Re: Global T20 Canada
Posted: Sat Jul 07, 2018 11:18 am
Excellent summary!LeScotsman wrote: ↑Fri Jul 06, 2018 10:54 amThe world has moved on lightyears in 10 years. Ten years ago, televised cricket was much harder to find in North America, or even on the internet. The IPL was a baby. The whole world wasn't glued to screens in the palms of their hands every minute. To understand what's going on, it's important to understand human behaviour. 99% of people will always take the laziest, cheapest route. It's very difficult nowadays to get people to to reply to direct messages (text, voicemail, FB) or even open emails, let alone read them and take action. When people can stream live cricket on their phones for free on the toilet or in their car, or from their sofa without paying, and tune in and out while they potter around doing other things, like looking after the kids, why would they choose to spend 40$-150$ a head and lose 8 hours of their day, driving to a bleacher in the sun or anywhere else, taking more than 50 steps of action along the way? Ten years ago, there was not a large enough market to successfully stage a pro event here. Now, even less so. With screens and non-stop distraction everywhere, if you make an offer to people, their brains make a quick calculation, ''Do I have to make effort for this?'' If yes, most people choose not to. This is why it is tumbling.
Cricket has always been hard here or anywhere. In North America, it has always been a shambles and followed the very opposite path to proper development. Stumbling around now trying to make a success of it while competing for attention with youtube is very difficult. Cricket here is not in a battle to grow any more as it was 10 years ago (a battle it lost, sadly). It’s in a battle to survive.
There is no other pastime that takes so much time and effort. So much has to go into it to making one game work. Miss or slack on one important detail, and it fails. Below are just a few examples of the key pieces in staging one recreational match - hugely different from a professional tournament but I use it as an example for cricket in general. In terms of creating a successful overall system or event, there are many more requirements, too long to list here.
To play a match, you need a huge space - 4 acres of flat grassed land, with people who properly understand and can carry out good ground maintenance in order to make play safe and productive. It's a full-time job, with years of training required. There are probably only 5 people in the country who understand that. Do they have the time and money? Will they in the future? You can't play hockey in 6 inches of snow. Can you play cricket in 6 inches of grass? Will it ever work in municipal parks where they have regulations about not cutting the grass? No. Will it continue to get use of substandard municipal land in the midst of demand from every other, easier sport? No. If cricket is to survive, it needs to find a solution to that. It will only have a chance of survival on private land.
Every match requires people who can score. I've played and organised cricket and other sports for more than 30 years, in all that time, in every cricket game, 80-90% of people say they don't know how to score. Even the guys who’ve played for 50 years. Every match, it's a dog's breakfast. Teams lose games all the time that they actually won because people can't count or pay attention, or understand the system. It’s not uncommon for scorebooks to have 40 runs out of place over 500 balls. The scorer can blink (or their phones vibrate now) and you lose the game. It's so much goddamn work and confusion. People say, just use an app. Again, most people don't know how to work the thing, and they can't spot or correct mistakes on a screen as they can on paper. The battery runs out of power, etc. Is people's behaviour and knowledge towards that going to change? No. Does this complication appeal to people, or drive them away? Or is it the system that needs to change? The ICC, MCC, or any cricket board has never bothered to even put a YouTube video up explaining how scoring works. How are people supposed to do it?
Every match requires qualified, unbiased umpires without eyesight problems or hearing issues who've watched thousands of hours of televised cricket, who volunteer to stand in the sun for 8 hours having people complain to them. Or the game fails, people get pissed off. Are people rushing out to volunteer for this? Are kids super keen to learn? Would you say there are more people now who know how to do the job than 10 years ago, or less? Are people going to want to do that in 10 years? It needs an affordable technological solution. It's too much work and too problematic.
You need a meal because you're stuck in the middle of nowhere for the best part of a day. Who wants to spend their Friday nights and Saturday mornings preparing that now? People can't be bothered to boil an egg now.
Between groundstaff, umpires, scorers, and caterer (before you get to coach, captain, players and coordinators) that’s 6 people who really know what they are doing and are willing to dedicate huge amounts of their time in order to succeed (park cricket on uncut pastures with no food, shade or bathrooms, and players doing a horrible job of umpiring and scoring is not a successful system). Where do you get those people? When 99% of people won’t lift a finger? When trends are showing fewer and fewer volunteers?
Cricket matches need so much time. On weekends. Parents are working 50 hours a week to pay off their credit cards for all their digital luxuries, and weekends are family time. In 10 years, are there going to be more people volunteering to give up their weekends, or less? If cricket wants to survive, club cricket has to find a way to develop on weeknights under floodlights. It has to find ways of speeding up without compromising the volume of play for everyone. Two to four hours of every cricket game is simply time wasting. Thirty seconds delay times ten times a day times 22 players is a lot of nothing. In 10 years, are people still going to choose to waste that time?
It's the law of the jungle, adapt or die. The fanciful ideas of IPL style franchises in North America are a total waste of time and resources without any sound business foundation or evidence of success. When I see the waste of millions on this, and then I look at all the clubs in the country that don't even have a lawnmower. Why would kids and 99% of the population want to play cricket when they can't hit the ball more than 3 metres in unrolled cow pastures? When that's your starting point...
As much as I Iove the game, as much as I've put into development, in mainstream and expat cricket, in youth and senior cricket, on a voluntary and professional basis, in Canada and elsewhere, I look at the stats, I look at people's behaviour, I look at the technology and the competition, I look at the history, I ask myself, will the North American cricket system change, or will it change other people?