T20 Blast

Great to see a full house at the Oval tonight. My impression is that, despite the gloomsters, attendances have been healthy at the T20s this year, including at Sussex, despite the World cup. In some previous years, the latter has been given as an easy excuse. No need this year.

bm,

Have you got any latest T20 attendance figures to hand? Beating the 550,000 in 2013 will take some doing.

Very disappointing crowd for the Surrey quarter final. Saturday afternoon, perhaps not as popular as a weekday evening in south London?

No surprise that the average attendance is down. See the thread 'Borderman's campaign against gratuitous floodlit cricket'. All those ridiculous games ending at 10 pm in the shiveringly cold nights of May - what the hell did the ECB expect?

Well, actually they expected a dramatic increase in numbers; the stated aim was a 50 per cent increase in attendances over 3-4 years,I believe. It goes to show how utterly out of touch those who run cricket both at ECB and county level are with the popular mood.

T20 needs to be played in a concentrated four week span and on Saturday/Sunday afternoons. It's a format meant to appeal to families and football supporters; but if Friday nights were really so attractive, wouldn't weekend league football be played under floodlights at the end of the working week rather than on Sat/Sun afternoons?

If the ECB sticks to its claim that there will be no change to this already failed 'new' format before 2018 at the earliest, it will be pure insanity.

Dobell is notorious throughout the game as a negative old sad-sack who talks English cricket down at every opportunity (have a look at his embarrassing articles from only a few weeks ago predicting that the England Test team was destined to spend half a decade in the wilderness before it started winning again). But it's hard to argue with his conclusion that the T20 Blast in its current format is most definitely not the 'golden bullet' and that "the evidence of recent months is that the current method is not working. Unless something changes, the game will continue its gradual but inexorable decline."

A franchised EPL T20 tournament marches ever closer. Othwerwise it's curtains.

Some of this revolves around the London issue - it appears correctly promoted on the right nights (with some luck with the weather) can draw huge crowds in July and early August in central London. In the south east if it was a case of profit maximisation for the counties two franchises in London playing at Lords, Oval and the Olympic stadium with some games televised on terrestrial television condensed into a month would be the way to go. Of course cricket in the south east may have other ambitions and objectives. At the moment we are stuck with  a situation of arguably supporting too many counties with television money.

Eoin Morgan bemoans the poor quality of our domestic T20 competition:

www.espncricinfo.com/england/content/current/story/799449.html

He reckons we need a franchised tournament, held within a specific time window. If we don't, he says, county players will never be exposed to top quality T20 cricket. That leads to England having an un-competitive T20 squad, and our players not being good enough for the overseas tournaments.

This is not a new argument, but I think it is a strong one. I've never been against franchises - I suspect the ECB would like to try it, but the counties tend to be very parochial. Do they care if English T20 is sub-standard? Not if they believe the ECB will underwrite their continued existence, and the 16 match CC.