In this  post  I looked at the performance of the England men's Test team using ICC rankings extending back to 1952 and came to the conclusion that " I think we have enough (my bad stats excluded) to conclude central contracts  probably  had a beneficial effect on England's test match performance." It's two years (and a lot of England Test defeats) since I wrote that and I thought it would be interesting to revisit the evidence on the impact of central contracts. Firstly here is the graph from that article extended to cover 2020 - 2022. The vertical line marks 2000, the year central contracts were introduced.  2021 and 2022 have seen a  sharp decline in ranking points and the 2022 ranking of 88 is the lowest since central contracts were introduced and fourth lowest since 1952. Although it's pretty hard to spot with the naked eye, performance has been better post 2000 with an average of 103 ranking points compared to 101 points in the period 1952 to 2000....

This post is an update to this, longer post on viewing figures for cricket shown on Sky.   I had a look at the  barb figures figures for the three weeks up to the IPL final on the 10th November 2020.  An audience of 252,607 watched Sky's coverage of the final, pretty good going seeing the programme went out at 1.30pm on a Tuesday, UK time. Figures for other games were a bit lower, generally in the 250k range for the peak Sunday afternoon slot, more like 100k for weekday afternoons and early evenings.  So are these good figures? I'd say it depends on your perspective.  Viewing figures for the IPL on Sky are broadly comparable with those watching England's domestic 20 over competition, "The Blast" (It's a bit hard to compare like with like, as Blast and IPL games go out at different times). That's pretty impressive for the IPL and I imagine the games bring Sky additional revenues from a UK based South Asian heritage audience. Whereas, I suspect, quite ...