Are the interpros fit for purpose?
If players and fans are losing faith, where does Ireland's professional domestic structure go from here?
Back in September, Chris Martin caused a stir when pictures of him attending a club game between Railway Union and Cork County started circulating. Generating viral news articles wasn’t the only effect the Coldplay frontman had on Irish cricket.
While the band was in Dublin for a four-night run at Croke Park (Garth Brooks eat your heart out), their presence came up during an interpro fixture played in Pembroke Cricket Club, just over five kilometres away. When the Leinster Lightning were hosting the North West Warriors, players on both sides were keen to wrap up proceedings in a timely manner so they could dash across the River Liffey to Jones’ Road.
Irish cricket would be forgiven for thinking that it had been put In My Place. The Clocks are ticking on the viability of the domestic pathway. Clearly, if making money by playing sport is not as alluring as belting out Viva La Vida - the merits of the song not withstanding - something has gone wrong. What can be done to give Ireland’s domestic professional infrastructure (for male players) a shot in the arm? How can we tell the interpros that we want to Fix You?
They say the first step of solving any problem is to acknowledge there is one. Defining what the actual issue is remains an altogether different matter.
A major strand is how the players themselves feel. The Coldplay game was a once off, a mismatch between two teams of a vastly different quality on a used pitch. No one is suggesting that anything improper occurred while the game was actually on. Is it really the end of the world if some players had one eye on a concert which was one of the most popular the country has seen in recent years?
In isolation, no. Yet this isn’t the only example of a lack of player buy-in to the domestic structure. Earlier in the season, a number of interpro players expressed the belief that their performances would have no bearing on the national squad. Some also noted that senior Ireland coaches no longer attended games as often as they once did.
In national selection meetings in recent years, statistics for what would be required from an interpro player to earn Ireland recognition have been discussed. One person involved suggested that batters have to average in the 70s over a consistent period, a feat which is difficult given the inconsistent quality of Irish pitches. Such numbers have likely been communicated to players.
It remains unclear how widespread negative attitudes towards the interpros are among those involved. One senior Ireland player pushed back against the idea that the competitions are losing their value. He is of the opinion that prospective Ireland players should be so dogged in their determination that their performances force national coaches to pay attention, whether they attend games or otherwise.
I don’t have figures for how many games Ireland coaches have watched in-person. Whether they are attending games or not is almost immaterial, though. If enough players believe that they won’t be noticed, then they won’t buy in and the standard of cricket suffers. If even just a handful of players lose respect for the competition, the chances of producing a good standard of cricket, necessary to develop the next crop of international talent, can only diminish. In this case, perception is reality.
Then there is fan sentiment. In some ways, this is difficult to quantify. The interpros are still a new concept. It takes a generation, if not longer, to develop hardcore support bases. Naming the sides after provinces certainly helped this process, adding a parochialism to proceedings, but how many people can truly say they are a Munster Reds diehard? Regular player movement between provinces, while necessary to ensure an even distribution of talent away from major population centres, diminishes localism.
In other ways, fan feeling is quite straightforward to measure. Hundreds of people turned up at The Hills to watch the first interpro of the competition in its current guise when Leinster Lightning took on the Northern Knights in 2013. Anyone who has flicked on a YouTube stream this year knows crowds rarely reach a fraction of that now. It’s a good day if those on the boundary outnumber the players and staff being paid to be there.
The streaming of matches in recent years has, in many ways, been a revelation. It does allow the handful of diehards an excellent excuse for procrastination during the working day. Yet even this has a caveat. In recent years, FanCode, an Asian streaming service, took over the rights for broadcasting the interpros in that part of the world. The viewing numbers on YouTube subsequently plummeted. The geographic make-up of the audience became clear.
There is an old saying that Indian cricket fans don’t like cricket, they like Indian cricket. At risk of doing a number of people a disservice, most sub-continent viewers are not watching thanks to their love of Ryan MacBeth or Ruhan Pretorius. Thousands are inevitably tuning in because broadcasting cricket creates a market to bet on it. Numerous figures have been caught at interpros engaging in ‘court-siding’, the practice of attending matches to relay live information before the stream broadcasts events to a global audience. It allows gamblers, bookies, or both to get ahead of the market and vastly increase their winnings.
Just two out of 15 interpro games this season reached 10,000 views on YouTube. The Senior Cup final, an amateur club competition, surpassed 20,000. Irish cricket people care significantly more for their clubs, institutions which have laid roots and cultivated relationships for centuries, than their provinces. Such a fact should warn Cricket Ireland off putting the interpro streams behind a paywall, an idea which has been floated.
If some players are losing faith and fans aren’t exactly enamoured, what is the purpose of the interpros? If drawing in punters was a priority, Cricket Ireland would devise marketing strategies and charge an entrance fee. They would also have installed floodlights at a ground, thus enabling evening T20 games for a post-work audience. Planning permission issues make this difficult.
Instead, the goal is to give senior internationals game time between Ireland series, all while developing promising players. For the provinces, separate entities to Cricket Ireland even if plenty of their budget comes from the top, the main aim is to win silverware. That balance between trophy pictures in front of a sponsor’s hoarding and giving youth a chance differs from province to province, depending on who you talk to and their opinion of their rivals.
Munster would be a strong example of this difficulty. Earlier this season, when shorn of their internationals and a handful of other players through work commitments, the southern province borrowed bodies from the Northern Knights to fill a team. Their other option was to use some younger players from their emerging side. They were not deemed ready to step up and compete at that level. This became a widespread controversy before one particular game, but an interpro figure said that Munster were regularly asking rivals for players behind the scenes.
Munster were always going to struggle to compete for silverware. Critics of the loans pointed to this when asking what harm would there have been in giving the kids a chance, in showing that there was a pathway to playing professional cricket in Munster, a province which regularly takes to the field without a homegrown player in its XI. Rightly or wrongly, that decision was not taken as Munster prioritised their chances of being competitive over developing their own players.
Other provinces are guilty of this as well. On multiple occasions in recent years, an unrecognised name has popped up on a scorecard to fill a hole in a starting XI. Further enquiries almost always reveal that these players are either overseas club pros or passport holders brought over for a first look, instead of a recent graduate of Ireland U19s.
This, ultimately, is the competition’s biggest weakness. Too often the quality of cricket relies on players who are not already within the Irish system. Rather than a xenophobic rant, this criticism points to the volatility of hoping enough clubs pay enough players of a decent standard every year. They must also be willing and available to take on extra work beyond what the club, their original employer, asks of them.
Last year, 73 per cent of interpro matches saw senior Ireland players available. This year, that figure dropped to 60 per cent. More games without top Irish talent ensures more time spent scrambling for players good enough to fill the gap. More often than not, this process failed. Multiple players expressed a view that interpros without the Ireland players did nothing for their development or international ambitions.
What to do?
One senior player expressed a desire to relegate the current provincial model to a development pathway.
This summer, first class cricket returned in the form of the Emerald Challenge, a one-off game between two new teams: the Raiders and the Strikers (the player in question could not remember off the top of his head which one he lined out for). This was, for all intents and purposes, an intersquad game between Test hopefuls in preparation for the red ball game against Zimbabwe.
Next year, these two sides are set to play more first class games against each other. Red ball will be the dominion of these new franchises, not the provinces. One idea suggested is for white ball cricket to go this way as well. Reduce the number of teams playing, thus increasing the quality of the games. Instead, use the current provincial teams as a development competition. The interpros would no longer have List A, or even, in all likelihood, professional status.
At this stage, it remains unclear if such a drastic change is being seriously considered. If Cricket Ireland does go down this franchise route, using the Raiders of the Lost Ark for both first class and List A fixtures, the top domestic clashes would certainly be of a higher quality.
Yet what sort of competitive structure has only two teams? It isn’t a competition at all, but rather a series of intersquad games. Perhaps an emerging or U23 side could be added akin to what the West Indies have done in their domestic competition, but is a league made up of contracted international players, young kids still living with their parents, and no one in between, a sustainable product?
In terms of the interpro pathway, do the provinces have enough emerging talent to fill these teams without the senior internationals? Club pros almost certainly wouldn’t play if these games were not List A. Match fees, already on the low side (when I used to commentate on the stream, I was offered a higher daily rate than the players) would likely diminish or disappear altogether.
Senior players may well prefer such a structure which guarantees better games, but I can’t see it happening. Firstly, too much money has been invested in the interpro branding to cut provincial teams out of List A cricket. Aside from paying for grounds, officials and match fees, the stream alone costs Cricket Ireland a hefty sum. They also pay Cricinfo a five-figure fee to cover the games on their website. All that money invested in growing the profile of the provinces will have been for nought if their status is relegated.
Equally, when Cricket Ireland released their new strategic plan a number of months ago, they stated that they wanted the provinces to deliver first class cricket by 2027. They also want other European countries - presumably Netherlands and Scotland - to enter teams into the provincial competitions by the same year.
Note that use of the word ‘provincial’ - Cricket Ireland’s own term. It is a big stretch to suggest that the provinces will be in a position to deliver first class cricket and play in an international competition in 2027 if they only fulfil a development league in 2025. Should List A cricket be taken away from them, the provincial unions, which can already at times have difficult relationships with CI, would see this as a slap in the face. CI is attempting to work better with the provinces, not antagonise them.
There is a line of thought that, without its current crop of internationals - many of whom form the last generation of county cricketers - Ireland does not have enough quality players for a four-team competition. This is only partly true. Ireland has enough quality players, but not enough in their control. Domestic contracts would solve plenty of woes. Multiple club players with day jobs, ones who do have the talent to be useful domestic options, have turned down interpro call-ups because the games are during the week.
As things stand, the money for contracts doesn’t seem to be there. Creativity is required to fix the problem. As is the case with most issues discussed on this site, Cricket Ireland’s new head of high performance, Graeme West, will have a significant say in what happens next - be it higher match fees, piecemeal contracts or the drastic solution of reducing the number of teams. There may be a different fix which more intelligent, well-paid minds can envisage.
The lack of county cricket thanks to ICC full membership has been referenced plenty of times when explaining Ireland’s talent production. Now, five years after Irish players dropped out of the county circuit, Ireland has taken a step back in its bid to fill the development gap.
Cricket Ireland has international plans for its domestic structures. It has learned the hard way with the Euro Slam that, without solid foundations, such grand ideas can fall flat on their face. To avoid the same embarrassment, but more importantly to preserve a development structure which has already gone backwards, something needs to be done.
Otherwise, who knows what will happen should an interpro game clash with an Oasis gig next summer.