater or lesser extent have been jeopardised by these accusations.  

Cricket has not only failed to respond with its full potential, it has conspired to make things far, far worse.

The real winners of these match fixing accusations are the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.  The losers will be the victims of their violence and the victims of their tyranny.

The drive for aid MUST now be redoubled.

Cats, Elephants and Flex Testing in Cricket

The cat is finally out of the bag.  At 12.30 yesterday on the third day of the third Test, Sky broadcast contrasting clips of the actions of Graeme Swann and Saeed Ajmal.  Under the direction of commentator and former umpire David Lloyd, the editor froze the action when their right arms were showing a quarter to three in their deliveries.

Lloyd said, “You see the bent arm of Saeed Amjal – it’s within the 15 degrees allowed by the law, it’s legal – this is the reason why Amjal can bowl the doosra and Swann can’t.”

And with this admission by a senior member of the commentariat (and without contradiction from any of his colleagues) the elephant had finally been acknowledged to have been in the room all the time.

The game of cricket has evolved a further step.  The Laws of Cricket had ‘jerked’ on to accommodate 15 degrees of flex in 2005 like a straightening arm catching up with practice and now, when sufficient time has passed to allow us to forget the strange anatomical and skeletal fictions that had previously been peddled before the amendment, everyone can be open and above board; The Special Ball Cannot Be Bowled, it Can Only Be Thrown, But That’s Legal.  

Anatomically the only way sufficient momentum can be given to a ball released with counter-clockwise rotations with the back of the hand facing the batsman is to jerk the arm straight from a bent position.  Provided that straightening is no more than from 15% of bend the ball is a legal delivery.  This flexing also allows more rotations to be placed on the ball for the clockwise ‘off-spinner’ (counter clockwise for ‘slow left armers’) as countless practitioners of erroneously called finger spin has known for many years; increasing dramatically the potential for drift, dip, turn and bounce.

When in May 2009 an ICC sponsored biomechanical report cleared Amjal’s action the ICC spokesperson was emphatic in stressing that the report “simply confirms that Ajmal is capable of bowling with an action which complies with ICC Regulations” and therefore  “whenever Ajmal bowls in a match in the future, his action will be under the scrutiny of the match officials”.

The spokesperson continued, “according to the ICC regulations, the match officials will use the naked eye to determine whether his action complies with the Laws of Cricket. The permitted degree of elbow extension is 15 degrees and the level of tolerance was set at the point at which such elbow extension will begin to become noticeable to the naked eye. Accordingly, any degree of extension which is visible to the naked eye must and will be reported.”

This of course provides the match officials with an enormously difficult challenge and the game will soon have to accept that a method of adjudicating each delivery will have to be implemented. 

At present the ICC maintains that beyond 15 degrees of flex the ‘the throw’ is visible to the naked eye, but most cricketers will continue to believe that a ‘throw’ can be spotted at degrees of flex lower than 15 degrees.  

Lloyd’s assertion that Amjal’s bent arm for that particular delivery is within the 15 degrees tolerance is exactly that; an assertion.  Big Cricket must now bring in technology to adjudicate on the degree of arm straightening by bowlers.  

Lovers of the game, many of whom still find it difficult to accept the 15 degree tolerance should nevertheless be supporting Shane Warne and Terry Jenner in their campaign for on field testing recently reported in the Daily Telegraph.

This is not the first time that forms of release have been experimented, perfected, performed, protested against, ignored, tolerated, accepted, and finally accommodated in the Laws of Cricket. 

In or around the 1750s Richard Nyren either before coming to Hambledon or soon after his arrival, (probably responding to the demands of ‘bowling’ against John Small (Snr) on practice nights), decided to raise his arm from the grubber ‘bowling position’ at the moment of release to somewhere around waist height – how awkward it must have felt and looked!  How vexing to the ‘legitimate’ bowlers from Slindon, Dartford and Sevenoaks!

It was twenty years later that Nyren’s apprentice, David Harris, took the action to its extreme, to terrorize the poorly protected batsmen of his day by jerking the ball out from a position under his armpit with a mixture of push and flick worthy of a juiced up East European shot-putter from the 1960s.

Again in the 1790s Tom Walker – Old Everlasting – practicing during winter in a barn worked out that he could generate even more pace and bounce than Harris by letting the arm swing out sideways in a ‘round arm’ fashion with the release at or around shoulder height.  

Cricketing authorities first banned the practice with a Law prohibiting ‘round arm’ bowling in 1816: The ball must be bowled (not thrown or jerked), and be delivered underhand, with the hand below the elbow. But if the ball be jerked, or the arm extended from the body horizontally, and any part of the hand be uppermost, or the hand horizontally extended when the ball is delivered, the Umpires shall call “No Ball”.

Gradually this form of bowling burrowed its way into the game and by 1826 Wm Lillywhite and Broadbridge were winning the County Championship for Sussex with round arm bowling.  Batsmen among the legislators were losing their rear-guard action against the practice and in 1835 the relevant part of the Law was amended to read: if the hand be above the shoulder in the delivery, the umpire must call “No Ball”. 

A voluntary code was soon made mandatory when in 1845 the umpire’s view of the incident was made final.  Ho! Ho!

Our story now moves on to the 26^th August 26, 1862 and The Oval where the England bowler Edgar Willsher deliberately bowled overarm to the Surrey batsmen.  In a foretastee of the 1995 Boxing Day Test, Willsher was no-balled six times in succession.  He and his eight fellow professionals in the England team then walked-off the ground in a suspiciously orchestrated protest.

This time the authorities rushed to catch up with practice and in 1864 amended the Laws to allow the bowler to bring his arm through at any height providing he kept it straight and did not throw the ball.

Strictly, cricketers stopped ‘bowling’ the ball the moment two hundred and sixty years ago when Richard Nyren ‘stood up’ to release the delivery, stopped bowling the ball (along the ground) and ‘pitched’ the ball at a length between himself and the batsman adding an extra dimension to the problems of striking a ball with a bat.

Innovation is driven by the tussle of ball and bat.  There are many social and political forces behind the acceptance or the prohibition of innovation but once acceptance has been codified a further difficulty arises over enforcement.   It is a truth universally acknowledged that an unenforced law is irrelevant to the actions and consciousnesses of those to whom the law is meant to apply.

In David Lloyd’s low key admission, yesterday, cricket admitted that it cannot stuff the cat back in the bag, but it has yet to shoot the elephant.

Kwik Cricket Festival for Flood Victims and Let’s Make it Inter-National

They always say, “Think Global Act Local”, so, thanks to the quick feet of Farouk Hussein, Clitheroe CC is doing exactly that by holding a Kwik Cricket Festival on September 1^st to raise funds for the victims of floods in Pakistan.

Reaching out to the 150 parents of 5 to 11 year old children who attend the regular Clitheroe Cobra  coaching nights, Farouk wrote, “You will have all witnessed the horrific devastation caused by the recent floods in Pakistan. People living in poverty have had their loved ones, their homes and livelihoods snatched cruelly from them. It is at times like this that we all begin to appreciate how fortunate we are and grateful for everything that we have.

“The DEC (Disasters Emergency Committee) are doing a terrific job in getting aid to the needy but funds are limited and they need all the support they can get.

“I have arranged for a Kwik Cricket Festival to take place – similar to our own annual event to raise funds for the DEC. All funds raised through entry fees and on the night as a result of Raffles / Auctions / BBQ will go directly to the DEC and no monies will be for the benefit of the club.”

Third Man hopes that Clubs everywhere can hold similar events before the end of the season.  In fact, what is to stop cricket clubs world-wide following this lead.  Think Global: Act International.  What a good lesson for us all.

The Disaster Emergency Committee’s web page is here.  And the Facebook group for Cricket Action for Pakistan Flood Vicitims is here.   

Thinking of lessons:  On the more mundane level:  Notts Under 17s thrashed Lancs U17s in a semi-final of the National 2 Day Championship.  

Notts made 432 in 93 overs on Wednesday with two batsmen making centuries another 85 and a fourth who coming in at No.4 made 45, but looked the best of the lot.  On day two, yesterday, the Lancashire ‘lads’ could muster only 245.

But Third Man feels that Lancashire will have learnt more from the experience.  Their ‘dispatch’ of weaker sides from Durham, Derbyshire and Cheshire, and their harrowing of Yorkshire before the rains saved the Tykes, had taught them little, or more precisely had taught them the wrong lessons.

It is a very odd thing but defeat often makes you stronger when victory always makes you weaker.

Remaining England v Pakistan matches should be major fundraising opportunities for Flood Disaster Appeal

A family wades through flood waters in Pakistan Muzaffargarth District of the Punjab Province - August 16 2010

Clitheroe Cricket Club’s success on Saturday (touched on yesterday) was built on the bowling performance of Anwar Ali their guest professional whose action, very late swing and change of pace reminded Third Man of Malcolm Marshall.  

Anwar Ali - bowls like Malcolm Marshall used to and maybe bats a bit like him too.

Ali, who was part of Pakistan’s Under 19 World Cup team in 2006 and who is aiming for a call up to the full international squad, took 6 for 24.  He also shared in an effective partnership with Naeem Ashraf a stalwart of the Ribblesdale League and a popular coach to the hundred and more under 11 year old cricketers who flock to Clitheroe each Thursday evening thanks to the organisational drive and talents of Farouk Hussein, Chairman of the Clitheroe Cobras.    Naeem along with all-rounder Farouk Butt and former professional, Shahid Nawaz, were key members of the last Clitheroe side to win the Ribblesdale League.

An injury to his shoulder earlier this year has prevented Naeem from contributing with the ball and is restricting his batting but his timing is still heaven sent.

Earlier in the summer the cricketing authorities placed their Test playing facilities at the disposal of the Pakistan Cricket Board. The MCC stepped in to sponsor the Australia v Pakistan match at Lord’s in a generous and sensible act of cricketing comradeship when regrettably no commercial sponsor was forth coming. 

Former and current cricketers throughout the game have  ties with Pakistan, yet there were criticism that TMS failed to publicize the Pakistan Floods Appeal contact details .  

The  facile and bureaucratic explanation put forward on Points of View recently was a pitiful response.

It is not too late for the players and officials involved in and responsible for the final matches between England and Pakistan this year to make them major fund-raising activities for the relief campaign, and an affirmation of the cricketing, social, community and national ties between our two cricket loving countries.

People at Sky, TMS, ECB, PCB, MCC, SCCC it is your chance to orchestrate the call to action.

Chalk and Cheese – Towards A Cultural Theory of Cricket

High on the Downs the sheep prepared the wicket.  The springy turf on thin soil above hard chalk made a ball bowled at pace along the ground hop and skip to the frustration of even the best bat.    

On still days you could look from here across the Weald to the North Downs and beyond towards London – that great wen*.  To the south, the onshore breeze brought the taste of salt and the scent of ozone.  The rising wheatfields, prepared last autumn and now in nature’s hand, gave time for leisure. 

It is April and walking with great cheer up the lanes towards these heights, the people of villages, hamlets and farmsteads could come together at this place to play at cricket three hundred years ago and more.  

Sometimes they played against each other, picking sides as people arrived: the old against the young or the shepherds against the rest; those of one hamlet against those of another or the married against the bachelors.  Sometimes they joined together to take on the challenge of a parish further ‘afield’.

But always having fun at this difficult, frustrating game where the darned ball always bobbles just when you are about to smite it, and when even your demon scuttler, having raced across the turf and beaten the batsman darts right on through the stumps without dislodging the bail, passing the despairing long stop, with his right trouser leg tied with a handkerchief (what is he like?) on and on down the slope as the batsmen laugh and run.

In David Underdown’s engrossing Start of Play, the author identifies the original location of the development of cricket as the Downs and the Weald of South East England.

The typical Downland landscape – the chalk country – was sweeping unfenced hillside, a huge close-cropped sheep pasture, like the one in the photograph above. At around 1700 many villages still grazed their sheep in common. 

There was arable farm land on the lower slopes and the Downland villages strung along the nearby valleys were compactly built with clearly defined central cores, a church, a smithy, an alehouse, a cobbler’s, a cartwright’s.

Even then, as farms sizes started to increase, there were remnants of the old common fields in which the inhabitants sowed the same crops and harvested them together collectively.

As Underdown observes, ‘Strong habits of cooperation were ingrained in such places’. Village institutions, ritualised festivities, mores and manners all stressed the values of neighbourliness and unity.

A symbol and facilitator of this unity would often have been a favourite meeting place, a large tree, a small stretch of green, a patch outside blacksmith’s forge, where people gossiped, relaxed and where impromptu games could take place.

On a simple axis of x and y she sought to plot the location of a social system according to how clearly defined an individual's social position is as inside or outside a bounded social group – termed "group" against how clearly defined an individual's social role is within networks of social privileges, claims and obligations – termed “grid”.

The social anthropologist Mary Douglas who did her fieldwork in the Congo in the 1950s developed a way of classifying cultures according to the degree of ‘group’ and ‘grid’ manifest in a social system.  She and her colleague Aaron Wildavsky later referred to it as Cultural Theory.

A “high group” way of life exhibits a high degree of collective control, whereas a “low group” one exhibits a much lower degree and a resulting emphasis on individual self-sufficiency.  

A “high grid” way of life is characterized by conspicuous and durable forms of stratification in roles and authority, whereas a “low grid” one reflects a more egalitarian ordering. 

The old Downland culture is high group and high grid, well suited to activities and games with an emphasis on team work, where the need for defined roles, shared knowledge of rules, assumptions of common practices and implicit codes of behaviour reinforced the sense of belonging and togetherness.

As the 1700s moved ahead there were more individually owned and larger farms which began to produce for the often distant market, and fewer small freeholders and copyholders engaged in subsistence agriculture.  The gap between rich and poor grew.

Individualistic and market-centred behaviour was supplanting the older order of conformity and cooperation.

As the requirements of the social structure changed so the culture responded in the type of rituals (including games) needed to reinforce the system. 

Cricket with its mixture of team work and individualism exactly met the need.  It’s time had come.

Cricket was uniquely placed to respond to a cultural shift as the bonds of group bonds weakened – giving each individual a chance to shine – and the grip of social stratification weakened – requiring the squire to share the crease with the labourer and face the unpleasant fact that fact that the carter was a better batter than he.

* wen – an indolent, encysted tumour of the skin; especially, a sebaceous cyst – adopted by William Cobbett to describe London.

**In a paper here Mary Douglas explains the history of grid and group cultural history.  This is an extract:  “The group dimension measures how much of people’s lives is controlled by the group they live in. An individual needs to accept constraints on his/her behaviour by the mere fact of belonging to a group. For a group to continue to exist at all there will be some collective pressure to signal loyalty. Obviously it varies in strength. At one end of the scale you are a member of a religious group though you only turn up on Sundays, or perhaps annually. At the other end there are groups such as convents and monasteries which demand full-time, life-time, commitment.

“Apart from the external boundary and the requirement to be present, the other important difference between groups is the amount of control their members accept. This is supplied on the other dimension: grid gives a measure of structure. Some peoples live in a social environment where they are equally free of group pressure and of structural constraints. “This is the zero start where everything has to be negotiated ad hoc. Moving along from zero to more comprehensive regulation the groups are likely to be more hierarchical.

“Put the two dimensions together, group and regulation, you get four opposed and incompatible types of social control, and plenty of scope for mixing, modifying or shifting in between the extremes.”

1st July 1916

The 1917 edition of Wisden contains a list of Deaths in the War 1916.  July of that year was a time of particularly heavy toll as the British sought to advance on the Somme.  July 1^st , 94 years ago today was the first day of The Battle of Albert.

Suitably at random here is one entry:

2^ND LIEUT. JOHN HUSKISSON PARR-DUDLEY (Royal Fusillers) killed on July 1^st aged 20, was captain of the Eleven whilst at Cranbrook School, Kent.

T20: Pow? Crash? Bang? Is there really no alternative?

It is possible that two thousand people made their way to Old Trafford last night lured there by this advertisement on Lancashire’s web site or by some other tripe hype.

It was a Wednesday evening.  It was very, very cold and blustery.  Earlier in the day the prospects for play had seemed uncertain.  And Lancashire were playing Northants.  But the numbers paying at the gates must have been a disappointment to the authorities. 

Where was the 'buzz' yesterday at Old Trafford?

The throng is part of the T20 experience.  There would seem to be a minimum density of crowd and intensity of ‘buzz’ below which a significant part of the attraction is removed.  It is obvious, but it needs saying, the fewer the people attending the weaker the draw of the event.    

Picture Window: the view from the indoor school

Third Man deposited his son at the indoor school which offered those who did not wish to venture outside this view of proceedings.

He then made his way round to the Pavilion to catch a dozen or so overs of the Lancashire innings.

In truth, the experience was not very enjoyable.  The weather must make a huge difference which raises the question:  in time, will Clubs that enjoy warmer evenings attract greater crowds, make more money at the gate and the bars, buy in better players and increase their chances of winning more cash and gaining access to international competitions?

Local Hero in Vermilion

However, the effectiveness of imported players is proving questionable.  In cricket jet-lag now measures the time between the arrival of a visiting international BSD and his first match winning performance.

It is also redefining what is meant by affinity. This report of the match at Cricinfo makes an unintended point: “Northants openers Loye (ex-Lancs, TM) and Lou Vincent, the club’s stand-in overseas signing, took the score to 23 after two overs of their reply. Vincent, who spent the latter half of the 2008 season at Old Trafford, has signed for the Steelbacks for 10 days until Zimbabwean Elton Chigumbura arrives.” 

It was good therefore to see the young and HOME GROWN Tom Smith make a fluent and untroubled 67 off 47 balls. 

The performances of home grown talent are inspiring to the three most likely ‘audiences’ making up the support on the night: youngsters who can dream of following in the footsteps of these ‘local heroes’; those going after work or as part of some hospitality package who can identify with players with a similar (in this case) Lancastrian approach to life, and older supporters who can take pride in their club fulfilling the higher purpose of producing good players for the game and its history. 

So do we really need expensive international itinerants either to win matches or to draw crowds?  The marketing of these matches could equally well centre upon the lives, progress and performance of local ‘lads’ like Smith and Simon Kerrigan who in the Northants innings took 3 for 17 in his four overs. 

Climbing Pro-Cricket's Ladder

Two further observations:

1.         The training bike has given way to the ladder as a means of releasing tension and keeping muscles warm.

2.         The deflected sweep, the flicks over either shoulder and the switch hit are now the main ways batsmen score.  These shots demand skilful and brave batting. 

Pace bowlers are finding it hard to counter them, but this change in the balance of power between batsman and paceman further enhances the attractions of spin.

Debt in deflationary times is a dangerous thing.  Treasurers and Chief Executives will be keeping an anxious eye on the gates.   Last night’s attendance suggests that the honeymoon is over.  There already needs to be a new reason to watch Twenty20.  Could that also be a new meaning for affinity marketing?

For the scores on the doors click here.