By Matt Hardy
The Bazball-inspired Ashes summer ignited the country with cricket fever in a way the 2005 series did, but it will be followed by a damp squib that could lose momentum.
I was just 12-years-old when the 2005 Ashes happened, and the first two things I did to pursue my newfound love was join a club, and buy the same bat as the then England captain – Michael Vaughan.
The glory of that summer set in motion almost two decades of playing, watching, writing, tweeting and dreaming about cricket – and there were two central factors that allowed it to happen.
One, I didn’t need Sky to watch it. And two, it was two of the best teams ever locking horns.
In 2005 the country sat down and watched the cricket on Channel 4, and the next day spoke about it in schools, workplaces, pubs and around the dinner table – it was also on Sky, and their coverage was excellent.
There’s no reason why it couldn’t be mandated to be on both going forward.
This enfranchisement, mixed with cricket being extremely gripping was important and, in many ways, the 05 Ashes experience was formative to Bazball itself.
The audience has always been there; when England play exciting cricket, fans show up. When England play rubbish cricket, less people watch. In his post-match interview at the end of the Oval Test last Monday captain Ben Stokes was asked if the 2023 series was the greatest ever. He fudged his answer.
“I really hope that we’ve inspired a new generation,” he said.
“I look back to 2005 and what that series did for me as a young person. I really hope there’s someone who is at my age in 2005 that’s looked at this series and just said, ‘That’s what I want to be doing when I’m 21 or 22’.”
And that’s just it. “I really hope”. Hope isn’t a strategy.
After five enthralling Tests, there should be a guarantee, not a hope, that going forward, grounds will be full, tickets hard to come by, every blade of grass in local parks taken up by kids with bats and balls.
But unfortunately, the approach of England’s cricketers and its administrators are very different.
While Brendon McCullum and Ben Stokes revolutionise English cricket by making it more exciting to watch, the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) are determined to stick to their guns and save the sport from its apparent terminal decline by simply re-creating the sport.
The calendar for August has been cleared for The Hundred with cheap tickets, colourful kits, crisps sponsoring all the teams, and a supposedly simple format which is idiot proof.
The Hundred’s stated aim is to bring a new audience to cricket, one that doesn’t really know or like cricket that much.
But it feels like it has never been about the audience.
It’s about the cricket.
I had to sit through many years of England losing, and losing badly. Losing is not fun or entertaining, it’s a central reason why audiences tail off.
One only has to look at next year’s calendar to see why people may not necessarily turn up in their hundreds-of-thousands to watch.
England’s Bazball stars are due to play two lowly-anticipated home series – against the West Indies and Sri Lanka, ranked seventh and eighth in the world respectively – in addition to a hoard of meaningless limited overs series after this year’s World Cup in India.
I know England have to play everyone, but it’s hard to get excited about it.
And of course, there are no games in the north during the next Ashes, which is a travesty.
The ECB would be much better to move away from ‘hope’ that a new competition will bring in a new audience, and look at what’s actually happening in front of their eyes.
They should trust England fans to know good cricket when they see it.
More than half-a-million also paid to watch the cricket in the grounds (both men and women).
English cricket’s problem has long been one of performance, not the audience.
The Hundred was never needed to save Test cricket, and a new audience which doesn’t really like cricket certainly won’t be the magic solution.
