The Ashes brought in the money
However great the 2005 Ashes may have been, the cricket world four years later is transformed not by Pietersen and Flintoff's heroics, but by Twenty20 and the Indian Premier League, writes Owen Slot in the Times .
Nishi Narayanan
25-Feb-2013
However great the 2005 Ashes may have been, the cricket world four years later is transformed not by Pietersen and Flintoff's heroics, but by Twenty20 and the Indian Premier League, writes Owen Slot in the Times.
No, the long-term success stories of the 2005 Ashes are the likes of Caitlin Byrne and Lisvane CC, recipients of an infrastructure at the ECB that had seen what might be coming and planned to make the most of it. Which leaves cricket in this country in an unanswerable situation. Cricket was cool in 2005 because the Ashes were electric and because the electricity was there for all to see on terrestrial television. And the ECB has been able to reap the fruits of that summer in large part because it then shut down the terrestrial feed on Channel 4 and raised its income by dealing instead with Sky. Yet that harvest could never have been so rich if, as now, those five Tests had been available only to 30 per cent of the nation's sofas.
Nishi Narayanan is a staff writer at ESPNcricinfo