Middlesex CCC

Either this is madness or a late April Fool.

Oh dear,in two daily newspapers it has reared it's ugly head again.
Both the Daily Mail and Telegraph have articles about it.
Although they have conflicting lists of counties who for or against this taking place,I fear for proper cricket as both have many comments saying that Franchise CC will come into being.
A date of early October is mentioned for a ballot,and each county is being spoken to privately about the pro's and con's by ECB.
In Telegraph on line there is a poll asking if in favour of a T20 shake up,I voted NO (of course) but it shows Yes at 61% and No at 39%.
I wonder if the ECB will allow each county to ask those that matter...us,the membership,our opinion and maybe even a vote for yes or NO?
I really do fear for our game.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 20/09/2016 07:17 by BarmierKev.

I agree Beefy...this is the beginning of the end.
The fact I have seen an awful lot of wonderful "Proper" cricket during my life
seems scant consolation..

Having read the Daily Mail again,Paul Newman has also put that the ECB may also ask Minor Counties what they think about what gets played.They need at least 12 counties to say yes

Graves and puppet Harrison seem desperate to have Franchise CC in operation.

According to the Franchise Chairman Graves and his confederates. The Norf Lunnon franchise will be based at Wembley Stadium, where they conclude big bucks can be made, with cheap ticket prices. And plenty of shirt sales.

The alternative venue is the West Ham Football Ground known as the Olympic Stadium.

Vaughan mentions this (cheaptickets). One snag. Codrington discovered in his time, when we were considering the Wembley option. It costs half a mill for Wembley to deign to open its doors.

Wembley like Lords will make a killing on the booze front.

Will the counties, allegedly beneficiaries of this cashwise, actually see any of the dough. The monies allegedly to be ringfenced for them. Well at the start as sales talk maybe.

Later that disappears where it all goes now.

So Vaughan's cheapos would require for a 50000 Wembley crowd at a tenner to meet the match fee.

He is of course banking on Sky/BT to pay that I imagine. All of this malarkey is scheduled for 2018 to improve the TV bidding rights for the following year.

Should it occur, then sadly it is RIP Middlesex. The make -up of our Board suggests that we (the members) are relying on Surrey as a bulwark to oppose this.

The unwritten clause in the the new agreement anyone?

Graves and his various media mouthpieces reckon they can challenge association football numberswise. There could be a few pigs overhead.

I fear this dreadful thing will happen. As in all sports, and cricket is no exception, money rules.

However, it is not for me, and I will not be attending any of the games for that particular competition. The thought of me watching for instance, North London play South London makes me reach for my indigestion tablets.

As someone said many years ago 'it is the devil's game', and so it comes to pass.

Read the Telegraph report with a heavy heart fearing the worst.I'm often asked why I support Middlesex and I have two historical reasons for doing so.The same cannot and will not be said for a financial franchise.
I have no desire to watch batsmen swinging across the line against a back drop of blaring music.

This announcement has not been a great surprise. Having returned from a close to sold out Lord's I can understand the logic of this. A report will follow later. There is nothing to indicate we won't exist in the longer form and potentially as a very strong team.

---

Barmy Kev
I'm only here for the tele

Simon Hughes, late of this parish and now editor of The Cricketer, was on the radio talking about this last night before the match started. He is plugging a competition based around 8 or 9 cities in addition to the T20 competition as presently exists and possibly the One Day cup. Not sure where this would leave the 4 day game. Jonathan Agnew was somewhat sceptical.

More specifically, Hughes saw huge potential support for "London Seaxes", comparing this rather dismissively with the membership attracted by Middlesex. I suspect that by now previous editors of The Cricketer were turning in their graves.

Well it must be serious if Jeff Coleman posts on here!

God knows how a city-franchise T20 is supposed to sit alongside another county-based T20.

God knows where this would leave the county championship.

God knows why anyone thinks basing it on cities would be more attractive than a nine COUNTY T20 - you could have two divisions. Just a minute - it's because Australia and India do, so it must work...

I read that if the counties don't vote for this in sufficient numbers, Graves will bring it in anyway. Democracy for you!

Yorkies and Mexicos reportedly won't give up their county names - and they have the grounds. Unless all of it is played in football or rugby grounds.

I hope the wickets are better than that rubbish Hunt prepared for last night - big crowd, live on TV and an old wicket!!

All very depressing to county members up and down the land - but we are clearly viewed as an inconvenient obstruction to the glittering visions of a few who see money as the be all.

The intention of the various proposals that keep on getting published is that they will help attract new supporters to cricket. However, the problem with all this is that it risks alienating the people who presently spend their time and money on the sport.

It is important to attract new supporters, otherwise who will support cricket after us lot are gone? However, I am not convinced that introducing city-based teams and maybe playing at Wembley Stadium will do a greatly better job of attracting new supporters compared to the current format.

The quality of the teams would probably be better. However, points to bear in mind include:

1). Lots of support exists outside the big cities.
2). Are people more likely to support a newly-founded team than one with lots of history, a strong identity and (to apply a business term) a strong brand?
3). If the answer to 2). is no, then considering matches at Lord’s at The Oval tend not to sell out until a few days before the match (or don’t sell out at all), then how is there a possibility of getting 50,000+ at Wembley Stadium?

I have always felt that if a city-based competition is introduced, then an 18-county competition ought to be played alongside it so that the non-Test grounds can continue staging Twenty20 matches and the players unable to get a contract with a city-based team can play some Twenty20 matches. However, the downside is that the quality of this competition may not be good if the best players are in the city-based competition. In other words, one of the great things about all county competitions is that it is one step below international cricket, but having two separate Twenty20 competitions would make the county competition two steps below internationals.

There is no ideal way of naming the city-based sides. I know for a fact that there are plenty of people from Yorkshire who could never support a team with ‘Leeds’ in their name, while someone from Portsmouth recently wrote into The Cricketer to take offence at Simon Hughes’ proposal of a Southampton Saints side. Simply giving teams nicknames or sponsors’ names would be even worse! I can understand why Yorkshire and probably a few other counties would like there to be a team bearing their name, although that would cause the non-Test counties to ask why the same can’t happen to them.

I am not sure how a city-based competition including Yorkshire would work, as I thought that it is supposed to be a blank canvas in regards to player-allocation, which would mean that there is no guarantee that Joe Root, Jonny Bairstow, Adil Rashid etc. would play for Yorkshire, and no reason why Alex Hales, Jason Roy, Ben Stokes etc. couldn’t play for Yorkshire or any of the other teams. It would be a mish-mash if the teams included a mixture of teams named after counties, cities, sponsors and nicknames (e.g Yorkshire, Manchester, Pumas, Newcastle, Tesco, Surrey etc.)!

I can’t see many of the traditional supporters accepting these proposals, which is probably why no-one sees much point in asking them. We will have to see how popular the proposals would be with the younger generation.

Personally, I can’t see myself feeling attracted to team in which Middlesex CCC have little or no control, and I wouldn’t have thought I would attend their matches if I had to pay. I hope that if there is only one London side, then it won't be called 'Surrey'. I know that London has two big cricket grounds and a few big football/rugby grounds, but to repeat what I have written, I don't know if there is an appetite in London for there to be two made-up teams, which causes me to fear the possibility of there only being one London team with their name being 'Surrey'.

I don't know if this has been seen by anyone else but all Notts members got set a link here by Lisa Pursehouse the other day: [cricketunleashed.com]

Not hard to see that this means franchises despite t20 seemingly doing well at many grounds. Really baffles me how a format is seemingly doing well and gaining popularity but is swept under the carpet because people think removing existing ties from supporters will generate more revenue.

I believe that much of the current enthusiasm for and talking up of a UK based T20 city franchise structure comes from the ECB seeing what is currently available on TV on Dave.

McCullum, recently of our parish, was not available to help us out all season, because he was off to the CPL in the middle of our season. (NB the CPL is talking about taking the game over to Florida every year now, in search of the bucks there.)

We have George Bailey currently - who appears to be an utter credit to his nation, given the way he engages with kids on the boundary. Would we not like to have both him and BigMc, as well as Sowter for all limited over matches ?

If ....... Chris Gayle was playing for Somerset, and, just supposing, we could not play that fixture at Lord's, do you imagine that Richmond would have the crowd it did earlier this year?

Why are people like Sangakarra, Dale Steyn, McC, the Warne lookie- likey (at least in run up and delivery, but not results at the other end) Adam Zampa, in the Caribbean, having to fly between islands to play, over there during the previously one and only natural time for playing first class cricket in the world, due to climate and time zones - the UK and Ireland?

Money talks. (Some say (Bob Dylan, and more recently The BLockheads) it swears!)They have a point.

That is why these people play in front of big crowds in the Caribbean. Filthy Lucre - oh, dayumm. What shameless hussies these players are.

Cricket is part of the entertainment industry, and the message seems to be clear that a lot of people want a game of only about 3 to 4 hours duration. - NB it's not the game, but the amount of time - This is percolating down to club cricket, where even Teddington CC, and Richmond CC cannot raise Sunday teams now. Cricket needs to be a lot more immediate for the market we are in now. When e.g. Scarborough sold out for Yorkshire to play Kent there in 1954, was there that much else to do in the day? Nowadays, you don't even have to go to a cinema to watch a film.

OK, the ECB is rising to the challenge of the Caribbean T20. It appreciates it is in a market. It has funds. It either had to rise to the challenge, or the CPL was going to kill the UK T20. The ECB also - by and large - controls the game over here.

I do not see what prevents the CC T20 structure becoming a feeder league for the UK T20, with funds gained from the franchised league supporting it, and e.g. The Middle being compensated for the loss of players called up to the London Franchise by either the ECB or the league. That's what happens in baseball. Did I not read that the Middle had sold the marketing rights of the limited overs games at Lord's to MCC anyway?

What would we feel if .......... Middlesex members were allowed into Lord's for free - ditto Slurry members for matches at the Oval, Warwicks for Brum, Leeds for Yeeeeeaaawwksheeeeeya, to see Gayle, McC, Steyn, alongside Morgan, Malan, Simmo and Ro-Jo-Smith in a match played by ............oh, I dunno, the Middle Seaxons, the City of London Insider Dealers or whatever they get called.

I personally think the City Franchise thing is inevitable.

If we want the club we love to continue to prosper, time to get behind the project.

I did'nt realise that Simon Hughes was the the Editor of the Cricketer.

Anyhow, as a former Middlesex player, mouthing off that we don't exist on radio, and should be referred to as London does him no favours.

Calling us London as he suggests, poses a few problems, as what constitutes the mess called London today, includes large former swathes of Kent, Essex, Surrey and bits of Herts apart from ourselves.

In addition, in 1964, the then Middlesex Members (bless them) voted to retain our County name at the AGM, and not take on the Tory/Labour created mess known today as Greater London.

I would guess that Hughes is throwing his hat in the ring for a job as analyst on the new city franchise gravy train.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 30/07/2016 13:21 by Seaxe_Man.

And don't forget Sir Philip Green and BHS. After taking 587 mill out of the company, unsurprisingly it was'nt in good health and was sold for a quid.

This franchise lark could go the same way after the novelty wears off and the media become bored with it.

At that point, as Beefy suggests, Graves can be seen beetling out of the North Gate, maybe the East, with his back pockets stuffed with franchise gold.

We wait with bated breath for the September/October franchise jamboree.

Articles on this subject have appeared in The Sunday Telegraph and the Observer.

The Sunday Telegraph article says that the reason why a city-based competition is expected to be more popular than the current 18-county competition is that city-based sides would have enough money to market their matches, which is in contrast to several counties being unable to spend as much as MCC and Surrey on marketing. The article also says that the current competition is not as popular outside London, with several counties struggling to fill their grounds, while it also says that Middlesex are expected to be one of the counties who will vote for the introduction of a city-based competition.

The Observer article says similar things about some counties outside London struggling to fill their grounds, while it also contains quotes from Guy Lavender, who is chief executive of Somerset, who are successful in filling Taunton. Many people will agree with Lavender when he warns that several people will be reluctant to support a newly-created side as opposed to an established team, especially if they have to travel long-distances to get there.

It'd be interesting to see who fills their stadia compared to whichever cities would be chosen. Surrey, Lord's and Notts all have full houses but also so do Somerset and Essex from what I understand. Neither of which would have a city based team I'd guess.

Exactly talliman. Essex ground capacity 6500 and Somerset capacity 8500 have both sold all of their T20 tickets this year.

While Chelmsford is a city Taunton is not, and presumably don't fit in with the Simon Hughes criteria.

Another anomaly to Hughes theory is Warwickshire. Under the Birmingham Council's instructions, they have been known as Birmingham in white ball cricket for a couple of seasons.

So, they have jumped Hughes gun. However, with a ground capacity of 25,000, have total attendance of 54,714 or 31% of capacity. Not very good.

This suggests that there is little interest in city based T20 cricket in England's 2nd City.

Over to you Mr Hughes.

In the meantime the Somerset faithful will have to head to Bristol or Cardiff, capacities 11000 (65% take up) and 16000 respectively.

Glamorgan's current take up is 29% of capacity. While Somerset and Worcestershire boast 100%.

Franchises should carry a Government health warning.

Notts btw talliman have only a 48% take up. Yorkshire 42%. Lancashire far better at 73%.

It will end up like American franchise system. Probably be The London toff @#$%& cc versus Northern peasant wife beaters cc played in Barbados