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Administrators remain more concerned with price hikes than offering a product that represents value for money
If you are running the world’s most famous cricket ground, and are entertaining in a Test match one of only two other sides in the world who can probably, at this point, give your home side a decently competitive game, it is understandable you let market forces rip when it comes to judging the price of tickets. This is what MCC appears to have done for its England Test match against India next summer, with the price of a seat with an unrestricted view of the game starting at £120 and going up to £175 on the first three days.
It has shown slightly more restraint in its pricing for the final of the World Test Championship, with top-price tickets at £130, because of a presumption England will not be taking part. Given the two sides who probably will be in the final – India and Australia – are so well matched, and therefore it may well be a game considerably more exciting than the two Lord’s tests in 2024 against West Indies and Sri Lanka, it is rather amazing that seats were not priced even higher.
This has become an issue because only 9,000 people turned up for the last day of the Sri Lanka match this summer, even though it took place on a Sunday in good weather. Adult tickets with unrestricted views were priced at between £115 and £140. Since the advent of ‘Bazball’, which has meant England take a fast and aggressive approach to batting that has been learned from white-ball cricket, rather too many matches involving the side have not made it to the end of the third day, let alone the fourth. In the Sri Lanka match it was obvious on Saturday night what was going to happen – England were going to win without any difficulty at all – and indeed that was the outcome. People might have paid £50 to come to watch the bleeding obvious, but more than twice that was never going to appeal to anyone without money to burn.
MCC is not entirely to blame, though the overlap it has in terms of some of its personnel with the England and Wales Cricket Board may exacerbate the problem. The ECB’s obsession with money rather than anything resembling the good of the game has become legendary, and it will have done nothing to deter MCC from an aggressive pricing policy; and, as I have said, market forces might in this instance just about justify the course MCC is taking.
But if the pattern of pricing continues for Test matches in this way when teams who are not India or Australia are playing, there will be serious commercial trouble ahead. Ben Stokes, the England captain, realises this. He told Telegraph Sport this month to “just make it a bit cheaper for people to come and watch. Pretty easy solution in my eyes”. Of course it isn’t just the price of a ticket. If a parent wants to bring a child (at £40-£50 a time to a Test), plus travel from the home counties, you are probably looking at a £250 day out before the drinks and sandwiches. MCC as a club is obsessed with promoting diversity and inclusivity. If only top-rate taxpayers can afford to pay for the spectacle, such ambitions, or pretensions, fly out of the window.
We saw in the two Test series this summer – apart from the game at the Oval, when England seemed to decide to give up taking the match seriously – just how corrosive a lack of competitiveness is to the idea of Test cricket as the highest form of the game. Even if Australia or India are touring every two years, in the years when neither of them is there is the prospect of two poor sides coming to take on England in deeply one-sided matches.
It would help, of course, if some of the players who tour had played some first-class cricket within recent memory, but that now is seldom the case. Instead of playing several warm-up matches against some decent county sides, the players come straight off the plane from whichever T20 franchise they have been amusing the public in, and try to play serious five-day cricket. No wonder the results are so pitiful. So if the ECB wishes to preside over the sort of pricing structure that currently exists, it had better do something to the nature of tours that means England’s opposition are not complete turkeys, and that anything beyond the end of the second day of a Test is hardly worth paying to watch. For that is what is coming down the line, as sure as night follows day, whatever the cash-crazed cricket authorities care to pretend to the contrary.
There is another issue concerned with value, and that is over rates. It remains a fiction that a Test side can bowl the required 90 overs in a six-hour day; and the authorities know it is fictional, which is why the game inevitably goes on until 6.30pm, and even after that extra half-hour it is quite usual for three, four or five overs not to be bowled.
Even when spinners operate there is so much time spent talking, deliberating, posing and dealing with DRS that the game drags. The least that can happen at £175 a seat is that 90 overs should be bowled however long it takes; that match fees should be confiscated from teams that deliberately slow the game down; and that, with the current advances in Artificial Intelligence, the decision about an lbw, catch, run out or stumping be made instantaneously rather than going through a theatrical performance about the alleged dismissal that starts to make one imagine what it must have been like at the Colosseum. Speeding the game up would create a greater impression of value, and concern for the paying customer.
As it is, the authorities seem to have hit on the perfect formula to drive genuine cricket lovers away. If the red-ball game dies, we shall all know whom to blame.