To hold on to the past, seize the future

A year and a half ago, Death Of A Gentleman, a cricket film that I co-wrote with Sam Collins and Jarrod Kimber, was screened at the Sheffield Documentary Festival. It was the first time that anyone outside of the makers had seen it, and it was an amazing moment when, at the end, where Sam had inserted little updates on what had happened to the protagonists since filming finished, the last appearances of Giles Clarke and N Srinivasan were booed by the audience. Sam and Jarrod had pulled off a remarkable trick: they'd made a film about cricket administration - not a subject for which Hollywood or even Bollywood regularly came calling - and turned it into a story with heroes and villains, jeopardy and all of the other tropes that make movies watchable and fun.

As the film was shown through the summer, it seemed almost too prescient. The Big Three takeover that it had caught on camera floundered as the tectonic plates of cricketing realpolitik shifted beneath it. From nowhere, Srini was out and Clarke changed roles and things went in a new and different direction. The rows were different and the people having them were different, but somehow cricket administration remained broadly the same, an old game struggling to find its place in the pixellated, digitalised 21st-century world.

If Death Of A Gentleman had a broader point, this was it. Cricket administrators did what they did for their own reasons. They all (probably) began with a love of the game, but that was one of the only common factors. Their power to affect the game always seems somehow disproportionate to who they are.

That Sheffield screening was only 18 months ago, but it might as well have been 18 years. The BCCI is involved in another schism. The ECB has just relegated one of its counties, Durham, while bailing it out financially. Another county, Kent, may sue because it has not been invited to replace them. Rod Bransgrove, the chairman of Hampshire, the county that did benefit from Durham's relegation, issued a remarkable statement about the future of the game in England. And on Friday in Dhaka, England's players, nurtured by this financially tortured system, produced more evidence that we may be entering a golden age of on-field talent.

You know all of this, of course. George Dobell has written magnificently and passionately about Durham's relegation. It's fair to say he captured the national mood, in as far as there is a national mood about county cricket, a mood that had been heightened by the wonderful end to the Championship season at Lord's. Yet Bransgrove's statement, and the exposure of the parlous financial condition of many counties, made a persuasive case that city-based T20 cricket could be the only way to get people that aren't interested in the game interested in the game.

This isn't a blog about the rights and wrongs of those arguments. It's about how hard it is to navigate a path through them. Cricket has a deep respect for its past and its history, a respect perhaps unmatched anywhere else in sport. Football, for example, established its clubs and leagues around the same time, but its most important and obsessed-over competitions are new: the Premier League and the Champions League began in 1992. They'd think little of ripping them up if something even more lucrative came along. In fact, financial power has become a part of the storyline that keeps everyone hooked.

Cricket has been gifted its futuristic format. The ECB even thought it up. But the sheer variety of interests in the English game makes it hard to know how to best use it. The most successful piece of sports administration in recent years has come in an arena - the cage - that was barely considered sporting when it arrived. The Ultimate Fighting Championship has legitimised its offer to the point that it has moved from a Wild West of barely sanctioned ultra-violence to a one-stop entertainment industry that was this year sold by its owners for $4 billion. That's billion. They had bought it in the year 2000 for $2 million. It succeeded because it did something that its direct competitor, boxing, with its internecine politics and lack of structure or governance, did not: it made the fights that the fans really wanted to see. It did that because all of the fighters were contracted to the same organisation. As that organisation grew in power, so everyone benefited.

The UFC's administration had one crucial point in its favour. The fans and the sport all agreed on the direction of travel. Equally crucially, it's a luxury that cricket does not have.

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged here on the finale of the County Championship. It was obvious from the reaction to Middlesex's win that lots more people than the few who attend the matches want the competition to survive, and see city-based cricket as a threat.

It's easy to sit back and write about problems, especially intractable ones, without offering a solution. Well, here's an idea, and it's called One Day. Everyone that followed the County Championship last year on social media and live blogs commits to attending one day of live cricket next season. Doesn't matter which team or match, just that a ticket is purchased at the gate for a Championship game, and a day's cricket is enjoyed. Let's see if it makes a difference to the health of counties.

All administrations will fail if they cannot connect to the fans, or if the fans do not connect back. There is a constituency in cricket that wants the County Championship. It is not currently large enough to sustain it without significant subsidies. The deal at the moment is that the Championship develops international players, whose marketability in the international game creates the finance for those subsidies. It's a delicate ecosystem, and like a coral reef it is dying, because the core group of fans is not being replenished. That's why a city-based franchise to bring in newer supporters is needed. We don't hear their voices yet because they have not arrived. Instead we have the voices of existing fans and of administrators.

In Death Of A Gentleman, the great Gideon Haigh makes the point that "cricket is the only sport that is actually contracting" in terms of the countries and the people that participate in it. In part, that is due to failures of vision in administration. But as the IPL and Big Bash have suggested, a new audience is there, waiting. India and Australia's Test and domestic cricket have not perished as a result.

What sports like football and the UFC prove is that the market decides. As fans, if what you want is in the marketplace, then you have to buy it or lose it. The common truth about all administrations is that they will usually chase the money.

If you follow the Championship, why not commit to One Day next season. Then it may continue to exist as the future hurtles towards it.