A Manifesto for sport. Sport for good

White Lines connect it all. Base, Boundary, Side, Touch, Goal, Try, Inside, Finish. Over the line, Crossing the line, Outside the line, Beyond the lines, Push the lines…

Home disadvantage…

The high summer of 2019 has felt unprecedented in its revolution of headline events filling our screens, feeds and conversations. The Men’s Cricket World Cup back at the cradle of the game, overlapping with the Women’s World Cup in France. Matches sometimes within 100 miles of each other, it all felt close. This festival mix was further saturated by the colour of the summer mainstays; the global national events of Wimbledon, Glastonbury then leading in to the Netball World Cup in Liverpool and the sunlit Open Championship on the magical Antrim coast, fresh for living memory. Each unique but all extraordinarily bound by presenting as a special edition in 2019. The term ‘Greatest Ever’ was applied in their quarters to all, and could not just be dismissed as binary hyperbole. It has been a special summer on the fields of play. One for all to bask in the glow and get out and play..

And yet..

Did cricket miss the trick? Despite the hands-on-head, open-mouthed glory of that fantastical final (captured brilliantly here by The Independent’s Jonathan Liew) and home win, with a multi-million audience at last invited in through the midnight FTA deal Sky struck inside their deal with Channel 4, my feel was the tournament didn’t touch anyone in the host country who didn’t go looking for it. I speak as a dyed-in fan, who chased the late night highlights or downloaded catch-up. But ask my children what was happening in the round-robin weeks, and they had nothing in their field of view to challenge the response of ‘What Cricket World Cup? In our country?’ There was no discovery mechanic. The ICC/ECB Sky deal kept it locked away, only really for those already in the club. It felt like a big hole in the plans, the serendipitous final and result aside. And this from those trying to sell the fresh paint of The Hundred in 2020 to precisely those folk not currently troubled by cricket in their daily grind.

There should have been a bundle of rights also delivering 5-10 games on an primary FTA channel, to throw the net wide. To include. To allow discovery. I say that not for the appointment screening and airtime of cricket. No, the real power is the amplification and the marketing heft these 360 degree broadcasters and publishers will carry through all of their media platforms and programming. This wallpapers an event across our daily lives. Look at the BBC with the Women’s World Cup, The Netball World Cup and especially and historically with both Wimbledon and Glastonbury. These (inter)national events set the tone of the daily schedule from brand Beeb; a conversational thread. From Breakfast to news to weather to daytime, drivetime, to EastEnders, to podcast, to phone-in to YouTube, children’s platforms to online and social, it drives all to the event in an unashamed FOMO pitch. Perfect for the rights holder for awareness and inclusion, and there is a sound commercial basis for this too. Sky, for all its excellence in broadcast, quality and depth of coverage, can’t match this armoury of assault to the nation’s eyeballs and ears alone. It can’t even do it with the Premier League, without the ambient support of football’s presence via other broadcasters and media.

I love cricket and The Ashes, that began on fire today, couldn’t come soon enough but I feel a sadness for the sport in the UK that something got away here, and the uninitiated weren’t invited to the party, to get into the international festival of fun (look at the attending crowds, see the anecdotes from cricket media of the stories they heard from foreign fans on trains and hotel bars) that we lucky club members savoured as a route into cricket as an entertainment and a pastime.

Encouraging to see the Vitality Blast T20s have had an upsurge, and the counties are sweating their promotions hard, but bizarre again to hear rumours of no extra support for the counties from the ECB to surf the World Cup win momentum to drive bums on seats at cricket matches, any cricket matches! I can’t see with clarity how silo marketing the Hundred will work. Happy to be proved wrong though, and happily FTA coverage via the BBC is bolted on, which brings these thoughts full circle .. (Why the Hundred and not an evolution in county T20 as the future of mass spectacle for cricket, is stew for another blog..)

In off the Post..

Loved this tweet from Michael Johnson @MJGold. The quirks of sport. Millions spent on R&D into the marginal gains of aerodynamics in performance kit in elite athletics and cycling, Only to be exploded routinely in the hunt for the world’s biggest trophies by safety pins and paper.. Where else in sport do you see this?

That’s it for Part 1 of the High Summer of Sport blog series. Part 2 coming soon.

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