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I was interested in the talk sport commentator who was put on the spot this afternoon , and he said that he had lots of empathy and in general he was siding with the Indian players who were concerned about their families; but then went on to say that if IPL wasn’t being played, then there would be a test going on today
Despite the cricketing world now dancing to India's tune it will be interesting to see how this is resolved. The test must either be played at a later date or awarded to England or else it may set a precedent allowing teams that are one up with one to play in a series to manufacture a reason to postpone the final test.
I read somewhere that it was on the cards that this might happen as the fourth test was played at the Oval and the final test of a long series is traditionally played there. Fanciful? Maybe.
Both sides have shut up because this is nothing to do with them. They've got little power and little say in it. This is about two country boards, one with far more wealth and power than the other.
Remember the ICL? The ICC ruled that it was not kosher and that the IPL was by virtue of being classified as being a domestic tournament. End result: the IPL survived, the ICL didn't and some players had their international careers affected through ICC weakness. At the time I said on the old BBC 606 service that it was utterly ridiculous to classify the IPL as a domestic tournament and was more than mildly rebuked. Here's the outcome of that, a situation where the needs of a "domestic tournament" have overtaken the needs of an international series. The players might feel shit but most of these guys have taken IPL money at some point. You might get the former vice captain of England saying he's disappointed about it but Moeen not so long back reacted to losing his Test contract by announcing a Test break so he could play more white ball franchise cricket ie. he put white ball needs ahead of Test needs. The ECB can whine all they like but they put Hundred needs above everything else so they could try to spin off their shitty version of the game and hope to sell the rights to that in order to compete with the BCCI. Tom Harrison can't really moan at the BCCI for being gits when he's been flicking two fingers up at the English domestic game.
Fact is, we are at a point now where the game domestically and internationally is an absolute fucking disaster. The scheduling is lousy. The Ashes are in danger. The domestic game is fucked. We have a stupid format rammed in. We have no coherence in selection. We have players struggling mentally after Covid bubble life. Two years on from the World Cup win that was meant to spark a new era in English cricket, the ECB have turned domestic 50 over cricket into a 2nd XI competition, have shat on the four-day game and harmed our Test side, have pushed the domestic T20 aside just ahead of a World T20 tournament that we have a genuine chance of winning, launched a pointless new format, and have demonstrated twice this year how the BCCI can whip them about.
Tom Harrison should be dragged into the middle of Trent Bridge, stripped, and be forced to undergo a long colonoscopy using only Stumpcam and ball tracking.
https://www.espncricinfo.com/story/explainer-will-the-hundred-make-a-profit-1222261
Also pertinent to remember that the BBL saw loses for the majority of teams in the first two seasons:
In the second season, despite projections that five teams would make a profit, only two actually did. But these figures, CA maintained, were to be expected. It was the nature of the long-term investment. CA pointed to the imminent broadcasting deal as the endgame for the league's start-up costs.
Sanjay Patel says the Hundred will make a profit. Yeah yeah.
And if you really want to vomit, then the Colin Graves piece in City AM earlier this year is the one that'll make you chuck. Private investment into sport, CVC, all the usual. It's pretty shitty. That's the direction he started and that's the direction we will continue to go in. The counties have their hands tied and the players will keep on going where the money is with occasional bouts of tears when something like this Test being cancelled happens. Until you get people standing up and complaining, and some of the players really do have to have the balls to stand up and shout, nothing will change.
https://www.cityam.com/former-england-cricket-chief-colin-graves-i-know-indian-investment-in-the-hundred-is-there-if-the-doors-are-opened/
The very first step: return cricket in this country to one where it lives within its financial means.
The top-down approach started in the 2000s and the wages started to spiral. The Ashes win and the Sky deal bloated this further and county salaries, which were crap in the 1990s went boomshanka and went the other way. Start of the 90s, Somerset's playing budget was around £300,000. Have a gander at these figures collated on someone's blog (cricket finances are seldom clear and easy to find out)
http://sideoncricket.blogspot.com/2019/11/county-championship-salary-cap.html
There has to be some recognition that chasing the cash has made English cricket look fucking ridiculous. We ran after Stanford's millions and looked stupid: we made our county sides bid against one another for international games and nearly bankrupted some and had to rely on the taxpayer to bail out Hampshire and Glamorgan: we chased the Sky money and cut off a generation from watching live cricket on telly at a time when cricket was as high profile in the media as can be: we launch a new format whilst fucking over our existing successful ones. Post-Covid we can't be spending like we used to.
I don't think this top-down approach has done anything good for English cricket. I'm critical of the women's game for the way they've introduced contracts and how money is spent on overseas players whilst the domestic women's game is so poorly funded. Australia are the best women's team out there because they've done it differently and tried to put more funding into the domestic levels of the game in order to have the knock-on effect higher up the pyramid. Over here, we seem to have the attitude of "Look, women on contracts for money! Hurrah!" whilst paying absolute lip service to the domestic women's game.
And as the salaries for the top people went up, so the ticket prices did too. It's fucking galling to have the like of Harrison and Patel talk about T'Hundred bringing in new people who have never been to a major match before. Of course they fucking haven't when a Day 1 Ashes ticket at Lords is £150. Lots of you guys have been to England games recently, you know the prices. When Hundred tickets were going out free in some cases, discounted in others, but all in the cheap category, of course you'll get new people. The ECB makes itself look shit by whining about a lack of diversity at international games when part of the reason for that lack of diversity is the price of those same games, a price the ECB has never seen fit to change in any way.
Some of this bloat goes down to youth levels. My county days saw us paying for our jumpers and ties and for accommodation costs. That was shit but the flip side to me is seeing youth sides going over to Sri Lanka and Abu Dhabi for matches with ECB grant money. When the club game is dying in my county and the main training facility has been dumped in a large private school with a corresponding increase in privately educated players whilst the state school players are ignored or find their chances reduced, then something is absolutely wrong with this system.
There's something wrong when counties were told to sort out their finances, have made huge strides to increase their commercial approach, and most have done this well, and the governing body then fucks over those counties with a stupid cricket format. When a club like Somerset is run well, has good finances, a good supporter base, has hosted international games for men and women, and is still dumped out by that same format, then the ECB make the backers of the European Super League footie look like saints.
Now my approach isn't what the ECB are doing. I wouldn't be chasing after Indian money like Colin Graves wants or Sanjay Patel dreams about. And quite honestly for all my spouting, the thing I feel saddest about is seeing the club game back here in Yokelshire. as Iv'e said before, my first league club at the start of the 90s ran 4 sides on a Saturday and the other club in the town ran 2. Now the other club is dead and my old side have struggled to make 2 sides on a Saturday. Recession played a part, lack of visibility played a part, the reduction of weekday working occupations in this area was a factor.
Shit, my ECB masterplan might take some time to do in full
https://www.statista.com/statistics/421078/cricket-sport-involvment-children-england-uk/
"In 2016, approximately 364,600 adults played cricket at least twice in the last month, whereas in 2018 it shrunk to roughly 291,900 cricket players."
Sport England data:
https://sportengland-production-files.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/1x30_sport_16plus-factsheet_aps10.pdf
I
Or director of cricket, whatever the top job is!
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Plus the ladies would hate me for talking about the ticket sales for their games.
I imagine the ECB have had enough and are pulling some strings?
I sympathise with the players who understandably do not want to be cooped up:
"And with some players away for the best part of four months (the IPL being followed by the T20 World Cup and the Ashes), they are understandably reluctant not to see their families for the entire period."
That said, the schedules have been fucking nuts for years and something like this was always going to happen. It's rather a mirror for what happened with Liverpool after they won the Champions League and fielded the youth side at home and the full time away at the same time. Administrators arrange this shit, the money on offer gets the players and agents onside, and only when the clashes happen do some people wake up to it all.
If we field a weakened side, then the money for the TV rights will be lower and that'll damage ECB finances considerably.
"As things stand, no broadcast partner has been announced to show the Ashes in the UK, though BT Sport are understood to be the likely home of the series. The prospect of a one-sided contest is unlikely to have enticed especially attractive bids."
I somehow doubt that the financial plan for 2021-22 would have featured an away Ashes series bringing in significantly less income than usual. That'll eat into the Hundred profits...
It's always amused me that someone so terrifying as a bowler could be such an immaculate gentleman after retiring from the game.
Sky have a good team of commentators but I think that this weakens it.
Look out for Jordan Cox's assist, one of the greatest pieces of fielding you will ever see.
Sod the hundred, it’s the best day out at cricket in the summer. 2 semi finals and a final, a really high standard of cricket, sometimes over 1,000 runs, 30-40 wickets in a day. Crazy value for £89.
Im a Kent fan so it was super special.
Jordan Cox’s fielding was silly, but it was a special innings too from the young man under pressure.
Anyway, he was out a couple of balls later and we won, so ya-boo stinky-poo to the umpires.
Bat av 28, bowl av 36. Swap them around and you've got a fine player. With those stats, he looks a bit "bits and pieces."
Top bloke though, absolutely top bloke.
For his sake of his career, I hope it won't be Parkinson because the last two leggies to debut down under never went beyond their debut Tests...
I am surprised Buttler is going he is obviously happy enough with the COVID regulations and allowances for family travel.
Personally I would have picked Parkinson over Dom Bess and tried to find space for Saj Mahmood.
Otherwise....it seems to be our strongest squad from those fit and available.
I think Australia are pretty shit anyway so we could be in for a competitive series, but their bowling attack is stronger than ours.
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England name strong squad for Test tour to Australia
Points for optimism. Root averages 50.15: the next highest is Hammed at 35.90. Our reserve batsmen are Crawley and Lawrence. Our keepers picked over specialist keepers average low 30s. We have no out and out quick bowler. Our talisman is shit in the second innings. Our spinners haven't played since the winter.
Prize for outright shit goes to Andrew Miller from Cricinfo with a piece on the tour selection winners and losers:
"Dom Bess
It's been a rocky road for Bess in the past year. His anguish in India in the spring was palpable, as he became a rather unfortunate fall guy for England's wider failings on spinning surfaces at Chennai and Ahmedabad - despite never looking at his best, he had fronted up with 17 wickets in England's three consecutive wins in Asia, after all, including a five-for at Galle in his first outing of the winter. He never came close to a recall this summer despite being included in a handful of squads later in the summer, but then neither did his former Somerset spin-twin Jack Leach, as England chose to field a seam-only attack for their first three Tests, until an abortive return for Moeen Ali against India. But now, with Moeen retired, Bess has an unlikely chance to reassert his status as England's No. 1 spinner - Australia is an unforgiving venue for such a comeback, particularly as a fingerspinner. But England admire his all-round package, including a compact and combative batting technique in the lower-middle order. In the absence of Stokes, Moeen, Sam Curran et al, the need for de facto allrounders may yet tip the scales in his favour."
Number 1 spinner. "His all round package". Dear god, we've entered a time loop and we're picking the slow bowler based on whether he can bat.
An honest article would read "In the absence of our one true world-class allrounder, one retiring and pissing about in Test cricket this year, and the left-armer who's a bit shite overseas on the whole, the need to prop up our inconsistent batting may yet tip the balance in favour of a guy whose bowling fell apart in India so we think he'll do fine touring a place where even great spinners have struggled".
I hope we get trashed this winter. It'd be the perfect finale to a summer where the administrators have demonstrated how fucked they are and how much they are prepared to ruin the game in order to chase their 100 dreams.
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