Bring cricket back to the People

By James Mills

England has won the Ashes!

But while we revel in this feat the fact is that there were probably more Australian than English viewers watching the Ashes this summer. This is due to the fact that they guarantee free live sports on their terrestrial television channels like SBS – the Australian version of Channel 4 – through anti-siphoning legislation. Thereby preventing it going off whole sale to pay-per-view TV companies.

This is something which I find very sad as one of the best things about the England Cricket team for me is that it’s not just the English cricket team. During my time in Scotland I was always surprised by how many Scots I knew who would hate England in rugby and football, yet followed England at cricket. One old Caledonian work colleague of mine use to travel down every year to Headingly when there was a test on. I even met a student SNP activist who admitted to me that he supported England! I would love to know how many newsletters the ECB send north of the border every year. But it wasn’t just a plethora of Scots I knew that followed England; many Irish relatives of mine also support England in cricket and were cheering on the victory yesterday.

There is a large terrestrial audience across the UK for live sporting events such as the Ashes. When Channel 4 last showed the Ashes they had a peak of over 8 million viewers watching the live coverage and the figures get higher when you go back to the viewing figures in previous years. Even more impressive is the 19 million who tuned in to watch the Third Test in 2005 or 23 Million who tuned in to watch the final Test at the Oval in 2005. In addition, Channel Five’s first Ashes highlights of The Cardiff Test had 1.4million viewers, which was a peak for that channel.

Now compare that with Sky’s live coverage which averages well under a million (for some England Tests as low as 200,000). Or even their highest ever recorded viewing figures for cricket which is the 1.5 million people who witnessed England’s defeat of India during the Twenty20 World Cup. I’m sure their figures were very high for yesterday, but nowhere near the numbers terrestrial television garner.

The fact is that the British public love live sporting events, for example; 11 million people alone tuned in to the BBC to watch the men’s Wimbledon final back in June. Sky Sports with a total of 8 million subscribers could never dream of such audiences for a British sporting event.

Currently all free-to-air TV sporting events come under the A-list. Events such as; the European Football Championships, the Football World Cup, the Olympics, Wimbledon’s tennis finals, the Grand National etc, are all protected by this list. Test match cricket use to be on the list but was taken off in 1999 and subsequently the ECB sold all cricket coverage post 2006 to Sky.

But back in December last year the government asked the former Executive Director of the FA David Davies to chair the-Free-To-Air-Events-Review, which is to re-examine the listed sporting events made available to free-to-air TV. They are set to report back to Ministers at the DCMS this autumn. The panel has a mandate to recommend sporting events that should be added or removed from the list or ultimately if the list should be terminated all together. But the final say resides with the Government and here is an opportunity for Labour to take the initiative on a vital issue.

Although the next home Ashes series in 2013 has already been sold to Sky, the Government could act following the report’s publication to persuade Sky into offering free coverage of one days play or even one Test match free to air. Especially if the government made it clear that the alternative would be the Ashes returning to the A-list in 2017.
The ECB would probably resist this for many millions of reasons. They simply don’t understand or refuse to recognise that for Test cricket to continue remaining popular in this country, the English Cricket Team needs to be not just successful but also accessible to the greater public. Furthermore, as cricket will be receiving £37.8m worth of public money from Sport England between 2009-13 – more than any other sport – it also has an obligation to do so.

I’m not advocating necessarily that every Test of an Ashes series should be given over to free to air TV channels or that we should have a similar set up as the Australians, as pay-per- view companies like Sky have revolutionised coverage of sporting events from football to golf. However, not everyone can afford to pay for the pay-per-view service and are forced to use legally dubious websites to watch sport online. Plus, although you’re likely to hear every sport journalist under sun say that these Ashes prove that Test cricket is still popular. No cricket fan would say that these Ashes were on the same scale as 2005 when everyone was able to follow every Test match. And how much longer will Test cricket be able to captivate this country in the same way if it’s denied a larger audience?

How do we expect Test cricket to remain popular if access to it is denied to the vast majority of the British public. Football and other sports are still shown (although infrequently) on free-to-air TV. So why shouldn’t cricket be afforded the same protection?