England County Twenty20 In Trouble
A meeting will be hosted by the England and Wales Cricket Board, attended by the first-class County chairmen to discuss the growing unpopularity of the domestic Twenty20 matches. Recently, attendances have been very poor at County matches, short enough for the board to be concerned.
It seems that the public has gotten tired of the eight home games per county in just 44 days, which is a total of 151 matches in a season. The entire structure of domestic cricket in England will be discussed at the meeting at Edgbaston and it is expected that the new changes will be rejected in hopes of regaining some of the crowd.
http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Pakistan-c755-Australia match and the county matches shows the difference in ticket sales. The Pakistan match on Monday sold about 13,000 tickets, while the County matches barely manage 3,000, in a stadium with a capacity of 13,000.
The chairman of Hampshire, Rod Bransgrove had some suggestions, “We do need some kind of change. This is the crucial time. We have had a couple of opportunities and not got it right. We now have to look at it again and decide what we are going to do to explore the fantastic opportunities Twenty20 provides. We are running out of chances.”
Nowadays, the best attendance is around 1,500, and an attendance of 15,000 at the London derby, http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Surrey-c851 was seen as an improvement. But looking at previous records, the same fixture in 2004 attracted a crowd of 26,500. The English County Cricket has lost its popularity since the Indian Premier League started; they are now doing their best to revive the popularity of Twenty20 cricket in England, where the form of the game was first introduced.
Twenty20 was first introduced in 2003 in the United Kingdom by the England and Wales Cricket Board. The format of the game was such as to make it shorter, lasting three and a half hours. Thus making it more lively and interesting, and attracting even those viewers who complained of cricket matches being long and boring compared to other sports. Each match has a single innings and a maximum of twenty overs, explaining the name Twenty20. The Twenty20 format was not intended to replace any previous formats and has not done so, the others continuing alongside it.
The only solution the board has been able to come up with so far has been to increase the number of matches, which hasn’t worked out too well. A joint suggestion offered by some of the counties was to spread the number of matches over a longer period of time, with 2 matches held in one week instead of being crammed in the short time slot of six weeks. The idea would be fine and might have even helped County Cricket regain some of its lost viewers if it wasn’t for the broadcast deal ECB has with Sky sports because of which they have to certain number of matches in a week.
The ECB has even conducted research to try and understand the Twenty20’s declining popularity. “We need to make sure we have a sustainable product that is going to be here in 10 years’ time. If not we could be looking for a new product in three years’ time”, said the ECB’s head of marketing. Even though the first-class chairmen have no such authority and cannot influence decisions, they expect to put their suggestions and ideas forward in hopes of saving domestic Twenty20.
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