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Showing posts from September, 2017

County Championship Final Round Permutations

The final round of county cricket starts tomorrow.  Not quite the excitement of last year when Middlesex, Yorkshire and Somerset all had the chance to win the championship on the last day, Essex have lapped the field.  Pleasing to see a county who have had good player development for some years finally getting getting to the top and funny how much influence a good coach  / director of cricket/ grand pajandrum can have. What remains to be setlled is the final relagation spot. The county table looks like  This . The fixtures include Somerset currently in the hot seat of 7th place versus 5th placed Middlesex who can still go down.  Hampshire in 6th place and Yorkshire in 4th also face the prospect of relegation.   If Somerset beat Middlesex and both sides get a full complement of bonus points both Somerset and Middlesex would end the season on 151 points.  If that happened Hampshire would need 12 points to stay up and Yorkshire 6.  Hampshire face woeful Warwickshire but Yor

ECB Finances Follow Up

A previous post  bemoaned the lack of transparency in the ECB accounts.   The excellent  By The Sightscreen  blog reveals a more forthcoming ECB.    As well as filing accounts at Companies House the ECB, as an employers association, files an annual return with the "Certification Officer" neither document is, generally, very informative.  The ECB normally attaches a set of accounts to the annual return. However, for the period to 31 January 2016 the ECB attached, not the public accounts filed with Companies House, but the ECB's own management accounts, providing a detailed analysis of income and expenditure for the period. If you would like to take a look go to  link .  It's the 2015 return you are after (for the period to 31 January 2016). By The Sightscreen has some fun with the numbers disclosed - including £275k for "public policy and foreign relations" which  presumably includes the cost of keeping Giles Clark fed and watered and another £120k o

BCCI Media Rights for IPL

The BCCI has announced the media rights deal for the  IPL . The deal is for rupees 16,347 crore, about $2.55b or £1.96b for 5 years. At £0.4b per year the deal is worth roughly double the amount the ECB will get for all its UK media  rights both international and domestic.  The deal also dwarfs the BCCI's deal for international matches of just £0.45b for 6 years although that is up for renewal in  2018 . It will be interesting to see if the media rights deal for Indian international matches gets anywhere near the IPL figures.  The ICC's total revenue for an eight year cycle are quoted  as £1.9b. Clearly the IPL is the biggest beast in the cricketing jungle and there must be doubts over the continued relevance of international cricket in general and test cricket in particular.  This is worrying for cricketing supporters who (like me) see test cricket as a better game, both as a spectacle and morally, than the shorter forms. But there needs to be some cautio