TV deal leads to cash injection for National League (6 March 1999)

6 March 1999

TV deal leads to cash injection for National League

By Christopher Martin-Jenkins

ANOTHER £6.3 million was added yesterday to the funds with which officials of the England and Wales Cricket Board are hoping to regenerate the game in World Cup year. This will be the sum paid over four years by the insurance company CGU to sponsor the revamped Sunday League when it is launched in April. It is the first substantial fruit from the £103 million television deal made by the ECB last autumn with Channel 4 and Sky.

It was Sky who gained exclusive live rights to the coverage of what will be known as the CGU National Cricket League, and they will start their coverage of "a minimum of 20 matches" with the Leicestershire v Hampshire match at Grace Road on April 17.

Total prize money in the first year will amount to nearly £200,000 and the approach is to be ultra modern, with 20 games scheduled under floodlights this season and more expected in future.

It was already known that the matches, played mainly at weekends, would be 45 overs a side, a rather uneasy compromise between the old idea of 40-over matches starting after Sunday lunch and the now familiar 50-over format followed for one-day cricket elsewhere in the world in line with the standardised regulations applied in one-day internationals.

A competition in two divisions with promotion and relegation for six teams each season (three up and three down) had also been agreed, the places determined by finishing positions in last year's AXA League, and the First Class Forum determined last December to embrace the idea of a free hit as an additional penalty for a no-ball, which aleady costs two runs.

The idea had its genesis in an attempt by the late liberal peer, Lord Winstanley, to find a solution to the problem that fewer runs have been scored off no-balls since they were called for overstepping by the front rather than back foot.

The idea was developed in an article in The Cricketer magazine in 1990 by the 1930s Oxford blue, Tony Legard, who suggested that the free ball should be used by umpires as a sanction in cases of time wasting, bad behaviour or excessive intimidation.

In the National League a 'free hit' for the batsman will follow a no-ball. The ball will have to be delivered normally, with no extensive revision of field placings and the forewarned batsman will have a licence to hit with no fear of any dismissal except a run out.

The counties will play this season with epithets, al though Kent have yet to decide what theirs will be. The Warwickshire Bears, Surrey Lions and Sussex Sharks were ahead of the field in this respect, but the last two will have to do their biting in the Second Division after finishing 18th and 16th respectively last year.

There will be new clothes too, of course. It remains to be seen if they can be both bright and rather more sartorial than the gaudy efforts to date but spectators will be helped by the introduction of numbers on the back of shirts and sweaters.

There will be £53,000 for the First Division winners, and £15,000 for the Second Division champions. That is more than any county but the top two in the First Division will get. There is a £550 purse for each game in both divisions but these sums are still meagre compared with football. The winners of this season's Premiership will get £3,452,380.

It is the downside, perhaps, of the commercial approach that those who live by the gimmick tend to die by it. Since the Sunday League was launched in 1969, there have been four different sponsors and eight different titles for the competition. All concerned with the financial viability of county cricket will fervently hope that the CGU National Cricket League works for everyone, enthusiastic spectators included.

Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)