The game is ours and we don’t own it.
I have just finished reading an article by Jonathan Liew on the pecuniary costs of a day out at Lord’s. Not living in England, I have never cast my eyes to the price of a ticket. Turns out it is an eye-watering £160, over $300 in our provincial currency.
The English game, indeed, world cricket, has always been a mess of contradiction and class-distinction. For much of its history it was a game of professionals and amateurs where the amateurs ruled the roost, pulling levers and changing ‘laws’ as they saw fit and to suit their needs.
Cricket is a game of peasants which, as the independent hand-weavers were overtaken by the loom, migrated to the alleys and forecourts of the bourgeoning urban proletariat. During this time, as the bourgeois took over the economic reigns, the gentry captured cricket primarily to wager on the outcomes of this esoteric game.
The gentry’s entrance into cricket took the game from fields and alleys to great grounds, the homes of the new great clubs, around the country and eventually into the empire’s colonies. In particular, into Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean, and the antipodes; there was also a relatively short-term boom in the wider Americas.
As the world travelled headlong into modernity, so did cricket and play on the field exposed the contradictions of society’s structures. CLR James, in Beyond a Boundary, recounts how Learie Constantine, a black man who was formally less than his white opponents and teammates, told James that he, and the other black players, were clearly superior and capable of autonomy on the field.
English cricket abolished amateur status in 1962. Formally, according to the ‘laws’, the cricket field was a place free of class-distinction. Here, whether it be at Lord’s or Old Trafford, the only spectacle was extraordinarily skilled human labour.
This is, of course, a myth. Or, at the very least, a fundamental misunderstanding of the structures that govern not just the game of cricket but our world.
There was a time in the ’90s and early 2000s when it appeared that, perhaps, English cricket’s obsession with class and gentlemen was dissipating. Many players from state schools and immigrant backgrounds were making their way and excelling in the national side. The stuffy, smoke-filled Lord’s long room was switching Chablis for lager.
Then there was the inevitable reaction. Cricket, notoriously, is a game of traditions and slow to evolve. The reaction was harsh and swift and came in the form of Thatcherite economics championed by a new governing class.
In 1998, when England won the Under-19 World Cup, three members of that squad attended fee-paying schools. In the most recent U19 competition, England fielded ten players from fee-paying schools. The English team that took the field in Hobart earlier this was filled with eight private school boys.
By the end of 2019, there was just one state-educated black man playing first-class cricket in England.
The point of Liew’s article is that you only price tickets at such a level as £160 if you only want to attract people who don’t ever have to think about something as trifling and gratuitous as money. As he writes: “If you need to ask the price of the suit, old boy, you can’t afford it.”
The truth is that those who govern cricket will never consider the needs of people who must choose between food and heating because they have never had to do so.
(Photo by Gareth Copley/Getty Images)
We have all experienced this to some extent. Perhaps in a dentist’s chair being told we need a filling or a crown. The dentist explains the causes of our discomfort and then they explain the cure and quality of life benefits that come with it. Both you and they are then silent, in such a way that is heavy, and both your eyes are wider than normal.
You then relent and ask, feigning a casualness you do not possess, “How much does that cost?”
The governors of our game envisage a world of private capital and multi-club franchises where community is a slogan to sell their commodity. They talk of what the fans want without letting us decide, only following the money. A day at the cricket, to them, is a matter of wheelin’ and dealin’. Pimms cups and Veuve Clicquot.
I don’t have figures at hand for Australian cricket prices, but my intuition is the trend is the same. More and more cricket is going behind a paywall, in contradiction of anti-siphoning laws, and more expensive status-signalling food outlets are being installed in the grounds, phasing out the meat pies and hot dogs.
And we don’t seem to upset by it. The loudest fans are happy to criticise Cricket Australia and other boards whenever they try to make our game a more welcoming place, spouting reactionary nonsense about ‘political correctness’. But few make noise about the increasing neo-liberalisation of our game.
All this stems from cricket’s, and all sports’, greatest contradiction. The game is ours and we don’t own it.
Joshua Makepeace
Roar Rookie
I would just say that Lord's is a lot more expensive than the other English cricket grounds and it's considered a big day out to go to Lord's where people would bring champagne etc. Still, that is no excuse for the tickets to be that expensive and the game is doing itself no favours whatsoever.
Rellum
Roar Guru
The game here is dying and putting the national teams white ball games behind a firewall is accelerating that massively.
Just Nuisance
Roar Rookie
It’s not just Cricket . Tickets for elite international sports events now the domain of the well off only . And of course to watch cricket on TV I need to be a multichoice subscriber here in South Africa and frankly that’s not cheap either . So yeah the administrators wax lyrical about growing the game at grassroots level but a new apartheid exists and it’s a financial one which simply excludes those less fortunate. A Springbok rugby coach Nick Mallett actually got fired for calling this out .
Paul D
Roar Guru
I gather things are quite a bit worse in the UK in Australia in terms of inequality, 160 pounds for a ticket, that is insane - a Gabba ticket can be had for well under $50 if you don't mind where you sit or what day you go on - as always, the lack of diversity at the elite levels or just below the elite levels has everything to do with what goes on at lower levels, where there are no cameras, no tribunal, and the standards of the racial discrimination act are rarely present and able to be enforced in the spur of the moment. Re: Greg Barclay I don't know many CEO's whose job it is to go and talk down their product. What a money hungry scumsucker he must be.
matth
Roar Guru
Nice article and hard to argue with any of that.
Rellum
Roar Guru
Greg Barclay is not the man to hold such a position.
Rowdy
Roar Rookie
I’ve stayed bog standard Bogan but l feel that I’ve become more Bogan because of this very reason. ——- All this aggregation of group-think sanitised, homogenised and pasteurized fandom based on world’s best practice where the cricket-loving public are funnelled into some sporting form of Catholicism bores me to tears and casts a pall over my hopes that we’ll find another Dougie, a Thommo or even a Katich because they’ve all gone to schools indoctrinated by staff that that live by the don’t P!$$ in bushes motto. ——- BTW Lewis a good article.
Rellum
Roar Guru
CA has sold out to capitalists' forces decades ago. We let Kerry Packer run the game and decided(this is a simplistic comparison but it gets my point across) his methods are how we should do things when managing the game in the country. That morphed through the Argus report into a hyper capitalist focus administration the basically destroyed the foundation of the game that gave us our great generations of players, the Shield and Grade games, so they could focus the game on only the Aus team like it is a MLB franchise. That to me has failed and we shall see that in falling interest over the next decade. And I don't attend games anymore outside of Shield games as the cost is far to high
Rellum
Roar Guru
I am sure most of the current and next generation of cricketers in Aus are from private school. Don't know for sure. That was not the case through our history. It was a working class game as much as a private school one. We need to make sure all players get the chance to play and prove themselves all the way through until they retire. Players careers should not be over at 17 because they missed out on the State under 17 team
Cricket worldwide is just way to0 focused on money be it ticket prices or the game itself. The role of cricket is not to make shareholders of media companies rich. The role of cricket is to provide enjoyment to those who play and watch it. Money is important, but if solely run Cricket like a business, the game is on the slippery slope. Queue the comments from Greg Barclay, current ICC Chairman, that Test cricket needs to be cut back and more T20 played "because that is what the market wants". No, that is not what the market wants, that is what Greg Barclay wants so he can get rich via the gravy train of the BCCi. Disgusting. https://www.cricket.com.au/news/icc-chair-greg-barclay-test-cricket-future-ipl-expansion-ftp-window-bilateral-squeeze-india/2022-06-04
Micko
Guest
The hyper-professionalism/capitalism of modern sport is depressing. It's the same here (very expensive to watch test cricket), but the ECB business model is more of an extreme: Lords (& The Oval) are the "local" test venues for not just London: a city of what, 9, 10 million people?, but also a lot of counties and large regional cities: Essex, Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Luton, Ipswich, Watford, Reading, Brighton etc. So the business model is to make a desirable and exclusive product: have a stadium at around only 30,000 capacity, but that caters to a massive regional population of around 15-20 million as the "local" test venue. So the extreme prices are still sufficient to get sellouts and large crowds at places like Lords & The Oval, just purely for the amount of rich (or at least people able to afford/willing to pay those prices!) cricket loving people.