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Modi lures football to take over the world
By Will 1 month ago, 5 Comments »
Lalit Modi has risen from seemingly nowhere. Unlike us sleepy Englishmen, with our excellent ideas but reluctance to ever commercialise them – or, perhaps more fairly, our endemic resistance to change – Modi’s timing was spot on. He saw Twenty20 as the adrenaline kick cricket needed, a drug for the fans and moreover for television executives to crave. The ICC, like the ECB, were caught off guard yet Modi spotted his chance and got the international board on side, brushing off the Indian Cricket League – and doubtless others – with a disdainful arrogance not readily afforded to someone who had, apparently, appeared from nowhere. Remarkably, he calls the shots.
That, ladies and gents, is the man we are dealing with. There is a distasteful arrogance to the way in which he announces some of his latest ventures and his name does not attract great affection or joy, rather a looming fear. But that’s only because the rest of the world is envious, shaking their heads disbelievingly at the ease with which he has transformed the game, occasionally showing an insouciance of self belief in his vision not seen since Steve Jobs first took to the stage wearing loose-fitting jeans and grubby trainers. Modi knows he’s nailed it. The IPL is his iPhone, a game-changing device applauded by the world.
The rest of the sport and her clubs are fawning for his attention, and not just cricket teams. Modi might havs snared football into the bargain now, too:
“There is a football club, a very famous football club in the UK, very interested in bidding,” Modi said. “[They are] probably one of the most famous football clubs – that’s all I can say. Probably top three. They are interested in taking a stake.”
Responding to speculation in the Indian media, Modi later said on his Twitter page that the club in mention was not Chelsea. A report in the Sun named Manchester City as the team looking at buying a franchise although the club told Cricinfo they were not involved.
The IPL will include two more teams from the 2011 season and will auction the franchise rights at a base price of $225 million ahead of the third season, which starts in India on March 12, and will invite potential investors this week. That figure – double of what the most expensive franchise was sold for in 2008 and more than four times the base price in that first auction – is, in an uncertain market, a sign of the league’s confidence in itself and the Twenty20 format.
According to Modi, the MCC would be a value addition to the IPL and open up the possibility of taking the bandwagon overseas to Lord’s. “I have talked [to MCC] last night and they are quite interested,” he said.
When will he have his iPad moment?
5 Comments »Sky is the limit
By Will last year, mid-July, 2 Comments »
I find this overwhelmingly depressing.
Official television industry viewing figures show that Sunday’s cricket was watched by 358,000 people on average between 10am and 2pm, then after two, until that absorbing close, by an average of 800,000. The peak audience, at 6.30?6.45pm, to watch Panesar and Anderson successfully see England to the draw, was 1.47m.
That is considered a respectable pay-television audience by the England and Wales Cricket Board, Sky and TV insiders. It does not, however, compare with the huge audiences drawn to the Ashes on free-to-air Channel 4 in 2005. Then, the peak periods of the third, fourth and fifth Tests, all similarly thrilling closing moments, were watched by 7.48m, 8.2m and 7.2m people respectively. Cricket garnered huge, growing audiences; the 8.2m fourth Test peak drew a 47% share of people watching television at the time.
Any comparison with this year must allow for the fact that we have had only the first Test but the ECB’s decision to sell the rights exclusively to BSkyB has dramatically cut the television audience for its sport. Despite the oceans of top action BSkyB has bought up exclusively, with not a single Premier League football match having ever been shown live on free-to-air television in 17 years, and despite the universally recognised quality of its coverage, under a quarter, 6m, of British homes subscribe to Sky Sports.
Full piece at The Guardian. The impact of ECB’s massive own goal won’t be felt fully for another decade, but it will eventually.
2 Comments »Gordon Brown: ladies, the whole county is proud
By Will last year, mid-July, No Comments; be the first!
An unfortunate typo by the ECB this afternoon on the non-news that Gordon Brown has seen an opportunity to jump on a bandwagon to congratulate England’s women for retaining the Ashes. Not that I’m denigrating their performance – far from it; they did superbly to survive that Test.
Prime Minister Rt Hon Gordon Brown MP said “I’m delighted that Charlotte Edwards and the whole of the England squad are here today so I can congratulate them in person for retaining the Ashes yesterday.
“Together with your thrilling wins in the World Cup and Twenty20, it has been a fantastic year. The whole county is very proud of what you have achieved, your contribution to British sport, and the inspiration you provide to girls and women across the country. I hope the next year will prove just as rewarding.”
I bet they’re over the moon at making an entire county proud.
No Comments »Clarke’s 9000 fans
By Will last year, at the end of February, 7 Comments »
Apparently, Giles Clarke received 9000 emails of support after the fracas involving the ECB and Sir Allen Stanford. As Patrick Kidd asks, and as several colleagues also pointed out, if he had 9000 fans then how many people offered something rather less warming than “support”? Not sure. Clarke didn’t say.
An enraged Kidd at The Times was so gob-smacked at Clarke’s outrageous claims that he used three whole questions marks. “9,000???” he asked, spittle flying around his study.
I hope that Clarke is still a regular reader of this blog (you do realise that when I called you scruffy, Giles, it was a compliment? Just look at how scruffy I am). If he is, then he should be reassured that I am not for one second claiming that he is lying about how much support he has received or exaggerating just a smidgin.
But still, 9,000??? How do you know that they were all letters of support? Isn’t there a chance that the odd advert for Russian brides or prophylactics slipped through? Are you including ECB press releases in that tally? We can assume (I think) that the ECB backs you, but it’s a bit sneaky to tot them up in the pro-Clarke column.
The very fact Clarke felt moved to mention the magic 9000 figure says rather a lot about his state of mind, or his bulging Outlook, and there can be little doubt that he hasn’t looked over his shoulder in the past few days. But it’s remarkable how the ECB seems to have slipped quietly under the radar since quickly cutting ties with Stanford, as though that public show of severance would mask the greed which lured it to Stanford in the first place.
It has not. The ECB continues to maintain that is is the honest, innocent party in this maelstrom. Stanford could and did pay, Clarke insists, which seems to be the ECB’s utterly blinkered method of washing its hands of responsibility. The warning signs were there that Stanford might have a jack up his sleeve and, if they were blinded by his pearly white smile, then surely the hired helicopter landing at short extra cover at Lord’s would have woken them up?
That the ECB are still scrabbling around offering excuses probably tells us enough about how English cricket ever got involved with Stanford in the first place.
7 Comments »ECB’s advert for the new England coach
By Will last year, at the end of February, No Comments; be the first!
You can apply here if you think you’re up to the job. And why wouldn’t you be?
Due to the requirements of this role and the responsibilities assigned to the post holder, successful applicants will undergo a screening process that will include an Enhanced Criminal Records Bureau Disclosure. Having a criminal record will not necessarily prevent appointment.
If you’re reading, Sir Allen…the door isn’t fully shut yet.
No Comments »The sleazy affair is over
By Will last year, mid-February, 17 Comments »
They call it Stella vision, waking up the next morning next to a monstrosity with whom you’ve shared the most intimate and brief of relations. Your head’s banging, your mouth dry, and the urge to escape and pretend it never happened is almost overwhelming.
That might be roughly how Giles Clarke and other ECB board members are feeling right now, after the news that Sir Allen Stanford, Clarke’s prized jewel of his tenure, has been accused of “fraud of a shocking magnitude” by the Securities & Exchange Commission. No amount of ibuprofen is going to lessen or cure this embarrassment for the ECB. The sleazy affair is well and truly done and dusted.
All the signs were there, right from when he shocked the establishment by landing his helicopter at Lord’s, all the way to the accusations by the Venezuelan secret police that the CIA were paying his employees to spy. Now, we learn that Stanford could have been involved in up to £5.6billion of fraudulent activities. The Hollywood script is beginning to shape up nicely, and you can almost hear Clarke’s heartbeat thudding through his ribcage. His time with Majestic Wine ended acrimoniously, and Pet City – which he founded in the mid-1990s – was a loss-making venture, though his shares still earned him about £20m. Was the deal with Stanford done for cricket’s interest, the ECB’s, or Giles Clarke? We may never know, but questions will now be asked about Clarke’s position, and moreover why better background investigations were not taken place by the ECB. The questioning seemed to be something like this:
Who is Stanford? What is the Stanford Group? Can he further English and West Indian cricket by money alone? Do we care? Shall we see if his first cheque goes through and, if so, take the risk? No one offering that amount of money can be dodgy; he’ll be true to his word. He must be a good egg (and a very clever one too) if he’s made all that money. Let’s do it. Where do we sign, Sir Allen? I hear you have a place in Colombia, too! Wow. Sir Allen, don’t think me as rude, but that man with the sunglasses and serious expression on his face has been following you around all day. Oh, very impressive – private security! No, let me open the door. So, tell me – this place in Colombia…
Cricket isn’t used to this extravagance, this bare-faced gluttony which Stanford brought. In the end, it was all too good to be true.
In 2007 Clarke was asked whether there are any similarities between cricket and business. “They are both long-term games and can change incredibly swiftly with just a couple of events,” he said. “The key element is teamwork; both teams and companies which are dependent on one person have fundamental long-term flaws.”
Quite so, Giles.
17 Comments »Cricket to return to terrestrial?
By Will last year, at the end of January, 11 Comments »
Having been away for a few days, this passed me by. It’s reported in The Grauniad that cricket could make a return to free-to-air TV sooner rather than later, if Andy Burnham (government’s culture secretary) has anything to do with it.
I’ve banged on about this for years. On the one hand, the ECB seek and need vast sums of money, which BSkyB can happily provide them. They pledge a percentage of that to grassroots cricket, development and other charitable activities. But in selling the rights to a pay-per-view broadcaster they cut the prospective number of viewers by a significant margin. Yes, they are piling money into things like Chance to Shine – and other initiatives which promote cricket in deprived socioeconomic areas of the country – but it could also be argued that Sky subscribers themselves are an elite. They are still a minority, after all (Sky subscriber stats anyone?). If they sold it to the BBC, a free-to-air broadcaster, suddenly English cricket is given essentially free advertising and the seeds of cricket’s interest are planted among millions of children, lazily flicking from CBeebies to Newsround on their summer holidays when they catch sight of Flintoff smacking Ponting in the face. What’s that? Some bloke’s been hit on the head by a red ball. Brilliant! I could do that. I will do that! Not that I’m advocating violence, but let’s face it: we all love to see a batsman sconned, especially when we’re 10.
That’s an idealistic and slightly naive point of view. I know that. I know the ECB needs money if they’re to compete with other national boards, but imagine if the 2005 Ashes hadn’t been on Sky. Would the country have whipped itself up into such an orgy? Yes, it probably would have, but not to the same frenzied extent. This year’s Ashes is the first in Britain not to be televised for free, and for all Sky’s excellence – their highlights package is usually 2 or 3 hours’ worth each day, for example, and the coverage is mostly quality – they can’t penetrate the country’s subconscious like Channel 4 or the BBC did. £300 million is £300 million, but how many millions of schoolchildren will be not bovvered because the Ashes is on Sky?
So. Returning in a roundabout way to the Guardian piece, it seems the various different formats of the game could be sold off independently from one another.
It is believed that placing international Twenty20 cricket on the list would be welcomed by free-to-air broadcasters such as the BBC, which would find it easier to schedule than Test cricket, and appeal to potential new, and younger, audiences.
As broadcasters and governing bodies begin jockeying for position ahead of the first review of the list for 10 years, the BBC is also expected to argue that the Ryder Cup and British and Irish Lions rugby union tours should be added to the list of protected events such as the FA Cup final, the Derby and the football World Cup that have “special national resonance” and “serve to unite the nation”.
Your thoughts, ladies and gentlemen, are welcomed in the comments.
(Also see TV won England the Ashes from three years ago)
(Also, I appreciate there’s a lot of Sky banners at the moment. I’m a sell-out. Bite me)
11 Comments »‘Sky to keep TV rights’
By Jonathan Liew 2 years ago, at the start of August, 14 Comments »
If this is true, then it’s an absolute travesty. Either the ECB or the BBC are to blame, or – and such is the incompetence of both that this is by far the most likely scenario – they’ve managed to bungle things between them.
FYI
The cheapest Sky Sports package costs £34 a month at present, possibly rising to over £40 by the time the next TV deal begins.
TV audiences for Test match cricket have dropped 75% since Sky took over.
14 Comments »A fan’s-eye view of the EPL
By Jonathan Liew 2 years ago, mid-July, 3 Comments »
On hearing a new initiative, my first instinct has generally been the most reliable one. “A shorter World Cup? Great!” “$10 million, winner-takes-all? What is this, a game show?” But I’m less certain about the contented feeling I got in the pit of my stomach immediately after reading about the impending EPL. On reflection, I wonder where it’s going to leave the casual fan.
Twenty20 cricket is the most expensive form of domestic cricket to watch, and with huge pressure on the ECB to match or even surpass the level of revenue generated by the IPL, it’s easy to envisage a future in which tickets to a Twenty20 game hit the £30 or even £40 mark. And it’s wishful thinking to expect a terrestrial broadcaster to show interest, especially when you consider the sheer number of games involved and the prime Friday-night slot most of them would fill.
What the EPL vision reminds me of most is not its Indian counterpart, but its footballing equivalent: the bloated, joyless Premiership. A middle-class preserve, a place where corporate fools will go to show how ‘down with it’ they are, the domain of Sky or Setanta subscribers alone. We will be told, patronisingly, that this is the price you pay for higher standards.
So a few suggestions, just in case Giles Clarke reads this blog:
1) Include free admission to a Championship game with every Twenty20 ticket. Championship cricket will all but disappear from summer weekends, and it needs all the help it can get.
2) Ticket prices will need some form of regulation. The ‘Iron Law’ of cricket spectating goes something like this: the less you’ve paid to watch a game, the more fun you’ll have. World Twenty20 in South Africa: fun. World Cup in the Caribbean: not fun. 50 rupees to watch the world’s best in the IPL: very fun. £60 to watch Neil Mackenzie trickle along at two an over: really, not fun at all.
3) If you want to sell the rights to the SuperMegaEnglishTwenty20FlyingCircus to Sky for such an astronomically high sum that anyone wanting to watch it will need to buy a new dish, we won’t kick up a fuss. As long as we can have Test matches back on terrestrial.
4) Oh, and thanks for ditching the Pro40.
3 Comments »Tickets for 2009 World Twenty20 on sale
By Will 2 years ago, at the end of June, 2 Comments »
Tickets for next’s year World Twenty20, to be held in England, have now gone on sale. Go get ‘em. From ECB’s press release:
2 Comments »General public tickets can be accessed in two ways:
- Through the tournament’s official website, accessed via the ICC website here: www.icc-cricket.com
- In the UK only by telephone by calling 0844 847 2020
If you are a Ticket or Premium member of TwelfthMan, you will have access to an exclusive allocation of tickets reserved purely for members.
This allocation will be accessed via a ballot due to the expected high demand of these tickets. More information on the ballot will be sent in due course, however we do not expect the ballot itself to take place until September 2008 at the earliest.
If you are not a Ticket or Premium member, you have until August 4th 2008 to join in time for access to TwelfthMan’s ICC World Twenty20 Allocation.
Stanford unveils US$100m deal with England and West Indies
By Will 2 years ago, mid-June, 11 Comments »
Good god. Did we ever expect this sort of money to be part of cricket? After much debate, Stanford’s expansion from the Caribbean has been confirmed, and England will face an All Stars XI from the West Indies on November 1. The winner will take home $20m:
There were concerns with the winner-takes-all format proposed by Stanford but those seem to have been resolved. A deal will mean that if England win, each of the XI will receive US$1 million, the rest of the squad share US$1 million, and the management team splits another US$1 million. The remaining US$7 million will be shared between the ECB and the West Indies Cricket Board, regardless of the outcome of the match itself.
All of which puts yet more emphasis on this year’s domestic Twenty20 Cup; not only could a good performance loft a player to India for the Champions League, but a life-changing sum of money in the Caribbean a few weeks later. This is monstrous. Bonkers, but monstrous.
11 Comments »Performance-based bribes for England
By Will 2 years ago, mid-June, 5 Comments »
England’s players netted a bonus of £180,000 for their series-win over New Zealand a few days ago. It’s a fair chunk of money, on top of their already comfortable salaries and extra advertising deals with the likes of Adidas. The Indian Premier League, however, has blown salaries and players’ monetary expectations out of the water, which has prompted the ECB to raise the series bonuses to £2m. It is effectively a performance-based bribe: do well for us in Tests, the ECB say, and you’ll be handsomely rewarded. Don’t worry about that silly Indian thing: beat the South Africans and we’ll buy you all iPhones and cars.
It’s a fair old whack, and a reasonable gesture by the ECB, but the newly sized pot surely can’t dissuade players from considering the IPL, can it? Over in India players are promised hundreds of thousands, even if they fail abysmally. Money talks, as that awesome AC/DC song says, but can Test cricket genuinely hope to match the new money offered by Indian leagues (and the new Champions League)?
Your thoughts?
5 Comments »Stanford close to luring ECB
By Will 2 years ago, at the end of April, 59 Comments »
Allen Stanford and Lalit Modi. Two entirely different characters, both from opposite ends of the world – geographically and, arguably, morally – but both with a shared love of money and cricket. Why do I worry less about the Wild West cowboy, and more about Modi’s modus operandi?
Perhaps it’s because he’s American and has no historical connection to a cricket board. Maybe it’s because he appears to have no dirty agenda to the politics of the sport: he’s seemingly happy to pile money into the flayling West Indies cricket, and anyone else who wants to join in the fun is more than welcome. This sounds naive – of course, billionaires crave and adore money: it is their driving force – but his come-follow-me attitude is refreshing and progressive, which cannot be said of Modi. Modi’s business is power and politics; the IPL has already made him millions, but it is a vehicule to global dominance. We’ve seen this season how the ECB have been tied up in knots banning (and subsequently unbanning) various players who represented the Indian Cricket League – the antichrist to the sanctioned IPL – which demonstrates just how much power the BCCI wields.
Anyway, I digress. I like Mr Stanford and am quite excited by what he could do to counter Modi’s unquenchable thirst for dominance. He has met with the ECB – significantly, the president of the West Indies Cricket Board, Dr Julian Hunte, was also present – to finalise plans for an England v West Indies All Stars XI later this year (and possibly running over five years). The matches themselves aren’t too significant, but it could signal the start of a business relationship which expands far beyond any of our imaginings. Stanford’s 20/20 in the Caribbean was a rollicking success – some say he should be in charge of ICC’s World Cups – so it’ll be fascinating to see what he and England come up with.
59 Comments »Do we need counties?
By Jonathan Liew 2 years ago, mid-April, 22 Comments »
There are 18 counties playing first-class cricket. That’s quite a lot. There are more domestic teams in England than in any other country. Yet they’re not evenly spread around – London and its environs has an embarrassment of teams, while parts such as the south west, the far north and most of Eastern England have none at all.
Now partly, that’s due to population: cricket teams are concentrated around the biggest cities. And yet, we persist in clinging to the county apparatus, a hotchpotch of hazily-defined localities that has very little relevance to the social geography of today. Counties don’t really exist in any meaningful sense any more; in fact, for four of the 18 counties, that’s literally true. The county system is rooted in a long gone past, and it hasn’t changed, even though everything around it has. Does the idea of ‘Warwickshire’ mean anything to anyone any more? Certainly not for someone like Ian Bell, who was born in Coventry – which since 1974 has been part of the West Midlands.
If it were only a quibble about names and boundaries, we could probably let it go. But this archaic system has a more serious effect on the domestic game. With large shifts in population and wealth away from rural England and towards the towns, some counties clearly have an inherent advantage over others. A county like Lancashire, with a catchment area of Liverpool and Manchester, the surrounding towns, Cheshire and Cumbria, have far more resource to draw on than the likes of Leicestershire, which has one medium sized town and four rival cricketing counties on its borders. It may always have been this way to an extent – pre-reform Yorkshire was bloody huge – but that doesn’t necessarily make it fair.
As a result, prosperity – and thus success – is distorted by the fact that some counties will always be struggling to prosper, regardless of cricketing merit, and some will always be comfortable. Test grounds – a major source of potential revenue – are concentrated almost exclusively around big cities. Look at the list of county champions: the top four are Yorkshire, Surrey, Middlesex and Lancashire – areas with high populations and a Test ground. Then look at who has come bottom most often: Derbyshire, Somerset, Northamptonshire, Glamorgan. When Leicestershire can’t hang on to a player like Stuart Broad, who was born in the county and has played all his cricket there, it’s clear the playing field is not level. The influx of Kolpak players have counteracted population factors to an extent – but they still need to be paid, and the biggest counties will always jostle their way to the front in this respect.
It’s possible teams like Leicestershire and Derbyshire will never again reach the pinnacle of English cricket. The best they can hope for is the odd promotion or a dart at a one-day trophy here and there, but it’s equally likely they’ll wane and recede slowly into the background. That is, unless something is done about it.
If domestic cricket is ever to make proper money – and, who knows, provide a higher standard? – it needs to brand itself in more familiar terms. In short, we need fewer teams, more fairly distributed. The quickest way of doing this would be to merge counties; in short, persuading them to vote themselves out of business. That’s not going to happen. Instead, reorganisation of domestic cricket could be craftily disguised as a PR exercise.
Ironically, the IPL might be able to teach English cricket a thing or two in this respect. Moneyed franchises they may be, but the teams in the League are based in – and upon – very real localities. The players may not be sourced locally, but that will come in time. What’s important is that a bond is being forged betwen a cricket team and a town. In England, those bonds already exist in large part: Gloucestershire is by and large a Bristol team, Hampshire a Southampton-based club, Warwickshire is a Birmingham team, and so on. Towns have a far greater emotional and economic pull than counties these days, and are far more relevant in today’s society.
The idea, then, is this, although the details are less important than the diagnosis behind them. Cut the number of teams to, say, 12, and base each one around a large town. Let’s call them, for sake of argument: Newcastle, Leeds, Manchester, Bristol, Southampton, Birmingham, Nottingham, North London, South London, East London, Cardiff and Brighton. The South East has a quarter of England’s population, so it should have a quarter of the teams. The names, as I say, are largely irrelevant.
What English cricket would then have, essentially, is the Australian system in all but name. Teams would be able to draw on the emotional and financial clout of the major town, but talent-wise the spread would be far wider – and far fairer. It provides the best balance between levelling the playing field and preserving some semblance of geographical integrity. And the standard would improve.
Anyway, well done for getting through all that – any thoughts?
22 Comments »English Premier League gathers momentum
By Will 2 years ago, mid-April, 10 Comments »
The news that Allen Stanford, the Wild West’s Lalit Modi, is to meet the ECB next week offers a delicious opportunity to ponder what the England board has up its sleeve. And still the ECB continue to maintain, with absolutely no conviction, that they “don’t want a knee-jerk reaction to the IPL”. That is exactly what they want, and arguably need. There’s a sense the ECB are spitting nails that another country – god forbid India! – have stolen their Twenty20 and created a monster from it. They want that monster, their beast, back.
So they’re pondering the English Premier League (EPL), a smaller sibling India’s giant tournament, to take advantage of England’s season to attract international stars. It’ll probably take place in June and July next year as no other country has any international commitments to conflict. And with Stanford potentially coming on board – it’s absolutely unclear what, if any, the Texan’s role might be – the prospect of millions of dollars come into the equation.
Stanford’s 20/20, the Caribbean tournament which he piled millions of his own money into, has been a runaway success with cricket at its core. There are even some who wish Stanford would take charge of ICC’s World Cup every four years; he does things loud, in a very American way, but rather like Mr Getty has a fondness for cricket and wants to keep the sport’s traditions at the centre. Also like Getty and Modi, he knows a good deal when he spots one.
In the IPL, team names have been singularly uninspiring. The Mumbai Indians, the Deccan Chargers, the Bangalore Royal Challengers. Boring. What do you make of England’s plans, and what teams might be created?
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