Behind the Boundary by Graeme Wright

Author:Graeme Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2011-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

It’s Our Money!

When heads of organisations resort to meaningless phraseology, it’s time to head for the hills. Around the turn of the century, Tim Lamb began talking up the first-class counties as ‘centres of excellence’. Excellent at what was never apparent, especially as the end product of these so-called centres, the England cricket team, usually fell some way short of what the pundits and the punters regarded as excellent. Even the ECB came round to this conclusion in time. They took the England players out of county cricket, put them under contract to the Board, employed specialists (often foreign) to coach them and, praise be, the charabanc became a greyhound. Where that left the counties was another matter. Not so much centres of excellence as development centres, maybe. Academies or even nurseries, perhaps. Tim Lamb quit calling them centres of excellence and instead started calling them businesses. Which is more or less where we have been all along.

So knock me over with a Gray-Nicolls if I didn’t come across centres of excellence again in the ECB’s annual report for 2009. Making reference to that year’s £35.4 million fee payments to the first-class counties, finance director Brian Havill commented that these were paid ‘in recognition of the costs they incur in participation in the Board’s competitions’. The counties, he went on to say, ‘are effectively 18 Centres of Excellence and the fees paid to them underpin the Board’s objective of ensuring a vibrant domestic game in which our most talented players are prepared for international cricket through a structured and competitive first class programme.’

We could do with a woof or two here to determine which is the dog and which is the tail. Instead, let’s look first at what’s being said. Cricket fogeys like me, and there are still some of us about, tend to think of first-class (note the hyphen) cricket as being matches scheduled for three or more days’ duration. Call me old-fashioned, but I have a sorry feeling that Mr Havill’s ‘structured and competitive first class [no hyphen] programme’ relates to anything from Twenty20 to the County Championship, as played by the first-class counties. Competitive it may try to be; structured, as many I spoke to made clear, it is not.

David East (Essex): ‘There’s a major bleating going on about the amount of cricket that’s being played. We’re trying to shoehorn so much into a season.’

Paul Sheldon (Surrey): ‘We have this very, very incohesive fixture schedule which is too congested; is never fully agreed by all the counties; but it satisfies the commercial demands of sponsorship and broadcasting.’

David Harker (Durham): ‘As a game we just don’t seem always to get it from a spectator’s point of view. We rarely put ourselves in the shoes of the spectator. How do we make this game easier, more accessible?’

Colin Povey (Warwickshire): ‘In my short time in cricket, the immortal words “Domestic Structure Review” must have been mentioned more than any others.’

Vinny Codrington (Middlesex): ‘Everyone agrees that we play too much cricket and nobody agrees too much of what.

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