Cricket

Crash! Bang! Wallop! Sport’s Fight for Market Supremacy

Posted on by Andy Gardner

Wow! What an incredible spectacle: the world’s finest athletes going head-to-head in a winner-takes-all fight to the finish. Scenes everywhere.

It seems as though a growing number of sports are in their own deathmatch in a quest to claw their share of the television and therefore monetary pie, with triathlon’s SuperLeague being the example that immediately springs to mind.

Admittedly, triathlon is a difficult sport to televise and monetise: there’s three disciplines to cover, possibly closing down a city centre or out-of-town venue with races that range from just under two hours to almost eight hours depending on the format.

One of the perceived troubles with endurance sport is that there will always be long periods of non-action when looking on as a spectator – anyone who watched the entirety of last week’s Milan-San Remo bike race, all 300km of it, would testify to that, with the race only really coming to life in the final 30 minutes.

So why not just get rid of all the boring stuff and condense it down into a YouTube-friendly package? After all, we are constantly told that attention spans are dwindling, social media controls all and people get bored super easily – what fans want is all the action, constant dicing for position and sprinting for the line.

SuperLeague looks to deliver this by the bucket load. Admittedly, the SLT Arena Games, born in the midst of the pandemic with competitors swimming in an actual pool before riding and running in a virtual world, makes the best of a very difficult situation. Large-scale, mass participation events are difficult when trying to control a respiratory virus, so the more controlled the event can be, the better in this respect.

However, SuperLeague was already thrusted upon us before the Coronavirus was even a twinkle in a bat’s eye, with it’s self-appointed role of disrupting triathlon through innovative formats, which essentially translates into making the disciplines a lot shorter and changing their order.

Races are chaotic and closely contested – a natural result of not actually doing much racing and instead doing three times as many transitions. In the outdoor SuperLeague events, athletes are routinely awarded power-ups, such as ShortChutes (shortcuts) or alternatively hooked from the race if they fall too far behind. One wonders if they might occasionally be able to de-rail opponents with exploding tortoise shells.

Each event features multiple rounds, across different formats with points being awarded for positions and ultimately a winner crowned at the end of each race weekend and eventually the season. It’s utterly confusing and almost impossible to know who is actually winning from one event to the next, but put that minor detail aside and isn’t great to watch!

Well, no actually – it’s just a bit different. Not better, just different and well marketed. And considering that triathlon is one of the most inclusive and equal sports going, there’s a separate conversation needed about the different uniforms needed for men and women, with the latter seemingly required to wear eye-wateringly high-legged swimsuits, presumably because more flesh equals more viewers.

This feels like the latest in a line of attempts to reduce sports to just the highlights in a bid to catch the eye. Cricket was probably the first to do it right with the birth of Twenty20, reducing a five-day contest to a three-hour face-off, full of huge sixes and spectacular wickets – goodbye maiden overs! There are similar stories in snooker, pro cycling and athletics as more and more sports seek to squeeze their events further and further to produce an exciting, schedule-friendly product. Latest reports in football suggest that Champions League bigwigs are considering a TV subscription package where customers (fans?) pay sufficiently to only watch the final 15 minutes – who cares about the previous 75, after all?

Except the only thing that all these reductions seem to actually do is make the longer forms of competitions look long and boring. Why would you bother committing a full afternoon to watching something on telly when you could catch up with the best of the action on demand and then get back to some doomscrolling?

It begs the question of where this might end. Why bother with all that tedious football when you can cut straight to a penalty shoot out? Let’s just have a tie break in tennis and make Formula One a drag race.

There’s so much more to sport than the result; it’s the preparation, the discipline and the hours that going into making the start line. It’s the concentration, the camaraderie and the tactical nous on the day itself. Sporting competition is great because it ebbs and flows – you might be winning early, then on the back foot as your opponent regroups only to then find something special to claim victory.

Condensing the action down into a TV-friendly package feels akin to reducing a meal from a Michelin-starred chef into a convenient pill-form, because who has the time to waste it actually eating or socialising? Read a book you say? No thanks, I’ll just skim the Wikipedia page, that should tell me all I need to know and if it’s any good.

The issue stems essentially from the competition that exists for every eyeball and every pound in revenue. The roaring success of football’s Premier League in the last 30 years has forced every other sport, governing body and event organiser to consider their own ‘product’ and how best to ‘develop market share’.

Without meaning to sound like Old Man Abe Shouting at Clouds, what happened to sport for the sake of sport? Competitions and races whose main purpose was the challenge they provided for the competitors or the opportunity for the best to test themselves against their peers.

Perhaps if finances and airtime were shared slightly more evenly without the need to try and steal viewers from the all-conquering football behemoth, there would be more opportunity for sport to breath organically, rather than this stifling quest for self-suffocation.

But where’s the fun in that? Just show me the best bits and send me to the gift shop!

Long Live the Long Form

Posted on by Andy Gardner

The clamour for further decreasing the length of sporting events to fit busy scheduling demands and appease decreasing attention spans has taken something of back seat in recent weeks with longer form events and sports roaring back into the collective conscience.

At the risk of sounding like someone’s dad, the increasing appetite for shorter and shorter representations of sport to supposedly satisfy the YouTube generation of spectators seems to be continually gathering pace. More and more sports and their organisers seem to be exploring ways of creating their own version of cricket’s Twenty20 format, reducing longer encounters to action-packed face-offs designed to appeal to casual viewers.

However, this summer has seen the extended, more traditional versions of sports making waves and demonstrating that it really can be worth investing time and attention to the slow-burn drama and tension that builds through time in the action.

Headlining the re-awakening for the longer sports was the Cricket World Cup Final on Sunday 14th July; an incredible, scarcely believable rollercoaster of a game, which genuinely could have swung either way on numerous occasions but ultimately resulted in a win for England over New Zealand by way of a Super Over – who even knew that was a thing?

Admittedly, the World Cup itself is not the longest form of the game, nor the perceived ‘true’ format of cricket, a title which is held by the five-day, test version, but it was nonetheless refreshing to see the 50-over, day-long variant of the sport making headlines around the world rather than the TV-friendly Twenty20 setup.

It’s easy to understand why short form cricket has steadily taken hold and, in some ways, become the prime format of the game. It fits nicely into schedules, competing with sports like football and rugby which don’t require a full day’s time to achieve a result This definitely makes it a more appealing package in terms of promotion and marketing, taking all the most exciting and dramatic moments from a match and concentrating them into a handy, three-hour package.

This has the further advantage of levelling the playing field somewhat – it should come as no surprise that while the big three in international cricket – India, Australia and England – continue to dominate the test arena (and the financial rewards that come from it), there is a far greater chance of success for historic powerhouses such as South Africa or the West Indies, who find it increasingly difficult to compete in the longer formats.

Nestled neatly in between the two extremes is the 50-over format, the World Cup of which came to England this summer and culminated in that final at Lord’s in July.

The match itself may not have been the anticipated all-action classic, with low scores on both sides and a focus on preventing free-flowing, aggressive batting with pragmatic, safety-first bowling. On the surface, that hardly seems like the recipe for high drama and an unforgettable outcome, but as it turned out, the drip-drip nature of the play only added to the tension of the occasion.

When it feels as though not a great amount is happening on the surface, the moments of action, arriving like bolts from the blue, become even more dramatic when they do arrive, adding to the excitement and joy for the spectator. 

While the cricket creeped towards its frankly ridiculous outcome, another ubiquitous summer sport was toiling away on a different channel, seeking its own share of the spotlight. Across London from the Lord’s cricket ground, the men’s singles final of Wimbledon saw two of tennis’s all-time greats, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, going head-to-head once more.

The match ultimately finished three minutes short of five hours, making it the longest ever Wimbledon final, with Djokovic eventually claiming victory over Federer by way of the competition’s first final-set tie break in the championship match, with the scores level at two sets all and 12 games each in the fifth.

This was another encounter that looked like it could could easily go either way. Federer undoubtedly enjoyed the greater support on centre court, but Djokovic’s ability to stay in the tie and actually lead 1-0 and 2-1 on sets, despite being second best for much of the play, demonstrated why he too is one of the game’s most successful players and a serial winner.

Trying to watch the cricket alongside the tennis was almost impossible; flicking over to Wimbledon to check the score repeatedly led to complete engrossment for an extended passage of play, before switching back to the cricket, only to learn that a wicket had fallen or a six clubbed into the grandstand.

This experience highlights one of the factors that makes long-form sport so encapsulating. In the 21st century, this could be described as FOMO – fear of missing out – something cycling’s biggest three-week party, the Tour de France, demonstrates perfectly. In amongst the epic, six or seven hour tests of endurance are sometimes tiny moments of drama that populate the six-minute YouTube highlight reels later in the day.

Perhaps the best example of this came on stage eight of the Tour, a hilly parcours taking in 200km from Macon to Saint Etienne. Eventual winner Thomas De Gendt took a shade over five hours to reach the finish line, having originally led a four-man breakaway group from the off before eventually grinding down his fellow escapees to take victory.

Back in the main pack, surprise race leader Julian Alaphillipe, who would go on to make headlines for his swash-buckling defence of the yellow jersey, re-claimed the overall lead of the race after attacking the main group of favourites in the final kilometres, joined by fellow Frenchman Thibaut Pinot, who effectively staked his claim for the overall win.

Coming right at the end of a long day where, to the uninitiated, nothing much was happening, this moment of action created a frantic, pulsating finish to the stage, as heroic breakaway artist De Gendt dug deep to claim the day’s win and hold off the two home heroes. Watching the gap ebb away on the TV broadcast was unmissable viewing, with multiple questions to be answered before the day was out – would De Gendt claim the deserved win? Would Alaphillipe re-capture the overall lead? Did this mean that Pinot was the most likely to claim overall victory in the remaining stages of the race?

As it turned out, this was just a skirmish in an ultimately classic war – further highlighting the difficulty of condensing three week’s action into a single package and the joy of following the theatre throughout its entirety.

There is a lot to be said for the accessibility of taking sport’s best bits and presenting them in a way that appeals to a wider demographic. Expecting everyone to want to sit down and commit to hours and hours in front of a TV screen or in a crowd might be a thing of the past, creating an understandable fear of declining audiences and reduced advertising revenues as a result.

However, protecting the extended formats of sporting occasions remains essential to maintaining their significance, and hopefully 2019’s rise of the longer occasions will go someway towards stemming the tide of further T20-ising among sport administrators and marketers.