The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) has admitted that advanced ticket sales for the UK’s domestic Twenty20 cricket tournament are down by up to 40 per cent.
The tournament's earlier start from last season, which has clashed with the tail-end of the football season, and belt-tightening in the current economic climate have both been cited as reasons for the reduced ticket sales.
It is also believed that cricket fans have chosen to spend money on tickets for the Twenty20 World Cup, held in the UK and starting next week, and the summer-long Ashes series.
“[I am] confident that once the tournament starts, the number of people who watch the cricket over the course of the year will increase significantly,” said ECB head of marketing Will Collinson in the Guardian newspaper.
Cricket chiefs however have expressed greater concerns. Durham chief executive David Harker said: “We've missed a trick in England. It was invented to attract people into the grounds, but we seem to have spent the last few years apologising because it's not 'proper cricket'. It is a sporting entertainment package in its own right. You just have to differentiate that from the longer form of the game.”
The ECB has had a commercially poor start to the cricket season following matches between England and the West Indies earlier this month. The Test match at Chester-le-Street had a number of unsold seats and for the one-day international at Gloucestershire, the ECB had to employ a buy-one-get-one-free deal to achieve a sell-out.
The domestic Twenty20 competition started yesterday and finishes with the finals at Edgbaston on August 15.
