Is there any sport which attracts the armchair administrator the way that cricket does?  Football fans don't seem to worry themselves too much about the ins and outs of financial fair play but were pretty effective in killing off proposals for a European super league.  Cricket fans are the reverse, always with some elaborate plan for how things can be better, which no - one pays any attention to. Sideonblogspot is a victim of this disease, broadcasting to an empty universe but hey - ho, and this blog is my to do list for new ECB chairman  Richard Thompson . Before I get to my 7 steps for a happy game there are a couple of areas where I've no idea what to do and I'm not touching.  Firstly  the rise of the IPL under the auspices of the BCCI is an existential threat to the ECB which is an extension of the MCC and its imperial, paternal, world view.  Responding to existential threats is a bit tricky and I'll say no more. Secondly messing around with the structu...

The ECB recently issued a press release on a  new media rights deal with Sky,  starting in January 2025 and running for four years.  Times passes quickly, Sideonblog is now in its second media rights cycle, the post on the ECB's previous deal with Sky is  here .  That deal, signed in 2017, was for five years and the new deal is described as an "extension" to that 2020 - 2024 deal. The ECB's broadcasting deal is the framework for English cricket .  It determines what cricket we watch,  how the ECB is able to pay cricketers, how much goes to the counties and how much is available for the grass roots game. The press release though is rather light on detail and what detail there is often misleading.  Here are what I think are the key points together with my thoughts on how the ECB / Sky deal relates to some of the other developments in the world of cricket. Show Us The Money You can read the ECB's press release from start to finish and back again wit...

This is a post on Yorkshire's 2021  accounts . Financially Yorkshire are in a pickle. The accounts disclose there is a "material uncertainty" over whether it will be a going concern in twelve months time. I look at why that is and speculate how likely it is that Yorkshire will go bust..  There are two reasons for Yorkshire's financial pickle.  The first, as you probably guessed, is the fall out from the Azeem Rafiq affair.  To recap, Yorkshire have accepted some of the allegations of racism and bullying are correct and have reached a financial settlement with Rafiq.  They  also sacked 16 members of "staff" and terminated a contract with the physiotherapy company owned by Wayne Morton. (This is a bit confusing, there are statements that 6 of the 16 sacked, were employed by Wayne Morton's company but, if you look at the accounts at Companies House, Morton's company, Pavilion Physiotherapy, only had one employee, Wayne Morton.)  Six of the 16 sacked sta...

In this  post  I looked at the performance of the England men's Test team using ICC rankings extending back to 1952 and came to the conclusion that " I think we have enough (my bad stats excluded) to conclude central contracts  probably  had a beneficial effect on England's test match performance." It's two years (and a lot of England Test defeats) since I wrote that and I thought it would be interesting to revisit the evidence on the impact of central contracts. Firstly here is the graph from that article extended to cover 2020 - 2022. The vertical line marks 2000, the year central contracts were introduced.  2021 and 2022 have seen a  sharp decline in ranking points and the 2022 ranking of 88 is the lowest since central contracts were introduced and fourth lowest since 1952. Although it's pretty hard to spot with the naked eye, performance has been better post 2000 with an average of 103 ranking points compared to 101 points in the period 1952 to 2000....

  In the draft for The Hundred the following players were all given, top rank, £125,000 contracts: Joe Clarke  Tom Kohler - Cadmore Tom Banton Laurie Evans Liam Dawson The £125,000 bracket was designed for top international players the sort of people who earn $1m + from the IPL and need to be tempted to participate in The Hundred. But none of the 5 players above are elite cricketers.  None of them is playing in the current iteration of the IPL, none of them is a regular in England teams.  And yet each gets £125,000 for playing in the Hundred.   It's not the only money the five players get from English cricket as each of them also has a county contract.  Precise figures on how much county cricketers earn are hard to find but £100k per year might be a decent guess for an experienced, OK player at one of the larger counties.  (Lancashire's cricket wage bill divided by the number of cricket staff comes out at about £80k.) A Hundred player has to rebat...

This post unveils the prestigious Bentley Forbes Consulting county financial rankings for "2020"  based on accounts for periods ended between 30 September 2020 and 31 January 2021.  The 2019 rankings are  here  and if you are really interested you can get back to 2017.   There are only 16 counties below, with Hampshire and Middlesex excluded from the table.  Hampshire because they are a part of Rod Bransgrove's business interests and Middlesex, because they can't do anything right - including filing accounts within statutory time limits. The approach is to rank each county by two measures, one the average profit (or loss) made over the last 3 years and the second a measure of balance sheet strength.  Then I've used those two measures to get an overall financial stability ranking.  Hang onto your hats and lock your pets in the back room, because here come the Bentley Forbes Consulting rankings for 2020. County Profit Assets Ranking Position...

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