John Howard and Australian cricket fans may have been worried about
the near-death experience of no free-to-air coverage for an Ashes
series that’s now become world sport’s most compelling contest, a
series that even David Beckham can’t do without. But that’s nothing
compared with what free-to-air UK viewers will face from next year:
nothing. Not a sausage, unless you count an evening highlights package
– which fans certainly won’t!

From 2006
until 2009, all live English domestic cricket will graduate exclusively to
subscription or pay TV network Sky. While the figures have never
been publicly revealed it’s commonly agreed that under this new four year deal,
the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) last December agreed to grant exclusive TV rights for all domestic tests, one-day and
county cricket matches in that period to Sky in a £220 million deal.

On Monday
evening as the Third Test neared its unforgettable climax, Channel 4’s UK
viewing figures were their highest in seven years of broadcasting cricket, with
the audience peaking at 7.7 million. This translated to a 42% viewer
share of all people watching TV at that time. That’s
going to mean a lot of very, very unhappy people being abandoned as England now
enters a new golden age of cricket.

It’s not that
C4 weren’t interested in continuing to share cricket as it does now with Sky,
but simply that Sky blew them out of the water with a much greater money offer for
exclusivity.

Today in the
UK the Daily Telegraphfeatures an
attack on the ECB for the way the body handled those negotiations, by C4’s
non-executive chairman, Luke Johnson. According to
Johnson, who’s clearly lamenting the pending loss of domestic cricket from his viewers’
screens:

“Others in Channel 4 may be more circumspect. Our view is that the
ECB did a very bad deal for the sport. They didn’t handle the negotiations well.
They were short-term.

They
went for the money…and they will find they have made a terrible mistake. With
cricket disappearing from terrestrial television the level of interest in the
sport will decline sharply. Cricket is not like
football, it needs visibility. How will they get 20,000 people outside a Test
ground?”

Maybe this
is a man crying foul after the horse has well and truly bolted as the
realisation dawns on his network just how great a loss Sky’s gain will be for
C4. But that’s really neither here nor there as I see it. The fact is that the
ECB has to a large extent cut its own throat – and now that of its burgeoning TV
audience – by sanctioning a deal where millions of the game’s fans who can’t
afford or won’t sign up for access to the Sky coverage are going to be left out
in the cold, starting from next year. Regardless of the massive increase now
in the game’s appeal, this was always going to be a deal that would end in
tears. The ECB has turned its back on the fans now flocking to the game
in greater numbers, and young kids now turning English players into soccer-like
deities.

So will the
Blair Government now dare to cross bats and take on the Murdoch operated Sky
Channel for the public good after cricket was removed from the UK’s own
protected list back in 1999?

Post
script: If Scottish cricket was looking to fill its boots with
Aussie gold from the Ashes bonanza, rather typically the weather gods had other
ideas overnight when a 4,500 full house at the Grange Rd ground in Edinburgh saw
its 50 overs match rained off. While the match was insured, it
deprived the Scottish game of additional promotion and the Aussies of much
needed practice away from the golf course!