YOUNG WRITER: Is fear driving the ECB's city franchise idea?

OLLIE WILLIAMS: Imagine we’ve got our hands on a time-travelling Delorean and zoomed off 20 years into the future. We arrive to discover, rather than causing any familial temporal disruption, that, Great Scott, the ECB has knocked it out of the park!

Imagine that we’ve managed to get our hands on a time-travelling Delorean and zoomed off 20 years into the future. We arrive to discover, rather than causing any familial temporal disruption, that, Great Scott, the ECB has knocked it out of the park!

The city-based tournament has been incredibly successful; cricket is the nation’s number one sport; children across the country proudly sport their favourite team’s shirt and play knockabout games on every street corner; journalists write gossip columns discussing the next big transfer; players get paid thousands, even for just sitting on the bench (okay, the IPL has already made this a reality).

Guaranteed, this is a highly fanciful future, and whether you view this as “success” is another question. However, some vision not too dissimilar to this must surely be driving the ECB’s risk-laden decision to create eight brand new city-based teams at the expense of the eighteen established, ready-to-go counties?

The reality, one suspects, could not be further than this. What appears to actually be driving the ECB is fear, fear over participation rates and the general public apathy towards cricket.

And if this is the case, the ECB and its officials are really acting in exactly the way one would expect.

In 1979, two Israeli psychologists, Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky, discovered that when faced with a loss, people tend towards riskier behaviour. The ECB’s pursuit of a shiny new city-based tournament appears to be behaviour that fits this theory perfectly. Admittedly, English cricket currently finds itself in a grave position, something recognised by the ECB as part of the rationale for the introduction of a metropolitan competition.

Sport England findings published in 2016 showed recreational cricket participation was down by almost 20 per cent versus 2006, making it now the 15th most popular participation sport in England.

Coupled with YouGov’s damning finding that almost 60 per cent of people who had watched cricket found it very or quite boring – making it the UK’s third most-boring sport after golf and American football – this paints a bleak picture for the ECB, as the custodians of England’s summer game.

Faced with these circumstances, it is not surprising that the ECB should appear concerned at the potential dangers facing the game. However, in the face of this “loss”, the ECB has acted in exactly the way predicted by Kahneman and Tversky; chasing the risky option of creating a completely new tournament, with eight new teams centred around England and Wales’ metropolitan cricket grounds. What makes this decision even more incredulity-inducing is the existence of 18 fully formed teams, the majority of whom have excellent links with their local areas, fan favourite players, and loyal supporters.

Despite this ready made solution, the ECB has instead chosen, rather like a gambler trying to recoup his losses at the end of a long night, to chase the potential rewards of one last big bet. The ECB would undoubtedly respond to this accusation by citing the examples of the IPL and the Big Bash to show how new teams can be plucked from the ether to create a successful “product”.

However, this ignores the inherent factional complexities of English county supporters. Will a Liverpool-based Lancastrian really be all that happy about supporting a Manchester-monikered team?

And okay, the ECB has stated that the names will not be geographically linked, but surely this only makes the task more difficult for them. Whilst geographic names may be divisive in some places, at least they generate some degree of feeling – can the same really be said for the anonymous team moniker (and apparent favourite of the marketeers), Stars?

The ECB may also argue that far from being risky, the city-based carnival has already paid off, pulling in the big bucks through the broadcasting deal with Sky. And credit where credit is due, the ECB has certainly pulled off a coup in extracting such large bounty from Sky, for a product that is yet to exist. 

This lack of existence only serves to highlight the risks faced by the ECB – and now also Sky, who’s future cricket coverage now appears largely tied to the success of the competition.

Regardless of why or how the ECB reached its decision to pursue a city-based T20 tournament, and whether you view this to be a risk seeking or inherently sound decision, the future of English cricket now seems inexorably tied to the success of the tournament. And, despite the apparent riskiness of this move, neither the tournament’s success or failure is guaranteed.

In the words of Doc Brown, the “future hasn’t been written yet”; the “future is whatever you make it”.