Don't you just hate Giles Clarke?

I dunno whether it's me (it probably is) but this guy just seems like a
public schoolboy. I find his whole manner, tone and most importantly his
views completely old school like a tory politician in the 1980s sort of
snearing a bit like the Spitting Image puppet of Norman Tebbit.

One week he's saying "we've made our position perfectly clear" - the next
thing the EPL is almost certainly on the cards.

lk wrote:

> I dunno whether it's me (it probably is) but this guy just seems like a
> public schoolboy. I find his whole manner, tone and most importantly
> his views completely old school like a tory politician in the 1980s sort
> of snearing a bit like the Spitting Image puppet of Norman Tebbit.
>
> One week he's saying "we've made our position perfectly clear" - the next
> thing the EPL is almost certainly on the cards.

I do not much care for IPL but his assertion that franchise system has never
really worked in English sport is really something that many fans of
English football need to hear about.

He comes across as a stiff snob who is miffed he has been preempted from
making a killing out of an English innovation (Twenty20).

I do not hate him. Just pity his position. Hopefully, Mr. Sanford (his
favourite moneyed man) will be able to help him some.

"Geico Caveman" <spammers-begone@spam.invalid> wrote in message
news:fv8hmr$583$1@aioe.org...
> lk wrote:
>
>> I dunno whether it's me (it probably is) but this guy just seems like a
>> public schoolboy. I find his whole manner, tone and most importantly
>> his views completely old school like a tory politician in the 1980s sort
>> of snearing a bit like the Spitting Image puppet of Norman Tebbit.
>>
>> One week he's saying "we've made our position perfectly clear" - the next
>> thing the EPL is almost certainly on the cards.
>
> I do not much care for IPL but his assertion that franchise system has
> never
> really worked in English sport is really something that many fans of
> English football need to hear about.

Go on then: give us a list of English football clubs that are 'franchises'.

> He comes across as a stiff snob who is miffed he has been preempted from
> making a killing out of an English innovation (Twenty20).
>
> I do not hate him. Just pity his position. Hopefully, Mr. Sanford (his
> favourite moneyed man) will be able to help him some.

For the benefit of accuracy, Adam Sanford is a West Indian medium-paced
bowler of mediocre repute; Allen Stanford is an entirely different kettle of
yams.

Andrew

On Apr 30, 6:39*am, "Andrew Dunford" <adunf...@artifax.net> wrote:
> "Geico Caveman" <spammers-beg...@spam.invalid> wrote in message
>
> news:fv8hmr$583$1@aioe.org...
>
> > lk wrote:
>
> >> I dunno whether it's me (it probably is) but this guy just seems like a
> >> public schoolboy. * *I find his whole manner, tone and most importantly
> >> his views completely old school like a tory politician in the 1980s sort
> >> of snearing a bit like the Spitting Image puppet of Norman Tebbit.
>
> >> One week he's saying "we've made our position perfectly clear" - the next
> >> thing the EPL is almost certainly on the cards.
>
> > I do not much care for IPL but his assertion that franchise system has
> > never
> > really worked in English sport is really something that many fans of
> > English football need to hear about.
>
> Go on then: give us a list of English football clubs that are 'franchises'..

Does it really matter, this difference between 'clubs' that have been
around
for decades and 'franchises' that might be established as part of the
new
process? Or for that matter, another point that Giles Clarke raises,
that
there's never been a successful sports team called 'London Whatever'.
Okay,
not 'London Whatever', but there are plenty of established and
successful
teams like Chelsea (an area within London) or Middlesex (covering not
the
City of London, but a somewhat different geography in the
neighbourhood).
At the end of the day, they are just a brand. The catchment area for
both
players as well as supporters is not restricted to a narrow geography,
be
it Chelsea, Middlesex or Bangalore.

To me, the only real difference between Chelsea and Bangalore Royal
Challengers is that one is an established brand and other is not.
But
brands can be established. Actually, some of the
IPL-sceptics would be surprised to learn how quickly brands can be
established in developing economies that are hungry for quality
products.
For example, it took decades for AT&T and British Telecom, and for
that
matter their Indian cousin Department of Telecom, to establish their
brand
presense, while the next-generation high quality service providers
like
Airtel have become successful brands in a matter of half-a-dozen
years.

Modi just needs to watch out for the quality of his offering: focus on
good, exciting
cricket and do away with meaningless stuff like cheerleaders, Akshay
Kumar's
stunts etc., and IPL would be in good shape in a couple of years.
Who
knows, an Indian entrepreneur might even own a successful EPL team
called
'London Whingers', with home base at Lord's cricket ground.

> > He comes across as a stiff snob who is miffed he has been preempted from
> > making a killing out of an English innovation (Twenty20).
>
> > I do not hate him. Just pity his position. Hopefully, Mr. Sanford (his
> > favourite moneyed man) will be able to help him some.
>
> For the benefit of accuracy, Adam Sanford is a West Indian medium-paced
> bowler of mediocre repute; Allen Stanford is an entirely different kettle of
> yams.

And Giles Clarke is a combination of a mediocre English non-spinner
and a
Cheatralian IPL-non-participant.

SP

On Apr 30, 6:39*am, "Andrew Dunford" <adunf...@artifax.net> wrote:

> For the benefit of accuracy, Adam Sanford is a West Indian medium-paced
> bowler of mediocre repute

a policeman to boot, he is also the only person of carib ancestry to
play international cricket (the caribs being the original inhabitants
of the caribbean whose numbers were greatly reduced by the massacres
and diseases carried by colonial settlers).

<swinging.yorker@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:aed71db2-018d-4f13-a874-ff15765f4ae2@m44g2000hsc.googlegroups.com...
On Apr 30, 6:39 am, "Andrew Dunford" <adunf...@artifax.net> wrote:
> "Geico Caveman" <spammers-beg...@spam.invalid> wrote in message
>
> news:fv8hmr$583$1@aioe.org...
>
> > lk wrote:
>
> >> I dunno whether it's me (it probably is) but this guy just seems like a
> >> public schoolboy. I find his whole manner, tone and most importantly
> >> his views completely old school like a tory politician in the 1980s
> >> sort
> >> of snearing a bit like the Spitting Image puppet of Norman Tebbit.
>
> >> One week he's saying "we've made our position perfectly clear" - the
> >> next
> >> thing the EPL is almost certainly on the cards.
>
> > I do not much care for IPL but his assertion that franchise system has
> > never
> > really worked in English sport is really something that many fans of
> > English football need to hear about.
>
> Go on then: give us a list of English football clubs that are
> 'franchises'.

> Does it really matter, this difference between 'clubs' that have been
> around
> for decades and 'franchises' that might be established as part of the
> new
> process?

Depends on the market place.

> Or for that matter, another point that Giles Clarke raises,
> that
> there's never been a successful sports team called 'London Whatever'.
> Okay,
> not 'London Whatever', but there are plenty of established and
> successful
> teams like Chelsea (an area within London) or Middlesex (covering not
> the
> City of London, but a somewhat different geography in the
> neighbourhood).
> At the end of the day, they are just a brand. The catchment area for
> both
> players as well as supporters is not restricted to a narrow geography,
> be
> it Chelsea, Middlesex or Bangalore.

> To me, the only real difference between Chelsea and Bangalore Royal
> Challengers is that one is an established brand and other is not.

I agree entirely, and the only real obstacle to the Royal Challengers
quickly becoming an established brand is if the start-up costs are too great
in comparison with the early returns. (BTW I'm about as far from being an
economist as can be imagined, so stop me if I'm barking up the wrong tree).

However the likely success of the Royal Challengers in the Indian
marketplace does not to me indicate that an English T20 competition based on
manufactured (franchised, whatever) teams will enjoy similar success. The
difference lies in relative maturity of market. T20 cricket had no strong
domestic hold in India before the IPL came along; however in England the
domestic T20 competition contested by the 18 counties has run successfully
for five years. Cricket fans in England are usually strongly attached to
counties and I find it highly unlikely that they will be keen to support
some new geographical entity, in the same way that I doubt football fans
would react positively to the idea that Liverpool, Everton, Wigan, Bolton,
Manchester City and Man U would band together as 'Lancashire' or 'North
East'. Something similar was tried 15 or so years ago in rugby union and
flopped.

> But
> brands can be established. Actually, some of the
> IPL-sceptics would be surprised to learn how quickly brands can be
> established in developing economies that are hungry for quality
> products.
> For example, it took decades for AT&T and British Telecom, and for
> that
> matter their Indian cousin Department of Telecom, to establish their
> brand
> presense, while the next-generation high quality service providers
> like
> Airtel have become successful brands in a matter of half-a-dozen
> years.

> Modi just needs to watch out for the quality of his offering: focus on
> good, exciting
> cricket and do away with meaningless stuff like cheerleaders, Akshay
> Kumar's
> stunts etc., and IPL would be in good shape in a couple of years.

And get the quantity right (even though I have no idea at this stage what
the right quantity is)

> Who
> knows, an Indian entrepreneur might even own a successful EPL team
> called
> 'London Whingers', with home base at Lord's cricket ground.

I think setting up leagues similar to the IPL in other countries is a silly
idea, unless one wishes to see T20 being the only form of cricket played.

<snip>

Andrew

On Apr 30, 4:47*pm, "Andrew Dunford" <adunf...@artifax.net> wrote:
> <swinging.yor...@gmail.com> wrote in message

<snip>

> > To me, the only real difference between Chelsea and Bangalore Royal
> > Challengers is that one is an established brand and other is not.
>
> I agree entirely, and the only real obstacle to the Royal Challengers
> quickly becoming an established brand is if the start-up costs are too great
> in comparison with the early returns. *(BTW I'm about as far from being an
> economist as can be imagined, so stop me if I'm barking up the wrong tree)..

True. In which case, the ownership would be transferred to someone
else with deeper pockets and more patience. My example of mobile
phone services in India is again relevant here. When the service
first started about 15 years ago, some of the early license winners
were shady operators with little or no knowledge of the business. But
eventually big business houses with deep pockets and professional
managements started buying these guys off and now market forces have
ensured that a few successful operators continue and grow.

> However the likely success of the Royal Challengers in the Indian
> marketplace does not to me indicate that an English T20 competition based on
> manufactured (franchised, whatever) teams will enjoy similar success. *The
> difference lies in relative maturity of market. *T20 cricket had no strong
> domestic hold in India before the IPL came along; however in England the
> domestic T20 competition contested by the 18 counties has run successfully
> for five years. *Cricket fans in England are usually strongly attached to
> counties and I find it highly unlikely that they will be keen to support
> some new geographical entity, in the same way that I doubt football fans
> would react positively to the idea that Liverpool, Everton, Wigan, Bolton,
> Manchester City and Man U would band together as 'Lancashire' or 'North
> East'.

Which might well be the case in England. To an outsider, who has only
a passing interest in what form or shape does the T20 form of the game
eventually succeed in England, if at all, what is amusing is the
vehemance and contempt behind statements such as "... a franchise
called Vodafone Team London owned by an ageing rock star?" (I know
Giles Clarke was quoting someone else here, but he seems to be in
agreement with the sentiment.) I mean, come on, how is that any
different from "... an old football club called Manchester United,
managed by an ageing fat bastard and where the fans are more
interested in WAG stories than the actual scoreline."?

SP

On Wed, 30 Apr 2008 03:02:43 -0700 (PDT), [email]swinging.yorker@gmail.com[/email]
tapped the keyboard and brought forth:


>Does it really matter, this difference between 'clubs' that have been
>around
>for decades and 'franchises' that might be established as part of the
>new
>process? Or for that matter, another point that Giles Clarke raises,
>that
>there's never been a successful sports team called 'London Whatever'.
>Okay,
>not 'London Whatever', but there are plenty of established and
>successful
>teams like Chelsea (an area within London) or Middlesex (covering not
>the
>City of London, but a somewhat different geography in the
>neighbourhood).
>At the end of the day, they are just a brand. The catchment area for
>both
>players as well as supporters is not restricted to a narrow geography,
>be
>it Chelsea, Middlesex or Bangalore.

In terms of failures, Clarke is thinking primarily of the London rugby
league team, which was an attempt to create a new market and was a
giant flop. Or the London franchise in the European American Football
thingummy, which was also a disaster.

It would be a leap into the unknown to attempt to create a new set of
urban franchises.

The English and Indian markets are not starting from the same place.
County cricket has been a professional sport for over a century. It
has had to develop sponsorships for its domestic competitions and its
county clubs and other means of keeping the tills a-chinking for
decades. And substantial numbers of people already go to watch
domestic cricket.

Despite the regular piss-takes about three men and a dog attending
county cricket, they are a wild exaggeration. When the weather's nice
and the schools are on holiday, attendances even at midweek
championship games is often a thousand or two. The one-day games get
more, important ones and T20s often selling out.

As I understand it, the idea of any kind of domestic game in India
being played before a packed house was a wild fantasy before the IPL,
and if the dog comes, he's usually left his master at home.

As I further understand it, there is no other sport in India which
attracts mass audiences to grounds. This is obviously not the case in
England where, despite the caveats above, more people go to an Arsenal
game than go to all the county championship matches on a single day
combined.

T20 came about because the ECB's research found that there was a large
constituency of people who followed their county's progress
religiously in the papers but just couldn't get to games because they
didn't have the time. (There's an even larger constituency of people
who follow their county's progress but can't get to games because they
don't live in their county any more, having taken employment away from
where they grew up. It's not so easy to see how to do much for them.)

They also found that although lots of people would not go to county
matches but would go to internationals, something like 90% of those
declared themselves to be supporters of particular counties.

But the large majority of people didn't want to go to cricket at all
because they far preferred football, although quite a lot of them were
pleased if the England cricket team did well.

It is not very surprising that someone who came up with an attractive
cricket package for the Indian market would do very well, since there
was a massive audience panting for it. The untapped potential was
vast.

The ECB's research has concluded that the untapped potential in the
English market is not anything like as huge as in India. There is no
seething mass of frustrated cricket enthusiasts who are just aching
for something worthwhile to emerge as a domestic game.

If Indian domestic cricket was making $x in 2007, it is making some
enormous multiple of that in 2008: the IPL is effectively a start-up
in a market which was previously empty. How far it will grow is
anybody's guess, because there is so little domestic competition from
other sports.

English cricket made £y in 2007. In normal circumstances, if English
cricket makes £y + 10% in 2008, it would be regarded as a success. Big
numbers bandied about by the IPL may make that look puny, of course,
even though the comparison is very unfair given the relative maturity
of the markets. £y is enough to maintain a fully-professional
structure with 18 county teams and a national team, as well as support
the minor counties, the women's game and the recreational game, so
it's not nothing.

They already have a substantial core audience, a considerable
proportion of which would be hostile to the trampling down of their
traditional loyalties. There is a large penumbra of potential audience
which already has an emotional attachment to an existing county side,
and it is just as likely that someone in this penumbra would use the
effective wipe-out of county cricket in favour of new urban franchises
as an excuse to simply give up being interested at all as be newly
attracted to a glitzy new team.

If the IPL fails, in a sense little will be damaged. There was not
enough of an existing commercial framework for it to be ruinous that
some money was taken out of the Indian game for a few years.

Were a set of EPL urban franchises to fail, it is probable that the
county clubs would have been damaged so irretrievably that the entire
game would collapse.

The ECB's challenge is not how to create an audience out of nothing,
but how to double or triple the size of the audience they already
have, tempered with the knowledge that there is a ceiling on how far
they can get given that football is the national obsession.

Cutting away the bonds which hold the current audience may not be an
intelligent first step to increasing it.

The proponents of city franchises could be right. There may be an
undiscovered mine there with seams of gold a hundred feet thick. But
we already have a mine which produces a reasonably steady supply of
gold, and we wouldn't want that mine to suddenly stop producing while
we search, possibly in vain, for El Dorado.

Cheers,

Mike



--

On Wed, 30 Apr 2008 05:38:30 -0700 (PDT), [email]swinging.yorker@gmail.com[/email]
tapped the keyboard and brought forth:


>Which might well be the case in England. To an outsider, who has only
>a passing interest in what form or shape does the T20 form of the game
>eventually succeed in England, if at all, what is amusing is the
>vehemance and contempt behind statements such as "... a franchise
>called Vodafone Team London owned by an ageing rock star?" (I know
>Giles Clarke was quoting someone else here, but he seems to be in
>agreement with the sentiment.) I mean, come on, how is that any
>different from "... an old football club called Manchester United,
>managed by an ageing fat bastard and where the fans are more
>interested in WAG stories than the actual scoreline."?

Not much. But trying to ridicule the idea of Man U as a successful
football club is going to take a lot more than a silly description.
Using emotive language to torpedo a bad business idea, though, is
often pretty good tactics.

This same Giles Clarke was the one who decided that English cricket
would be much better off financially if it went with Sky rather than
free-to-air and got roundly abused for it - though I would have
thought that you of all people would approve of his stance in that
matter.

I can't say that I like Clarke's demeanour - he seems to be of the
this is my business, I'm running it, and screw the rest of you school
- but he does have his eye firmly fixed on the bottom line. If he has
come to the conclusion that the franchise model used in the IPL would
be commercial suicide in England, then it seems like an excellent idea
to do as much as possible to strangle it at birth, especially if he's
right.

I must say that I'm a bit bemused by the statements that broadcasters
would never go for an 18 team competition, though, on the grounds that
it's too many teams. There are 20 teams in football's premiership, and
they seem to be queueing up to take a slice of that.

Clarke also gave a lot of praise to the IPL's presentation; at
present, none of our grounds could put on a show like the ones in the
IPL - even ignoring the cheerleaders. I'm not quite sure that we could
anyway, because the best time to put the thing on is obviously high
summer, when we don't have the dark evenings to put on a dramatic
floodlit show. But Lord's (as of this season) and possibly The Oval
are the only grounds with anything like that sort of big-screen
capability, and the PA systems are generally rudimentary. Those things
only take money: it's taken for granted at Fenway Park, where the only
show on a normal evening is the baseball.

Given the relative maturity of the English market, it makes more sense
to me to try and beef up and improve the existing product rather than
trying to invent an entirely new one. Most English grounds could do
with heavy redevelopment, and to their credit, quite a few counties
are now getting on with it. Heading off diversionary ideas at the pass
is probably a good idea.

Cheers,

Mike
--

Andrew Dunford wrote:

>> I do not much care for IPL but his assertion that franchise system has
>> never
>> really worked in English sport is really something that many fans of
>> English football need to hear about.
>
> Go on then: give us a list of English football clubs that are
> 'franchises'.
>

Coming from international cricket, where national passions and intense
country vs. country rivalries are the norm, I daresay that that distinction
is lost in the woodwork.

The basic point is that football clubs like Manchester United, Chelsea etc.
have been extremely successful, often with people who have absolutely no
geographic affinity with the location of the club or its name. Mr. Clarke's
insistence that a modification of the current county system, well managed
as it is, is the only way forward, appears to be contrived in face of
contrary evidence seen in England's other big passion.

While one can understand his human reaction to being left behind, and
attempting to pass off the city based rivalry system (which I personally do
not care for) as a fad which will not last (the jury is out on that one),
it does justifiably come across as sour grapes and hollow snobbery.

Another poster has pretty much summed up what I think about the distinction,
so I will leave you two to discuss it.

>> He comes across as a stiff snob who is miffed he has been preempted from
>> making a killing out of an English innovation (Twenty20).
>>
>> I do not hate him. Just pity his position. Hopefully, Mr. Sanford (his
>> favourite moneyed man) will be able to help him some.
>
> For the benefit of accuracy, Adam Sanford is a West Indian medium-paced
> bowler of mediocre repute; Allen Stanford is an entirely different kettle
> of yams.

Thanks for the correction.