Moving in the right direction

Ashes fever brought a new audience to cricket and increased revenues but what is the next step for English cricket? Daniel Brigham investigates

It isn't supposed to be like this. Cricket shirts are outselling football tops, pub conversations revolve around Fred not Becks and Australian kids want to be Andrew Flintoff.

But this Ashes feelgood factor can't last forever. Next year it's the football World Cup, so keeping a footie-obsessed nation hooked on cricket will be a tough task. With counties and clubs reporting huge demand from children wanting to play and watch the game, the ECB knows that England's success has created the perfect opportunity to sustain an interest among youngsters that could benefit the game for the next two decades.

So how does English cricket cash in on The Ashes Effect?

The ECB

"Cricket has a huge opportunity and inevitably there are some challenges," says John Perera, the ECB's commercial director. "But the most positive thing is that this England team can be very strong for at least the next four or five years, which gives us the best possible platform to sell the game."

With long-term deals already done with key sponsors Vodafone, npower and NatWest, England's success will not immediately yield increased revenue in this area.

But there are short-term commercial benefits. "The DVD of the Edgbaston Test sold almost 40,000," says Perera. "We have a review of the Ashes DVD and we will be disappointed if it's not the biggest sporting DVD of all time, which shows that cricket's popularity isn't just a fad." The ECB realises that the long-term health of the game depends on introducing it to young people. A range of posters, books and clothing are selling well in shops. At the end of the series Admiral, England's kit manufacturers, reported that sales of England kit had doubled compared with last year.

Marketing projects such as `Cricket in the Park' and `England's Big Summer' were in place at the start of the summer with a view to capitalising on increased interest in the Ashes. "We've found that we've managed to attract a whole new audience with no specific demographic," says Tom Harrison, ECB's marketing manager. "It's enormously diverse: from housewives to kids to ethnic minorities. People who weren't previously cricket fans who are now taking a huge interest in the game and in the performance of the team. The job for us is to keep hold of these people and also get them to watch domestic games."

One idea is to take `Cricket in the Park' - which attracted large crowds to venues with big screens in London, Birmingham and Bristol - to clubs, giving them a template for organising these events on a more local level.

The next 18 months are crucial. "I'm confident we'll see huge interest building up for the next Ashes pretty soon after the football World Cup," says Harrison. "Then, if the one-day team are performing, there will be some real expectation around the World Cup shortly after the Ashes. The prospect is very exciting."

Learning from experience

Beating the Australians, creating a marketable sporting icon and drawing huge crowds to an open-top bus parade seems to be the perfect plan for a sport trying to bring back old fans and, perhaps more importantly, entice new ones. Just ask the Rugby Football Union. "The parallels with cricket are almost identical," says Paul Morgan, editor of Rugby World. "There was a massive decline in club players prior to the World Cup and the win managed to arrest the decline and the benefits are still there to see."

One advantage the cricketers have is a bright future on the field, while the rugby side reached a pinnacle with the World Cup win. Since then, the team has disbanded, Jonny Wilkinson got injured and results have been poor. Despite this, Morgan believes the benefits were not short-term. "Attendances at club grounds are still breaking records and the revenue is still coming in. The current perception that rugby is back in decline is nonsense - that comes from the fact that England's performances have tailed off. This is where the cricketers will have an advantage if, as expected, they continue to play well."

The counties County cricket might have been marginalised during the Ashes but that does not mean that counties cannot cash in.

"The access point to county cricket for new recruits is the one-day game, which has a variety of offerings," says Paul Millman, Kent's chief executive. "That will be where the bulk of the revenue comes for counties. For the last two totesport League games we had about 6,000 people in for the Yorkshire game and over 3,000 for the Sussex game. Neither of those games were table-toppers and the crowds were a significant surprise to me. Importantly, a large proportion of the crowd were families. Loads of kids around the ground were trying to find a space to sling a ball about and bowling legspin and it's wonderful to see. I would suggest that without the Ashes success both of those gates would have been significantly smaller."

Some counties are better equipped to utilise cricket's popularity: it all depends on whether they stage internationals or field England players. "We are in an enviable position," says Stuart Robertson, marketing manager at Warwickshire. "We realise we're in the fortunate position of selling out Edgbaston for internationals months in advance and also being able to use Ashley Giles and Ian Bell to help market the county."

"Geraint Jones has contributed to the process by immediately getting involved in post-Ashes publicity," says Millman. "We had the Ashes bus down here in Canterbury, we took Geraint down to schools where he had a net with kids and took the urn around to show them and we've done fantastically through him. On the back of this we can get kids playing the game in primary schools and hopefully churning out stars for the future."

For counties without England players or any hope of hosting an international, the marketing has to be innovative. "We've got a scheme where any youngster under 16 who joins a local amateur club gets a free membership to Derbyshire cricket," says Derbyshire chief executive Tom Sears. "They come to the ground and bring mum and dad and we'll see the commercial benefits in future years. England's success has certainly helped this: in the last few weeks of the season there were far more youngsters out with their mums and dads."

The agents While football agents come somewhere between Jeffrey Archer and John McCririck in a popularity contest, their cricket counterparts have so far remained respectfully in the background. But they have an increasing role in brokering deals for their players and ensuring they avoid the temptation of Strictly Come Dancing.

David Ligertwood's agency athletes1 has almost a third of England's first-class players on its books. He says: "One of the most obvious changes is that all of the current crop of England players have the opportunity to get proper endorsement deals, rather than just one or two. They'll also be able to ask for more money for book deals and newspaper contracts. Whether this is sustainable really depends on whether this England team can nail themselves into the public consciousness."

Ligertwood isn't so optimistic about the effect spreading outside the England team and into the first-class game: "You might get a little bit of local-level stuff: getting a good car from a local dealership that suddenly wants to be associated with cricket; getting more money from bat deals; getting better deals for writing columns in local papers or being used as a face for a local business. However, all players will benefit from extra revenue in cricket after England's success. Wages could rise across the board, especially with the deal the ECB signed with Sky TV. One of my 20-year-old up-and-coming clients has just been offered a much better deal from his county than he would have received last year."

The F-word As a Pom, you have to be pretty special to be adored by the Australian public especially if you have just stuffed their cricket team. "Freddie Flintoff is head and shoulders above everyone else and he has the ability to become one of about 20 people in the country who can head up national advertising campaigns," says Ligertwood.

The Times serialised Flintoff's autobiography and Marcus Williams, of the newspaper's sportsdesk, believes that for the moment at least Flintoff rivals David Beckham, Michael Owen and Jonny Wilkinson in terms of selling papers. Rugby World's Morgan agrees: "Marketing men say that you can only sell a team game through individuals. Freddie will be huge for cricket, as Wilkinson is for rugby - despite his injuries - and Shearer and Beckham were for football in the 1990s."

Media presence The coverage of cricket in the media this summer was unprecedented. Five or six pages at the back of the papers were devoted to Ashes coverage plus regular front-page exposure as the summer went on. Williams believes that the summer was a timely reminder that sport does not just mean football. There is a problem on the horizon, though: "Clearly the football World Cup will command enormous space but the enthusiasm will diminish once - or if - England and the home countries are knocked out. However, the parts of the media where cricket is long established will continue to give it space, although the 2006 Tests will have to be quite exceptional to receive similar column inches as given on the front and back pages in 2005."

Keeping the shoots green `Chance to Shine', a campaign to get more competitive cricket played in state schools, was launched earlier this year by the Cricket Foundation, the charitable arm of the ECB. Wasim Khan, the campaign's operations manager, was happy with the initial interest it generated but his post-Ashes mood is even brighter. "We've been absolutely inundated with inquiries from clubs and schools from all over the country wanting to know how they can get involved," he says. "The euphoria and success of the Ashes series has really added to the momentum of our campaign.

"The great thing that's come out of this summer is that you can compete at the hardest and highest level you can but you can still do it with a smile on your face," says Khan. "It really enhances the role-model status of these guys - the youngsters look up to them and want to be the next Freddie Flintoff or Kevin Pietersen. You didn't have that before the Ashes. They have some charisma about them and have blown away the old image of cricket, which has helped bring kids into the game."

Chance to Shine selected 100 clubs to reach out to 600 local schools next season and Khan is confident the Ashes effect will help to reach even more schools. "The Ashes has given us a real window to capitalise on the current euphoria and get into the hearts and minds of all youngsters while it's fresh and still raw in their consciousness and make it part of their daily lives." Chance to Shine are working with county boards and Paul Millman of Kent says they are already seeing the benefits. "Our youth development officer's switchboard has been inundated with kids asking where can I play, what club can I join. It's been fantastic - grass-roots participation is what sport needs to be about in this country."

The ladies are for turning One of the less predictable effects of the summer was increased interest in cricket among women and girls. Twenty20 has played a part in that, as has the England women's side's own Ashes victory.

Khan says: "The women's Ashes success and the way they played with a smile on their face will only help parents introduce the game to their daughters. We had 536 girls taking part in our pilot schemes in competitive matches, compared to only 48 girls taking part in the same schools in 2004. Consequently we've seen girls teams and youth sides set up all over the country. Cricket is no longer a closed shop."

Cricket's keynotes

1 There is an 18-month window to cash in.
2 England team must stay together.
3 Counties use their England players to market the game.
4 County one-dayers are way into cricket for majority of public.
5 Continue to make cricket more family- and female-friendly.