Enjoy cricket-style entertainment at The Rose Bowl
More and more venues around England aspire to acquire Test status
John Stern
30-Nov-2006
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Cricket's bulging lexicon welcomed a new phrase this week. For those
deluded souls who believe that when they attend a match they are visiting
a 'cricket ground' have been put firmly in their outmoded place.
No, the future of international cricket in England is at a 'sports and
entertainment resort' according to Rod 'Loadsamoney' Bransgrove, the
chairman of Hampshire whose ambitious Rose Bowl venue was awarded
provisional Test status this week.
Presumably players will no longer be players but 'entertainment
facilitators' while spectators or fans become 'customers' enjoying a
'cricket-style experience'. Maybe that's what England's performance at
Brisbane was: a cricket-style experience, something which resembled
cricket but lacked the essential, fresh ingredients.
The England and Wales Cricket Board's (ECB) announcement about the Rose Bowl's enhanced status comes less than six months after Bransgrove launched a scathing attack on the board
when Cardiff was awarded an Ashes Test for 2009.
In the June issue of The Wisden Cricketer, Bransgrove accused the ECB of
double standards, of a conflict of interests, of being biased against
private investors like him, of bad business practice and claimed that
Hampshire's position was becoming unsustainable unless they hosted Test
cricket.
I guess that when you have Bransgrove's cash, you can rebuild bridges as
fast as you burn them.
The ECB would have to be remarkably pig-headed to bear a grudge against
Bransgrove. Regardless of his Rose Bowl 'resort' he brought Shane Warne to
county cricket and for that he deserves our gratitude. As the county game
struggles for credibility and profile with anonymous overseas players and
Kolpaks by the kilo, Warne has made a mark as indelible as any left by
[Malcolm] Marshall, [Gordon] Greenidge, [Vivian and Barry] Richards or [Richard] Hadlee.
The Rose Bowl's credibility as a Test venue (sorry, resort) is undermined
only by an iffy pitch and an accessibility problem that has made it
marginally harder to get out of than Alcatraz. But these issues are being
addressed. By all accounts, it was much easier to get away from the ground
for the one-dayer in September against Pakistan than had been the case for
the Twenty20 against Sri Lanka earlier in the summer.
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The problem is not with the Rose Bowl. The problem is the amount of venues
in England and Wales aspiring to host internationals. Edgbaston, where
England have won four and drawn one of their last five Tests, will not
host a Test in 2007. Gone are many of the long-term staging agreements
between the traditional international venues and ECB that guaranteed these
famous grounds years of major matches.
These agreements enraged the likes of Bransgrove trying to break into what
he perceived as a cosy cartel between the administrators and the grounds.
And to an extent he's right. Some traditional venues were becoming
complacent and the decaying facilities showed it. And it can only benefit
cricket in England and Wales that people in Durham or Cardiff can see
international cricket on their doorstep.
But given the cost of staging international cricket and the cost of
maintaining or building international-class facilities (the latest Rose
Bowl improvements are costing £35m and that's on top of the king's ransom
it cost to build in the first place), I cannot see how all these counties
can sustain such ambitious targets. England's home international schedule
expanded in 2000 to seven Tests and 10 one-day internationals. It has
surely, hopefully, reached saturation point. Yet more venues come on
stream. I'm no accountant but the maths doesn't seem to add up.
Glamorgan, who shocked English cricket by earning the right to host an
Ashes Test in 2009, announced recently that money was so tight they would
not be able to afford an overseas player in 2007 or 2008.
I might mock Bransgrove's description of the Rose Bowl as a 'resort' but
the reality is that cricket alone cannot sustain these counties as viable
businesses. In Australia the forgiving climate allows for Australian rules
football to be played at the Melbourne and Sydney cricket grounds without
ruining the playing surface. English cricket venues look to Elton John to
reach the parts of their bank accounts that cricket cannot nourish.
Seemingly immune from this outbreak of democracy is, surprise, surprise,
Lord's, which hosts two Tests each summer, one against each touring side.
In The Wisden Cricketer's recent readers' poll, 59% said it was time
Lord's gave up one of those Tests. Now there's a thought.
John Stern is editor of The Wisden Cricketer