Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

140 First-Class Fragility Over the last year or so one has been able to take soundings, off the record, of several senior officials in the county game. Inevitably financial instability is the chief anxiety, with almost every first-class county in debt, albeit with some having adroitly structured that indebtedness, and, as is well-known, unable to sustain body and soul without central funding. Television can be a fickle mistress. If the television companies decided that enough were enough because subscribers were declining in number (as seems, as of 2016, to be the case with football watchers) or advertisers were growing unhappy with the proceeds from their investments, matters could become critical. The game’s sponsors, cheered to see their logos broadcast free of charge on the billboards around the grounds or even tattooed upon the very sacred turf and printed on the shirts and sweaters of the participants, would not be too pleased. An unpleasant fact is the near emptiness of venues around the world, especially for other than limited overs matches of note and interest. The TV cameras relish shots of the crowds, particularly when there are a dozen or so Elvis Presley doppelgangers or Richard Lionheart lookalikes to be spotted. That carnival element is much in demand. Barren terraces cannot be hidden, which makes it look as if television is airing events which are dull and which no one wants to see. Imagine a TV show such as Strictly Come Dancing or Britain’s Got Talent if there were a depleted studio audience. When this question has been raised, the answer urged is that televised cricket is inexpensive. You mount your cameras and other tackle for four or five days and you bounce nine or ten hours a day cricket and cricket talk off the satellite – and that’s one whole channel taken care of. That, of course, is a simplified version of the argument but, certainly to the lay ear, it does sound somewhat over-confident. Furthermore, and still on the fundamental subject of financial rectitude, what was suggested in conversation on one or two occasions, with a certain pressure of tongue in cheek but nonetheless with a clear-eyed realism, was that running a venue was fine and could be a decent business. What was economically disastrous was trying to manage a cricket team in that venue. Echoes of Thomas Lord; these arenas, several of them well-located and well-appointed, might be credible sites for all manner of activities, as several of them demonstrate, such as concerts, conferences, hospitality events and so forth. What wrecks the balance sheet is paying something like 500 cricketers to play before practically empty stands in all these stadia. All this underlines the fragile nature of the construct. Unluckily for present ills, the English first-class tier was never organised on a sound economic basis. It was a tenet of that religio-imperial concept of its Victorian originators that a cricket should be protected from so sordid a taint as the commercial stain. It was emphatically not to be compared with the music hall or football or other elements of the thriving leisure industry of Victorian England. As we have noted, the coyness about amateurism or the disdain over paying Entertainments Tax subscribed to this disparagement of filthy lucre.