Twenty20 hindsight
I wonder if, in the early days of association and rugby football, there were a load of old farts reminiscing about day-long village matches, muttering that the flashy attractions of the 90-minute code were all very well if they attracted young players, but shouldn't take attention away from the subtleties of kicking the living shit out of 200 people from the opposite side of town while wrestling over a severed Danish head.
I only ask because Mike Brearley has a series on Radio 4 at the moment about Indian cricket, which sounded like it was going to be interesting, but has in fact been taken over by his general project of boring the pants off everybody about 20/20 not being real cricket. Call me mister rootless economist guy, tell me that all I care about is money, but face facts; if there is a new game which is more exciting and more fun to play than your old game, then the strategy of emotionally blackmailing people into paying lip service to the old-fashioned version is good for one generation at most, and trying to coerce them into it by manipulating the rules is a certain recipe for decline.
Er, no, because what is more exciting and fun may also turn out to have less depth and hence less fascination. And the public which is attracted to it will pass on to something else, long before even "one generation" has passed.
ReplyDelete(Note: as a rule, people who have a great fascination and a long attachment for a given sport tend to look a bit askance at people telling them that it's all boring and needs to be completely changed. We had this with football in the Seventies and Eighties: it was rubbish, we should have points for goals, there should be shoot-outs at the end of drawn games, we should all change to American football, etcetcetc. Well, har to all that.
ReplyDeleteI can and will go on.)
You might want to save some of it for next week, when I turn to the subject of blitz chess.
ReplyDeletepeople who have a great fascination and a long attachment for a given sport tend to look a bit askance at people telling them that it's all boring and needs to be completely changed
ReplyDeletePerhaps so, but they also tend to be pretty blindly oblivious to the fact that their sport has declined massively in popularity. Have a look at county cricket attendances, for example.
For that matter, the people who thought there was nothing wrong with football in the 70s and 80s were mainly of the opinion that a Premier League was a terrible idea, that the FA Cup should be the biggest prize in British football and that supporting Oxford United would lead to anything other than repeated heartbreak and misery.
Seriously, if your case here is that there was nothing seriously wrong with football in the 1980s, you're really swimming against the tide. (I also have an autopilot screed stored up about people who want a fucking medal for having supported a football club for longer than anyone else. And in particular for Everton fans who often seem to be happier the worse their team do and the duller they are to watch, in the belief that tolerating it is a sign of moral character and working-class grit)
There's an awful lot of hand wringing from the old brigade about the rise and rise of 20:20. Agnew sounds like a confused geriatric asking how to set the video every time he opens his mouth on the subject.
ReplyDeleteThe odd thing is, in this country people still MUCH prefer Test match cricket. This summer's Ashes will be a sell out, every single day.
People watch 20:20 for convenient entertainment, but there's no emotional buy in to the result for more than about ten minutes at the end, then it's forgotten about. I think the lack of real attachment to the result will turn people off, in the long run. What is sport if no one cares about the result?
The rise of 20:20 in India is also slightly misleading. No one is really sure how many people actually revealed their preference for the IPL by paying for a ticket. There's a suggestion that many people were bussed in to make up the numbers. Ask ESPN how they feel about their HUGE commitment to show the 20:20 club tournament? Pretty pissed off, is the answer. Finally, the other one, the ICL passed off 6 weeks ago with barely a whimper. Hardly the inexcerable rise of the new global sport.
The other dimension to this is players and they know full well that 20:20 is just a hit and giggle, nowt more. Most of them will talk up the 20:20 book, but there's the odd one who will tell it how it is. You can't credibly, long term, market a sport which has palpably lower skill levels than alternative versions.
I think the lack of real attachment to the result will turn people off, in the long run. What is sport if no one cares about the result?
ReplyDeleteDarts? (trying to think of examples of sports that are on the up, financially).
You can't credibly, long term, market a sport which has palpably lower skill levels than alternative versions.
Accounting, presumably for the massive popularity of snooker compared to pool? I don't agree that 2020 has "lower skill levels" in a physical sense. It's got less tactical content, but that's not the same thing and doesn't support your contention - cf road cycling versus velodrome.
Also, UFC seems to me a great example of a sport where nobody really emotionally identifies with the rather identikit grapplers - they actually invented their successful reality show to try and overcome this problem though.
ReplyDeletehata: "but it takes five days to reach a draw and during most of that time nothing happens!" (1)
ReplyDeletefan: "that's exactly why we like it!" (2)
theory: fan and hata will never find a game-type they actually both enjoy
related counter-sub-lemma: however if fan is in his late 50s and hata his late teens, there is a case that in four decades hence hata will be angrily taking position (b)
speculation: the first-thrills-version-for-teens will gradually mutate over time to allow for more and more b-friendly qualities
"first-thrills-version-for-teens" makes more sense if you know it's meant to be "fast-thrills-version-for-teens"
ReplyDeletePersonally I think the rot set in when they scrapped timeless tests. England was never the same again.
ReplyDelete"I don't agree that 2020 has "lower skill levels" in a physical sense."
ReplyDeleteSorry, I think you're wrong. The skill required to bowl 40 overs of leg spin in a day (as Warne has done) is an order of magnitude greater than bowling four overs of 20:20 "flatties" that can't be hit out of the ground. Batting on 20:20featherbeds to wide set fields is also much easier than facing Curtly Ambrose on a fast track with a full slip cordon.
The fact that no one cares two hoots for Michael Bevan (Australia's best one day player of a generation), but think the world of, say, Mark Taylor tells you what the public really think about the skill levels and commitment involved in short and long cricket.
You can also argue that tactics can be wrapped up in the general definition of skill.
"Darts"
You're guessing. All serious darts fans know their onions and care deeply who wins. Phil Taylor is accutely aware of his place in darts history.
It's also worth remembering that India as a country is pretty lousy at sport. In reality there's a competition vacuum and 20:20 has nothing to go against. As such, it has been jumped on, with every sponsor and celebrity clamouring for their piece of the action. This doesn't actually mean it's any good. In other countries with a more balanced sports diet, no one is going quite so gung ho for it, at all.
Apparently when they were scrapped Australia proposed that all tests should last 30 hours, regardless of how many days that took, and tried it as an experiment. I wonder why it didn't catch on?
ReplyDeleteAll serious darts fans know their onions and care deeply who wins
ReplyDeletedefine "serious darts fan" - the darts championships attracted ratings of around 1 million (on Sky!). There's no way that anything like 1m people care deeply about darts.
You can also argue that tactics can be wrapped up in the general definition of skill.
You can, but do you want to go there, since as far as I can tell it's destructive to your original point? It takes a lot more tactical acumen to manage a Giro d'Italia campaign than a five man spin around a velodrome, but velo looks like it's in a much better state as a sport than road racing. Formula 1 is a lot more skilful than NASCAR, but neither has made any material inroads into the other's market.
"You can, but do you want to go there, since as far as I can tell it's destructive to your original point?"
ReplyDeleteNot really. As I suggested earlier, I don't think anyone properly understands the demand for, or success of, 20:20. There's alot of froth and hype, irrational exuberance, if you will. The Ashes Tests will be far more popular than this year's IPL or any of the other 20:20 fare on offer. I'm willing to bet good money on this.
What is your evidence that 20:20 is the next big thing, apart from marketing hype and some flash cash?
You're talking about cycling from a British perspective. We suddenly love velodrome cycling because we're good at it - what a surprise. You could also argue, that we're suddendly so good at it because no one else much cares for it, apart from us.
Road cycling is on its knees because it's competitors can't keep on the straight and narrow, drugs wise. Hardly a reasonable comparison.
Perhaps so, but they also tend to be pretty blindly oblivious to the fact that their sport has declined massively in popularity. Have a look at county cricket attendances, for example.
ReplyDeleteFrom when? County cricket attendances have been miniscule for as long as I can remember - and as far as I know, for a great deal longer than that. People do know about this, I assure you - if you think anybody's "oblivious" to it, I'd invite you to provide me with examples. I think there'a straw man here, and it won't be the last one I refer to in this comment.
I agree very much with what Tom says about cricket above. Re: Test match cricket, of course there are emptty stadia in India (they might like to look at the pricing) and while it's true that in England, grounds are sold out months in advance at record prices, that may change due to (a) England getting tonked this summer and (b) the recession. Nevertheless, currently it's enormously popular (new Test grounds and all) and has been for some years, even before England won the Ashes.
For that matter, the people who thought there was nothing wrong with football in the 70s and 80s were mainly of the opinion that a Premier League was a terrible idea, that the FA Cup should be the biggest prize in British football and that supporting Oxford United would lead to anything other than repeated heartbreak and misery.
Who are these people (this is another straw man) who "thought there was nothing wrong with football in the 70s and 80s"? Again, it would be good to get some references. They won't, I think, include anybody who got involved in fanzines during the second of those decades, since the main (but not sole) function of these was to complain about the state of the game.
It's true we didn't like the Premier League much: we thought it would sizeably increase ticket prices and sizeably reduce the number of clubs capable of challenging for the title. Now that's not the whole story, but we weren't wrong on either count, and one useful bottom line is that there's no value in being told how improved a product is if you can't afford to buy it any more.
You might want to save some of it for next week, when I turn to the subject of blitz chess.
Bring it on
If Tom's allowed to say that 2020's a flash in the pan, I'm certainly going to help myself to the clear long-term decline of even Test cricket - pre-Stanford it was well on the way to losing the West Indies as a market and the UK isn't going to be able to ride on the 2005 Ashes success forever. As far as I can see, the sport was getting very close indeed to the sort of situation that rugby league was in, before it became a summer game (and my God was there wailing and gnashing of teeth over that).
ReplyDeleteThere was - and there's been a lot of losers from Super League. Last time I saw a rugby league magazine (oddly, I was able to buy one in the station at Ipswich) there was quite a good article about the decline in attendances outside Super League (something which isn't, for instance, true in football). Obvious disaster areas include the smaller Yorkshire clubs and Cumbria pretty much in toto.
ReplyDeleteThis matters - it's all very well observing that sports have to remake or repackage themselves in order to sell themselves to a television audience, but how precisely they do this makes a difference. I don't much like the franchise system and a lot of other people don't either.
Incidentally, rugby league as a whole might be surprised to learn that it was ever a reality-denying community afraid to embrance change: it's always been prepared to change rules, points systems and so on in order to make itself attractive. It does, however, also like to concern itself with its grassroots, and a good thing too. What grassroots will a 20/20 league have, I wonder?
I can't understand this argument. Hundreds of peasants belting the fuck out of each other is evidently better entertainment than modern rugby. So, by analogy, test cricket wins, no?
ReplyDeleteAccounting, presumably for the massive popularity of snooker compared to pool?
ReplyDeleteNot in the US: ESPN likes its 9-ball pool, because it fits more comfortably into half-hour programming blocks. It's classic filler material for when there's either something on another channel or nothing live scheduled. As a result, the US tour has attracted a number of female snooker players over.
Isn't the complaint re: 20/20 really that proficiency at masturbation makes you rubbish at sex (for values of n greater than 1)?
(Competitive wanking, coming to a digital cable channel any time now...)
The decline of WI cricket is the real slow-burn here: at first, it was assumed that basketball would strike the death-blow, but given the attractiveness of scholarships in American colleges, track & field seems to be doing most of the work.
"If Tom's allowed to say that 2020's a flash in the pan, I'm certainly going to help myself to the clear long-term decline of even Test cricket"
ReplyDeleteI'll happily meet you halfway on that. I think 20/20 will grow and propser, but I don't think Test cricket is dead, by most conventional measures.
The Windies just need a couple of shit quick young tyros to get the crowds back. Another Curtly and another Malcom M would do just fine. I'd happily watch England get thrashed hollow if it meant the revival of Windies cricket.
I am one of those sad people who buys Sky Sports through Virgin which means you can buy it by the day. Religiously, I subscribe on the first day of an England Test series and cancel on the last day. This in the vain hope of sending a price signal to Sky that it's Test cricket and not the hit and giggle stuff that I am willing to buy. I suspect, sadly, that my signal gets lost in all the noise. Ho hum.
Rugby League, well.
ReplyDeleteThere's nothing wrong with the summer season, I was much in favour then, but there was plenty wrong with the politics and style of politics that was unleashed.
EJH, however, you should realise that the first big political schism in RL since the foundation was when the grassroots broke away in 1972 or thereabouts to start BARLA. Which has done a great job; but it's painfully obvious that we don't really need three governing bodies, and most of them exist in the interest of 50 or so professional committee sharks.
The decline of WI cricket is the real slow-burn here
ReplyDeleteIn global terms, is it so important? Compared to the period of their emergence we may have lost WI but we've gained Sri Lanka and South Africa.
it's painfully obvious that we don't really need three governing bodies, and most of them exist in the interest of 50 or so professional committee sharks.
ReplyDeleteCome to think of it, this is depressingly like boxing.
Much as I dislike the gimmicks and commercialism of Super League, it's a great combination of speed, strength and technique, and Rugby League does excellent work at grassroots and community level.
ReplyDeleteHere in Leeds the Rhinos make much more effort and arguably enjoy a higher profile locally than Leeds United and Yorkshire CCC.
County cricket can generally be summed up by the fact that Yorkshire prefer to play championship matches in front of 300 at Headingley rather than 3000 at Scarborough. Twenty20 is merely a cash-raising spree to compensate for these anomalies.
Igor Belanov
The reason for that is that while you always get more spectators at an out ground, you have to pay for its upkeep as well as for your home ground, and the economics tend to be poor (which is why so many out grounds have disappeared fro mthe county game).
ReplyDeleteMind you, last time I was in Scarborough, for the British chess championships some years ago, I was able to wander in to the cricket grounds to watch some minutes of - I think - an U-19 England v India match without anybody challenging me or asking me to pay. I hope this wasn't normal, or the economics would be even trickier...
That would presumably have been the Scarborough Cricket Festival which does have a lot of free games, although I'm surprised that they booked the chess championships in the same week from a simple hotel availability point of view.
ReplyDeleteIn fact they had to build an Olympic-style village to cater for us.
ReplyDeleteThe last Scarborough Festival match I went to I got in free, but only because Warks had collapsed to 50-8 in 30 overs. It's normally £15 a pop to get into a County game.
ReplyDeleteI would recommend it to any cricket fan. The standard of cricket was certainly higher than England vs Windies games of that year and the atmosphere was old school.
I used to go along to Beckenham when I was living in Brixton (and when I was in East Dulwich). In general I think county cricket is great value, never mind the risk of rain or an early finish. That puts me in a very, very small minority but to somebody with a background in Trotskyism (and chess) that's not such a problem.
ReplyDeleteIt's certainly news to me that the Scarborough Cricket Festival has a lot of free games! Unfortunately the days of a proper festival have passed, it was as recently as 1994 that England captain Mike Atherton appeared for Lancs in a one-day festival trophy match- now they hardly play any championship matches! In the same year South Africa played against a World XI for whom an aged Malcolm Marshall proved what a great bowler he still was.
ReplyDeleteBack to the point- I understand EJH's point about the economics of outgrounds, but logically the County Club must benefit from the profile of the game throughout the county and the fact that players prefer to play in front of decent crowds and a good atmosphere. Yorkshire is a huge county so these considerations should be more important. When they stopped using Acklam Park in Middlesbrough many local fans switched to watching Durham instead. Having said that, Yorkshire are incredibly lazy at attracting local custom to Headingley. They make no effort to encourage the local student population, with much time on its hands, to go to games. Plus, the only fixtures that get publicity on billboards or in the local press are the Twenty20 ones.
Igor Belanov
Ahem. Some pretty revealing evidence here that 20:20 is part hype and not all substance:
ReplyDelete"The ECB is scaling down plans to launch an Twenty20 English Premier League to try to rival India's IPL, according to a report in the Times."
When they say "scaling down", they actually mean dropped.
Well, they also mean "we don't have enough wonga to pay for the greedy bastards involved"
ReplyDeleteWhen they stopped using Acklam Park in Middlesbrough many local fans switched to watching Durham instead.
ReplyDeleteTrue, though the matches there were never exactly highlights of the calendar.
I'm sure, though, that the waning support owes something to the regularity of Middlesbrough-based Yorkshire fans on visits to Headingley (or even Scarborough, a truly great venue) having to deal with yorkier-than-thou types from Wakefield or Pocklington informing them that 'tha's not proper Yorkshire, lad'.
Compared to the attitude of YCCC towards talented kids of South Asian ancestry, that's nothing. But it shows how retrograde a body it is.
There's life in West Indies' cricket yet. Best game I've seen in years. Great atmosphere at the ground.
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ReplyDelete