This article is taken from the July 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Like many British delusions of moral grandeur, cricket’s took hold in the Victorian era. Few sporting myths have been more endearing than the notion that the game depicted in Tom Brown’s Schooldays was created ex nihilo. 

In fact, as the author Derek Birley puts it, the game was “snatched from rustic obscurity by gentlemanly gamblers”; and no sooner had it done service as both “symbol and synonym” for British imperialism, the twin forces of urbanisation and democracy made it part of the leisure industry, with all the capitalist imperatives that attend such a description. 

There’s always been a yearning for a Golden Age that never existed; a line of influence that runs from the Victorian poet Francis Thompson recalling “oh my Hornby and my Barlow long ago”, to the hissing MCC members of last year’s Ashes, furious that the visiting Australians had violated the nebulous “spirit of cricket”.

It’s with a pinch of historical salt then that we turn our attention to the latest iteration of the battle for cricket’s soul. In May, the England and Wales Cricket board (ECB) reached agreement with the 18 first-class counties over the sale of stakes in the eight teams competing in The Hundred, its city-based, franchised, 100-ball tournament. 

The hosts of the teams will be given a 51 per cent stake, which they can sell or keep, while the remaining 49 per cent in each team will be sold by the ECB. The resulting income will be distributed to the recreational game (10 per cent), and the remainder to the counties and MCC. This huge injection of private investment — the ECB is at pains to point out it might not be private equity — has been met with quite the reaction from various quarters of the traditional county cricket fan base. The governing body, they say, has sold off the British summer.

There are valid concerns here. As the ECB’s chief executive Richard Gould pointed out in a recent interview with the Cricketer magazine, a case study already exists: football. Gould approvingly mentioned working for the Lansdown family at Bristol City, and the amount of “love and finance and support” they provided. As the magazine’s editor wryly noted: “For your Lansdowns, Richard, I’ll give you a Glazer.”

Perhaps a bigger issue, certainly one that speaks to the hearts of the disgruntled county fans, is the prominence The Hundred has been afforded. It runs throughout August; the peak of the summer, when cricket could be attracting hordes of kids on their school holidays. Now those children will not be able to see full-strength county sides, while marquee Test series against the biggest sides (India and Australia) have to be flexed around it. 

Private investment is set to lock in this arrangement: money has spoken over the purists who value long-form red ball cricket’s slower burn and nuanced ebb and flow. The imperative to create a premier league of professional teams in the belief it will help the game is likely to alarm anyone who knows anything about football’s Premier League.

To further enforce the feeling that the last days of summer are upon us, this all takes place against a background of decline for member influence. The majority of the 18 first-class counties are members’ clubs; but the number of members is in decline. 

Yorkshire’s chairman, Colin Graves, has said the club must become a private structure to survive, while Brexit’s Arron Banks — who does value longer form, red ball cricket — recently wrote to members of his beloved Gloucestershire offering a “hybrid” model in a bid to save it.

Yet while reports of county cricket’s lingering death are exaggerated, it is hardly in rude financial health. The picture remains mixed at best, with some counties — Yorkshire, Middlesex and Gloucestershire among them — struggling with significant debts. They have long been partly reliant on money given to them by the ECB as a share of broadcasting revenues. That is an uncertain source of income. 

Derbyshire’s most profitable day in 2023 was a gig by The Who. Now add the rising cost of living, skyrocketing energy bills, the imperative to reach gender parity on pay and more, and a rarefied sporting spectacle looks like an endangered luxury.

This financial ill health begets further problems. Last year’s Independent Commission for equity in Cricket really told the story of a sporting infrastructure that, despite the best intentions of those in charge, is creating barriers to entry for all but the most privileged in society, in large part because resources are so stretched. 

Then you have professional players increasingly frazzled by a packed schedule; the rapid growth of franchise cricket has seen the outgoing chief of the Professional Cricketers Association describe a possible future of “players becoming more like tennis pros or golfers, with their own physios, coaches and managers, servicing themselves to be self-sustainable”, and keenly aware of “the value of broadcast deals, crowd figures and viewerships”. 

Hornby and Barlow might have found this world somewhat foreign. It is unlikely, and certainly unclear, that the game’s governing body is making all the right choices in this rapidly changing world. But cricket has always bent with the winds of change: don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.