A post on the ECB and how it spends the money receives on behalf of cricket in the UK.   In this  post  I had a moan about the lack of information in the ECB's published accounts and had a guesstimate at how the ECB might be spending its money. Well the ECB have now produced an analysis of their expenditure on cricket's behalf, you can find it  here . It's a really welcome development.  What follows is an analysis of how the ECB's figures compare to my estimates, a brief diversion into the accounting for The Hundred and some comments on how disclosure can be further improved. Sideon's estimates v ECB figures Area Estimate   ECB   £m £m Counties, boards and other 45 118 Grassroots 34 38 National Sides 42 38 The Hundred 0 39 Administration 48 40 Total 169   273 Administration as a % of total 28%   15% Differences   My estimates were pretty good, in most categories I'm within a few million of the ECB's figures. I'm way out on T...

This post is a follow up to a salary cap for county chief executives which looked at the amounts paid to Key Management Personnel at the first class cricket counties.  I've now updated this for 2018 and 2019       2019 2018 Derbyshire     164,851 156,974 Durham     165,127 238,246 Essex     577,723 467,881 Glamorgan     558,102 423,277 Hampshire     421,499 523,405 Kent     554,286 492,375 Lancashire     1,448,110 950,460 Leicestershire     128,335 136,368 Nottinghamshire     511,575 477,821 Somerset     142,253 97,716 Sussex     610,949 545,659 Surrey     1,216,000 1,063,000 Warwickshire     772,741 629,871 Yorkshire     856,983 654,025       8,128,534 6,857,078 Although tempting, it's not really fair to use the table for county by county comparisons as there is no fixed defini...

Lots of statements from commentators (both paid and unpaid) about the value of winning the toss and batting first in India.  Universally held, winning the toss is a big advantage and quite a few comments along the lines of, "once we lost the toss, we'd lost the game." And I can see why people say this, logically if batting becomes harder over time, you want to bat earlier in the game. But looking at the statistics there is very little support for this.  Using cricinfo's stats guru function it is possible to see what happened to the side batting first in each game played in India for the period from 2000.  There's a nice round 100 games in the period (doesn't include current test) and the stats for the 21st century are. Bat 1  = Win =      32 Bat 1  = lose =      41 Bat 1 = Draw =    27 So across a decent sample size the evidence seems to suggest, in complete contrast to intuition, bat second. Do I believe this? Wellllll...

Warwickshire's accounts for the year to 30 September 2020 are available  here These are the first county cricket club accounts I've seen which cover the period of the coronavirus pandemic.  I've covered previous Warwickshire accounts, 2019   2018   2017 This post continues the analysis and considers whether there's a future for the counties in general and Warwickshire in particular.  As it's quite a long post I'm starting off with a summary. Summary Given the  pandemic, Warwickshire's 2020's results weren't too bad.  The board is confident the club can navigate 2021 and as I believe Warwickshire is one of the weaker counties financially I'm increasingly optimistic most counties will get to 2022, perhaps a little battered, but basically intact.  But if the virus results in reduced crowds for 2022 (and beyond?) continued financial hardship will take a toll.  Problems may be particularly marked for test match staging counties who have budgeted o...

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 ...

The Broadcaster's Audience Research Board (BARB) publishes weekly reports on TV viewing in the UK.  These provide details of the audience for cricket on Sky .  This post looks at cricket viewing figures for 2019 and 2020 taken from https://www.barb.co.uk/viewing-data/four-screen-dashboard/. Results are for weeks commencing 29 April 2019 to 26 September 2020, and, if I have understood correctly, viewing figures are for all the viewers who watched a particular programme.  (So if person A watches a test match from start to lunch, B from lunch to tea and C from tea to end that's 3 viewers although only 1 person was watching at any point in time.)  I have combined figures for Sky's Sports, Cricket and Main Event Channels.  Some Context    Matches in the IPL have viewing figures of around 100m.  The 2019 Men's Cricket World Cup final had a  unique UK audience of 15m (8m maximum audience at any point).  Once behind Sky's pay wall viewing goes ...

2018 was a bad year for Leicestershire cricket.  The usual poor on field performance was matched by financial worries, with the club falling 6 places to 11th in the prestigious  Bentley Forbes Consulting rankings. The financial statements for the year to 30 September 2019 showed more losses.  A loan from the county council has bought some time, but even before Covid 19 Leicestershire faced significant financial problems. The county are unfortunate in being assailed both by specific financial issues as well as the more general issues faced by the cricketing counties.     It's always been hard work trying to grow cricket in Leicestershire's stony soil.  When I was researching my book on  1930's cricket I found there were counties who were only getting by thanks to their share of the revenues from English test matches and MCC overseas tours.  Leicestershire were generally included in the ranks of the struggling counties and, in that respect, not m...