Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

132 Change of Culture; Change of Cricket attracted?’, he asked rhetorically. There was a whispered riposte about a possible niche audience and then we moved on to next business. The County Championship continues to be the loser. The actual figures for spectators at all domestic and international cricket is not so appalling. Between 1997 and 2015 the annual attendances were roughly 1.5m to 2.3m, the wideness of the range a reflection of weather and the popularity of the tourists. The total of subscribing members to the county clubs, including the high MCC figure, is around 150,000. The advent of Twenty20 cricket has also been a valued shot in the arm - but the numbers attending first-class county matches are in pitiful decline. In the 2015 season Warwickshire did well in welcoming 37.000 paying customers to its eight home matches but other counties did badly. Glamorgan, Leicestershire and Derbyshire managed only 11,000 or 12,000 while Northants found little more than 4000 hopefuls coming to its doors. Overall there were some 300,000 paying attendees at county matches in 2015. The average daily attendance, exclusive of members, was thus a maximum of just over a thousand and a minimum of 120. 8 The decline of support for first-class county cricket did not, happily for the players, deter the increase in cricketers’ salaries over this latter period. The Packer episode had blown apart the previous contractual device and, in all branches of the entertainment industry, there were quite radical improvements in pay. The revolution was more dramatic in football than in cricket. Wally Hammond’s cautious choice of cricket as the better financial deal would have been patently the wrong one from the late 20 th century onwards. There was an intriguing counterpoint in the sporting headlines of the Manchester Evening News about the turn of the century announcing that Andrew Flintoff was requesting £50,000 for the season at one Old Trafford and Roy Keane £50,000 a week at the other – the latter was more successful (£52,000) than the former (£32,000) in his negotiations. In another example from the same two bastions was the destiny of Phil Neville. On leaving school he was offered something in the region of £1800 for the summer at the cricketing Old Trafford and £1500 a week at the footballing one. It should be added that, as a fifteen year old, he was assessed by a high-ranking Lancashire official, one not given to melodramatic utterances, as being the best schoolboy batsman he had ever seen. The Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson, recalling the incident when the young tyro asked which sport he should select, said he thought Phil Neville was taking the piss. Had, as now, football been an all-year-round sport in mid-20 th century, it is certain that the likes of Wally Hammond or Denis Compton would never have been seen on a cricket field. Figures across the sporting board from Barclay’s bank in 2006 revealed that county cricketers were earning an average of £43,000 annually, with something of a gap between Surrey’s £51,000 to £60,000 and Glamorgan’s £31,000. Self-evidently, contracted England players made considerably more money. Premiership footballers