Desperately disappointing, totally unsurprising

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The decision of the ECB to throw in its lot with satellite broadcaster BskyB, granting it exclusive coverage of live cricket for four years from 2006, has attracted considerable media comment, and little of it favourable.

Most analysis was critical of the ECB for putting money before the good of the game. "For all the crowing of delight in St John's Wood yesterday, by awarding all live cricket coverage to satellite television English cricket has opted for short-term financial survival ahead of enlightened promotion of the game," wrote David Hopps in The Guardian. "This was a day that English cricket will rue. It was the day when the game abandoned its claim to be part of the fabric of English society. It was the day when it became just another sport scrabbling for a fat pay cheque."

In The Daily Telegraph, Derek Pringle was not against the deal as such, but he nevertheless struck a note of caution. "Time will prove the better judge and it might be that in five years Andrew Flintoff's heroics have persuaded most households to have Sky Sports," he explained. "Either that, or Wayne Rooney clones will have overrun the playground, leaving cricket to be the domain of public schoolboys and economic migrants from former Commonwealth countries. Let us hope it is the first one that comes to pass."

In The Daily Mail, Peter Chayney described the deal as "desperately disappointing, remarkably short-sighted and totally unsurprising." He added: "Little more could be expected from the organisation (is it oxymoronic to call the ECB an organisation?) that presided over the recent, and completely precedented, debacle over England's tour to Zimbabwe."

A number of writers commented on the ECB's insistence that awarding highlights to Five, terrestrial TV's junior channel, circumvented objections to accessibility, pointing out that it is not available in one home in five, and that the timing of the package is misguided. "Better, certainly, for an impressionable young boy to have the chance to watch the day's events at 7.15pm than to have no chance at all at about midnight," agreed Christopher Martin-Jenkins in The Times, "but what if, in a home where football is the staple sporting diet, a father or grandfather wants to watch EastEnders or Coronation Street?

Martin-Jenkins also questioned Sky's potential audience. "The live coverage will be exclusively in the expert hands of a satellite broadcaster that has done much to promote the game, especially in the winter, but which could boast an audience of only a million last March even when Stephen Harmison was producing the most sensational piece of fast bowling by an Englishman since Frank Tyson against against Australia 50 years previously. By contrast, Channel 4, losing money and, to judge from the time they put on the highlights, also losing faith, raised 5.2 million viewers during the Lord's Test between England and West Indies in 2000 and three million on the Saturday of the Edgbaston Test last summer."

In The Independent, Angus Fraser warned that the county chairmen, who forced this deal through, act responsibly. "It is to be hoped this money is not wasted by counties on expensive overseas signings and players who have little interest in the future of the game in England," he said. Time will tell.