Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

124 Towards Classless Cricket? devices formed a spiral of employing international stars to play one-day cricket funded by sponsors so that international stars could be employed to play one-day cricket funded by sponsors. At another serious level, the introduction of the limited overs tournaments was justified as a conduit for attracting people to watch the first-class game. From this stance it was a flop. With seven-a-side rugby the shorter format is used as an appetiser or fillip fore and aft of the season; there has never been any peril of it supplanting the mainstream game. With cricket’s shortened version, the reverse is largely true. The limited overs variety flourished as the county championship, as a spectator sport, continued to diminish. The one-day tail wagged the three or four-day dog. There followed the advent of costumes that made cricketers look like plumbers or car mechanics. The was much agitation among the faithful, who found little solace in the knowledge that white had only become ubiquitously fashionable during the Victorian era of cricket’s association with goodness, circa 1880 to 1895. Before that there had been coloured clothing. For instance, the All-England XI had worn white shirts with pink spots. They might have been mistaken for Tottenham Hotspur or Derby County in their away strip. The limited overs game increasingly made itself manifest as somehow separate from the first-class formula rather than its adjunct and feeder. John Arlott had perhaps been wise in his days when he advised that the one-day variety was fine in itself but it should be given another name and not be called cricket. George Bernard Shaw had, from his acerbic Dubliner stance, once written that ‘the English are not very spiritual people so they invented cricket to give them some sense of eternity’. As the 20 th century wore on the English public had apparently grown agnostic in this regard. To look ahead a reasonable time, over the next twenty ot thirty years after these changes, by the early 1990s the first-class annual attendances had shrunk by almost a half again to 170,000. That opened up an ever-widening gulf since the 2m of 1950 and the close on 3m of 1947. To underline the seriousness of the decline, in 1990 some counties were counting themselves lucky if, over the season, as many as 10,000 customers paid at the turnstiles for their first-class programme. In 1947 12,000 paid to watch the first day of the varsity match. The notion that the shorter would usher the public into watching the longer version of the game was dead in the water. The county finances were little better, even if changed in composition. In the 1990s, only 8% of county revenue derived from paying customers and 17% from membership subscriptions. The remaining 75% was gleaned from commercial and TCCB sources. To detail the alteration in terms of one county, in 1962, at the launch of this raft of reforms, Lancashire’s turnover was £67.000, £39,000 of which was taken at the turnstiles or in subscriptions. The rest came chiefly from internal commercial enterprise, with only £8000 in Test and broadcasting receipts. In 1990 the turnover had shot up to £2m but only £0.5m was in gate-money and subscription, a proportionate drop from 60% to 25%%, while £1.5m came mainly from