The prestigious Bentley Forbes Consulting rankings for 2019 are here!  Sixteen of the 18 first class cricket counties ranked by financial strength.  For those interested in the basis of the calculation please see the first set of rankings I did here.  The rankings for 2018 are here .   This years rankings are a bit late, largely due to the counties being very slow filing their accounts with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).  In theory this has to be done within seven months of the financial year  - end but some counties are habitual late filers.  Some are years in arrears.  In theory there are sanctions for late filers and I raised this issue with the FCA.  They were very sweet, but clearly rather horrified by the suggestion they might like to do something.   It's been a tumultuous two years for county treasurers.   First the feast of 2019 with a home cricket world cup and ashes series, then the famine  of covid ...

Introduction I've never followed Lancashire very closely but I have the impression they are an underachieving county. One county championship plus one shared since the end of World War II is a meagre return, given Lancashire's large population with an interest in cricket (especially those with a south Asian heritage) and the famously competitive and high standard of cricket played in the Lancashire leagues . Similarly treasurers and, more recently, chief financial officers of the other seventeen counties spend their winters looking at empty stands and car parks thinking, "if only there was some way to use all these assets when there's no cricket."  But at Lancashire the other Old Trafford just across the road is an obvious source of off season revenue.  As with playing resources Lancashire have seemed unable to take advantage of their financial leverage, and, with the ground growing increasingly tatty, test match crowds and county membership dwindled. P...

I was just reading back this post about Warwickshire's 2019 accounts.  Written in February, without a single reference to coronavirus, events make fools of us all.  This post is a collection of musings about the financial position of county cricket given the certainty the coronavirus will, at best, significantly reduce the amount of cricket played in 2020 and might mean we lose a year (or two, or three or five) of cricket in the UK. With UK deaths from the disease in the tens of thousands and thousands of new cases a day none of this really matters, but sport is supposed to be a distraction.... Introduction The starting point for this post is this  cricinfo review of the steps each county was taking in response to the pandemic.  What is interesting is one or two of the smaller counties indicate they think the financial burden of the cessation of cricket will fall on the test hosting grounds.  Durham chief executive, Tim Bostock said the following:...

As I mentioned in this post a good use of your compulsory CV - 19 lock down is to read https://redballdata.blog/   It's a bit geeky, which I like, and Mr RedBallData has some interesting ideas on how to predict and select, cricket and cricketers, an area which I find fascinating, although I don't have the maths to do anything other than cheer on from the sidelines. Something that really appealed to me was his list of the best bowlers of the last 50 years.  The approach used to compile the list was, rather than  look at average, to order the bowlers by their impact on the averages of the batsmen they played against (you can get a bowler's career broken down this way on cricinfos stats guru.).  So, for instance,  let's say we have a bowler who has only ever bowled to two batsmen, A&B.  A has a career average of 50 but our bowler gets him out for 25; B has a career average of 10, our guy though has a bowling average of 15 against him.  ...

Warwickshire's accounts for the period to 30 September 2019 are now available on the county's website .  This post is my take on the financial results for the period, my posts on earlier years are on these links,  2018 2017 2019 Results In Brief  2019 was always going to be a good year for Warwickshire with two money spinning events,  an Ashes test which went to the 5th day, and a cricket world cup staged in the UK.  Not surprisingly revenue soared by 54% to £27m.  But it was gratifying that costs of sale only increased by 27%.  Warwickshire bucked the recent trend of revenue growth coming at the expense of increased costs and widening losses. The press release accompanying the accounts trumpeted an "operating EBITDA of £6.2m."  However, as set out in my previous posts this is a meaningless and misleading measure of profitability, excluding interest costs and payments to the catering joint venture, which are integral to the county...

The Johannesburg test of 2020 was Vernon Philander's final appearance for South Africa.  Throughout the series he was a diminished figure, never bowling badly but struggling to manage more than 4 overs in a spell and pulling up injured in that final test.  If I was Somerset chief executive I'd be checking his new contract very carefully. But that shouldn't detract from what has been an excellent test career with Philander taking his wickets at an average of just over 22.  What's more there's an argument the simple average doesn't fully capture just how good a bowler he was. The highly recommended redballdata blog ranks Philander as the fourth best bowler of the past fifty years on the basis of impact on the opposing batsman's average.  You can always niggle away at these type of exercises (although any list of bowlers that has Malcolm Marshall at the top is OK by me), but the real point is; any way you slice it Philander was  a supremely effective bowler...

Whilst I was at a bit of a loose end I found this, ICC historical test match rankings going back to 1952. The graph below is England's ICC ranking points from 1952 to 2020, to simplify the exercise I've taken one ranking a year as at March  (or as close as I can get to March if no March results.) What I was interested in was whether the ICC rankings could provide some insight into how effective the decision was to put England players onto central contracts in 1999, an issue I first looked at here . The year 2000 is marked by the vertical line on the chart,   I'll come clean and say I was expecting the evidence to show central contracts to have no impact on test performance. But I have to admit the data shows something rather different.   The average ranking in the period prior to central contracts is 101 compared to 104 for the period after central contracts.  Given my complete lack of statistical know - how, I'm on shaky ground here, but I used variou...