A quick update on my book.  It was a (very) modest success.  Selling the 200 copies print run & getting a nice review in  cricket web . I'm afraid it's no longer possible to buy a hard copy (in this bit of the market it's done for the love not the money and I can't afford another small print run) but the ebook is available from Amazon. https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09PWQPSMD

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...

 A follow up to my post on the  ECB's accounting for coronavirus furlough payments This covers what I think has happened, what should have happened and why it matters. What Happened Note 4 to the 2020 -2021  accounts, "staff costs",  included the following explanation for the sharp increase in staff costs in the period. " As well as the change in the average number of employees, the increase is also due to higher player salaries linked to the new media rights cycle and one-off redundancy costs arising from the restructuring exercise during the year. These factors were offset by funds received from HMRC with respect to the furlough of staff during the year." That final sentence seems to me to say the furlough payments were netted off the wage costs.  So, as an example, say staff costs were £10m (they were way more but....) and furlough payments £1m,  I think the ECB would have disclosed staff costs of £9m.  The alternative to this is the grants could ha...

The payment of £2m, due in 2022, to certain unnamed individuals at the ECB under a Long Term Incentive Plan has finally been picked up in the press.  See this from the  Guardian . The Guardian has the story as an "Ali Martin exclusive", not so fast Mr Martin, SideOn first covered the payments in  2018 .  I'm not accusing the Guardian of nicking my stuff but claiming something as an exclusive which has been available in the ECB's accounts for three years seems a little rich.  Still it's good the whole business is getting some scrutiny.   If the Guardian was looking for another exclusive they could do worse than this  post , which showed ECB spending on staff salaries increased in the year to 31 January 2021 by more than £6m to over £43m.  And I wonder whether there's a bit more to it than that.   Note 3 to the accounts which covers payroll costs includes the following, rather ambiguous, narrative explanation of why staff costs have i...

  This is a post on the ECB's financial statements for the period ended 31 January 2021 .   Posts on previous accounts are here:  2017   2018 2019 2020 Summary In 2021 the ECB's income was £207m against total costs of £223m leaving it with a deficit of £16m. At 31 January 2021 accumulated reserves were just £2m.  As the accounting period  coincided with the worst of the coronavirus crisis that's not a bad result.  Of course the talk (some of it from within the ECB) of cricket losing £100m + was always exaggerated, given reduced revenues would come with reduced costs and that cricket's financial position is underpinned by TV revenues.  But there was no guarantee there would be games to televise and the ECB did well to keep the show on the road.  The remainder of this post, tries to get underneath the headline figures, compares actual to expected outcomes and asks the questions: who benefits from English cricket's weird structure? As with ...