Are The Summer Series Showing Us A Glimpse Of The Future Of Cricket?

 

 

Cricket 2014

 

Putting the Summer in Perspective

 

September 3^rd 2014

 

Sadly, the Test win, completed less than three weeks ago, on August 17^th, is being out into perspective by the One-Day series. England beat a side totally disinterested in the format that was barely going through the motions by the end of the series. Why India agreed to a five Test series is one of life’s little mysteries at a time when the new generation of players prefers to find fame and fortune playing IPL and do not have the patience for the longer form of the game that does not provide either the riches or the exposure that a televised T20 match does. India’s heart is not in Test cricket and that suggests that the format may not last much longer, at not least as we know it.

England is in real danger of becoming totally isolated in world cricket. In England, the First Class game – the County Championship – is still regarded as the premier format of the game. Even ardent fans of a side are hard-pressed to recall when it won the One-Day cup in its various guises, or its side’s fortunes in the T20, but will know exactly when the County Championship was last conquered. In a world where First Class cricket outside Test matches is fast becoming an irrelevance, scarcely followed and with no viewing public to speak of, the English county game is thriving. Attendances have climbed year on year for some time now. Every game is broadcast live, ball-by-ball. Attendances of several thousand are commonplace (English cricket, of course, complicates this because it only calculates the members of the public who pay at the gate, not the members who, effectively, have a season ticket to games, so attendances can often only be guessed). As an exile, I do not get to many games but, the last one that I attended, on a cold, blustery day in May, must have seen at least a couple of thousand in the ground, as was spectacularly demonstrated at the lunch break as the shops and walkways around the ground suddenly filled with punters who poured out of the stands in torrents. There is an image of county cricket being attended by “one man and his dog”, but that has scarcely been true for at least twenty years – there are sparsely attended days with just a couple of hundred spectators, but there are many more with attendances that would make lower division football clubs envious. Out grounds like Cheltenham, with their smaller capacity, talk proudly of filling, even for Division 2 games. The purported cricket fans who say that no one goes to county games and no one cares are simply parroting an image from thirty years back (yes, I did attend a game back in the 1980s where, one afternoon, my entry substantially improved the gate, at least percentually).

Contrast that with India or Pakistan, where there is scarce interest in the First Class game. Even in Australia, the Sheffield Shield is no longer the focus of attention. Australian cricket followers will tell you who is winning, but few ever make the effort to attend a game. If you want to get an Indian to be passionate, ask him (or her) about the fortunes of the Mumbai Indians or the Chennai Super Kings, not about Hyderabad or Tamil Nadu’s performances in the Ranji Trophy.

First Class cricket exists as a feeder for Test cricket and as a regional form of the game where those one step below Test standard ply their trade. If Test cricket disappears, the reasons to have a First Class structure largely disappear too. Much of the Test history of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka has been played out without a domestic First Class competition, with club and schools cricket acting as a feeder. The West Indies and New Zealand have, in recent years, expanded their First Class programmes from a very precarious base – First Class cricket in the West Indies was, for a time, very much an endangered species with barely a handful of games played. The West Indian domestic finalists will now play as many as eight games and in New Zealand all side play ten when, at one time, the majority of the domestic First Class season was played over the Christmas holiday so that players would not need to take time off work. In India, Karnataka played as many as twelve First Class matches (not so different to the modern English domestic season of sixteen First Class fixtures), but most sides in the Ranji Trophy play eight.

However, scratch a little deeper and things are not so healthy, even in England. There is constant pressure to cut the First Class programme to accommodate other forms of cricket. There are persistent cries that there are too many First Class counties: Derbyshire, Gloucestershire and Glamorgan are frequently mentioned as counties that no one would miss, often followed by Northamptonshire. Might not Surrey and Middlesex amalgamate so that there is just one London team? Why not make Glamorgan, Gloucestershire and maybe even Worcestershire form one supercounty to compete where the individual sides cannot?  There was even a rather unhealthy desire to see Darwinian selection take over in the form of a few counties failing to bankruptcy, without the need to wield the axe. Rumour has it that the recommendations on the future of the First Class game in England favoured a reduction to 12 or, at most, 14 games per side and a significant reduction in the number of counties.

One result is a strange, fragmented, First Class programme. The season starts earlier than ever and is half-completed by early June, it then has a substantial break until a frenetic climax in  late August and September. Four of the nine Division One teams had completed 10 of their 16 games by June 25^th and were into the final run-in. This mirrors the Sheffield Shield, which has a two month break from early December to early February and the Plunkett Shield in New Zealand with its odd format of a round of (non-simultaneous) games in late October, followed by two in mid-December and then games from February until April. In prestige, the First Class tournament may be the one to win, but it has to take its proper place, squeezed around the more financially attractive cricket with its TV income and larger gates (even so, one-day attendances in England have dropped year by year and now, not even the Final is a sell-out). It is a wonder that the County Championship survives and hard to see that there is not an element of reducing the appetite for the County game involved that would make it easier to cut back the fixtures in the future.

Indian fans are already asking why India bother to play Tests. They are kings in the short format and do not need Test cricket, particularly if they are to receive repeated hammerings. Series with Bangladesh, Zimbabwe and New Zealand are unattractive in many senses. The FTP has been tacitly forgotten (how many tours of India have Bangladesh made? When was the last England-Zimbabwe or India-Pakistan series?) Where India lead, others follow because they need a slice of the IPL and Champions League pie.

It is not hard to imagine a future, possibly not far away, where all cricket is played as a long-format (40 or 50 overs) and a short format (T20) only. There may even be a move to an even shorter format, with sides playing two games in an evening as in baseball. Maybe a few marquee series such as England v Australia v South Africa may continue to be played, perhaps as occasional one-off games. In such a world, would there be any place for a First Class programme at all? Probably not? Would traditional counties and State sides make any sense in such a world? Of course not! There would be a rapid change to franchise-based sides.

In such a future, England would be likely to continue with its traditional county game, probably in glorious isolation. One-day fever burnt out in England years ago. There are signs that T20 fever is burning out too: England invented T20, as they did the one-day format, but it is the traditional game that retains its popularity and importance. Even in Australia though, the shift to a game based around the short formats seems inexorable, with a powerful Grade structure as likely to supply the stars of the future as the Sheffield Shield. Other countries would probably shed their First Class programmes with some relief and throw everything into the limited-overs formats.