Warwickshire have published accounts for the period to 30 September 2021 .  What follows is my review of those accounts. Warwickshire  are one of the first counties to publish 2021 accounts which give us a peek at cricket's finances as the sport began to come out of lock down.   Results in Brief My review of the 2020 accounts can be found  here  and by following the links on that piece you can work your back to the 2017 accounts.  As you will see from the review, 2020 was a bad year financially for Warwickshire with the county taking on an additional £3.5m of debt. This was largely  as a result of the coronavirus but there were some worrying indications the county was in financial difficulties even before lock down .   The accounts for 2021 show an improvement from 2020.  Revenues were up, losses were reduced and cash flow was strong leaving the county with almost £8m (before taking debt into account) on the balance sheet. But the B...

Cricket is in a state of flux, but some traditions endure, for instance, the great Ashes autopsy.  As people cast around for solutions to England's cricketing woes there is a consensus  Andrew Strauss is an integral part of a better future.  Michael Vaughan suggests he'd be a good chairman of the ECB, Michael Atherton sees him more in the Chief Executive's role and Tim De Lisle (Guardian) thinks he is right man to reset English cricket, but seems happy to leave him in his current role of chairman of the ECB's cricket committee. From the little bits I've seen, Strauss is a good man who speaks and, presumably, thinks clearly.  But I'm less convinced he's the right man to run English cricket and I find his treatment in the media a little odd.  Tim De Lisle for one seems to be in favour of a mythical Andrew Strauss.   In today's article in the Guardian De Lisle writes:  " It was Strauss who saw, in 2015, that something drastic needed to be done about ...

This is a post returning to the  BARB  viewing figures to see what they tell us about the inaugural year of The Hundred and English cricket more generally.    Note: 21 January 2022, I've subsequently revised this post for  the ECB's press release on The Hundred viewing figures.    I do have some doubts about the press release.  Figures are quoted but there is no underlying data to support them and the ECB doesn't even provide a source for the figures.  This is an important point, BARB provides its subscribers with a lot of additional information & if the ECB's figures are based on BARB data I would say it is pretty persuasive.  (From 5 minutes of research: it's acknowledged BARB's data has its limitations but it is seen as the best available and at least information is consistent across programmes.)  But if this is some other data commissioned by the ECB I'd be far more sceptical.  Still as I don't know, I assumed the ECB's...