Misgoverned And Marooned: English Men’s Cricket Still Faces Social Extinction

Richard Heller and Peter Oborne explore how money, centralisation and a lack of accountability around the England and Wales Cricket Board is taking the essence of the sport further away from fans

Three electrifying performances by the England men’s team against the world Test cricket champions, New Zealand, may suggest to many that all is well again with English cricket.

The celebrations are a deserved tribute to an inspirational new combination of the captain, Ben Stokes, and the coach Brendon McCullum. But they cannot conceal the reality that English cricket is in deep trouble.

It is becoming marooned as a sport for affluent, predominantly white people. Long-concealed but now open scandals of racism overlie the routine, barely noticed, exclusion of thousands of potential participants on grounds of class and money.

According to Statista.com, the number of people in the UK playing cricket at least once a month fell from 364,600 in 2016 to 229,100 in 2021.

This cannot be attributed to the pandemic. Recreational cricket clubs made prodigious efforts to keep going during lockdown, especially in outdoor sessions for children, and many have reported a massive revival of interest from all genders and ages at the end of it.

Instead, the decline reflects long-term competition from other leisure activities which are easier to access and more welcoming for disadvantaged populations.

The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) estimated in 2018 that 30% of all recreational cricket players are of South Asian origin – but these represent only 4% of professional first-class cricketers. People of Asian or Afro-Caribbean origin are almost as unrepresented as first-class coaches or senior managers. In terms of class, 45% of the men employed in England to play first-class cricket were drawn from the 7% educated at independent schools (a higher proportion than members of the House of Lords). Many recorded as state-educated finished their cricket preparation at independent schools, including England’s best current batsman Joe Root, at the fine cricket nursery of Worksop on a scholarship from the age of 15.

English cricket remains a client, domestically and internationally, of outside commercial and media interests.

It has been misgoverned for years by a Board which seems almost determined to destroy the institutions which have elicited enduring loyalty from cricket followers and prepared generations of players for the highest forms of the game.

This Board is virtually a law unto itself and answers to no one for its stewardship of the game. It has been consistently late in addressing its multiple crises.

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The wisest administrators would struggle to keep English cricket alive and well.

Its structure, with three-day county cricket and longer international Test matches at the summit, was economically obsolete from the moment it was established in the late 19th Century. It was created by, and for, a Victorian rural leisure class already yielding status and wealth to English cities.

English cricket could, and probably should have, developed as a professional short-form sport in those cities, as did association football. But the English rural amateurs not only made their long-form versions into the ‘first-class’ form of the domestic game but exported them – and their status – to the British Empire.

For connoisseurs of the game this was an astonishing piece of good luck, since these forms generated a unique mix of skills and drama. But they were rarely profitable, especially English county cricket which represented its nucleus.

The counties have had intermittent periods of prosperity, especially in the aftermath of both world wars, when live spectatorship at major matches was strong enough to finance them. But, in general, they relied on subsidies from local landowners or business leaders and other rich patrons or indeed the players themselves – professionals willing to work for low wages or genuine amateurs working only for genuine expenses.

From the 1960s, the first-class counties relied more and more on receipts from ever-shorter forms of cricket and on their share of revenues from domestic international Test matches. They generated sponsorship and commercial income.

The share of county revenues from attendance and membership fees dwindled year by year. This trend was accelerated from the late 1990s when global media revenues for international cricket matches took off dramatically thanks to expert salesmanship from Pakistan’s Ehsan Mani, at the International Cricket Council (ICC). The distribution of the English share of these revenues effectively turned the counties into dependents of the controlling body of English cricket, the England and Wales Cricket Board.

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It is fair to say that the unremitting focus of the ECB since its inception has been the acquisition of money.

This prompted the most fatal decision in the modern history of English cricket – the removal of international cricket matches from free-to-air television. It robbed the game of millions of spectators of all ages, above all the casual ones who had ignored cricket but could drawn into it by an exciting passage of play.

England’s dramatic Ashes victory over Australia in 2005 had a peak viewing figure of nine million on free-to-air television. The England team acquired a national following. Even Tony Blair came to realise that cricket was popular. In 2019, when England equally dramatically snatched the men’s cricket World Cup, the television audience on Sky rarely exceeded a million.

The ECB claimed that the Sky revenues were vital for its investment in grassroots cricket, but the loss of these casual spectators was a far greater cost to participation in cricket than anything the ECB could do to compensate by dribbling support to the grassroots.

Perhaps the first-class county cricket clubs should never have come into existence. They have certainly less and less logic as the apex of English domestic cricket. None of the 18 have the same administrative boundaries as they did in Victorian times: one, Middlesex, no longer exists as a name in English local government. But that does not mean that they should be extinguished – which seems to have been the dominant strategy of the ECB for at least the last decade.

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This has become overt since its introduction of the Hundred in 2021. For non-initiates, the Hundred is a new short-form version of cricket. Matches are completed even more quickly than T20 ones, allowing even more entertainment and advertising intervals.

Its invention owes much to the fury of the ECB at missing the commercial potential of T20, introduced in England but developed in India through the Indian Premier League, much imitated and the source of a revolution in money and power in global cricket. The ECB claimed that the Hundred would entice a new audience into cricket, especially women and children, although it was forced to modify its original marketing which implied that these two groups were too stupid to understand first-class cricket.

The 18 counties had adapted with great success to T20 but they were ousted from the Hundred in favour of eight new franchise teams, with