The stomach required to preserve red ball

Sarah Keane witnessed her first Test match since becoming CI CEO. What did she make of her nostalgic financial burden?

Sarah Keane with Ireland debutant Reuben Wilson at Stormont. 📸: Cricket Ireland

It’s a quandary familiar to club cricketers everywhere. A new partner comes onto the scene during the winter, cold weather and dark days allowing for plenty of socialising inside bars and restaurants of your choice.

Then the summer comes around. The weather doesn’t always improve but daylight increases. The cricket season arrives. Tuesday nights are taken up by net sessions and Saturdays are written off.

The new partner, not familiar with our curious sport, is baffled. For the bones of five months, you are out of action for at least one day every weekend when well-rounded friends with functioning social lives are elsewhere. You are choosing to stand in a field with 10 peers over quality time with loved ones.

Why sacrifice so much for a sport that, depending on both skill level and luck, often offers scant reward?

Eventually, a decision has to be made. The new love interest either accepts us for all our cricketing foibles or they move on.

Last week at Stormont felt like Irish cricket’s own version of this process. In this analogy, club cricketers are the general Irish cricket population combined with traditionalists within the offices of Cricket Ireland. New CEO Sarah Keane is the love interest (not literally). Having been in the job for a few months, Keane now is confronted with a futile yet nostalgic pursuit that impinges on her ability to get the most out of her new relationship with Irish cricket.

Much like we must convince our partners that there is a point to spending Saturdays watching others have a go after nicking off in the first over, Irish cricket must prove the worth of Test matches to an outsider with no romantic attachment to the old format.

Club cricket is an expensive pursuit, both in terms of equipment, match fees and time commitment. Ditto Test matches for Cricket Ireland. Neither provide any tangible benefit - vibes and social connection are difficult to quantify for clubbies while CI loses a high six-figure sum every time red ball is hosted.

In both cases, for the charade to continue, someone needs to be convinced. When hosting New Zealand last week in Stormont, Irish cricket made its first big pitch to new leadership to protect the oldest format. How well did it do?

To be clear, there is no indication that Irish red ball is on any immediate chopping block. There are signs, though, that Keane is going to challenge the orthodox view that red ball is a format worth expanding. Plenty of ears pricked up when she appeared on Indo Sport with Joe Molloy - the biggest sports podcast in Ireland - back in March:

“We’ve three formats, Test cricket, ODIs…and then T20 which is the shorter form of the game,” she said. “From that perspective, are we trying to be good at all of these? Is that realistic in terms of players we have, money we have to host events and go to events?

“Do we have to start looking at where we put more resources? I’m excited about that because these discussions are where you develop a vision from. Some of these will be very difficult for traditionalists if you’re saying, look, Test cricket is very hard for us, it’s four days, five days, and financially that’s very challenging. Also our young people are not doing enough of it, where does that leave us vs something else? I’m a great believer in having those honest conversations.”

Attending days one and two in Stormont, Keane took in Test cricket for the first time since joining CI - if not for the first time ever. If there was no Test match this week, CI would in theory have had an extra few hundred grand to prepare the women for the upcoming T20 World Cup. Or the men to add to their 50-over preparation in a bid to qualify for next year’s ODI showpiece

Instead, Ireland hosted the Blackcaps in a one-off fixture featuring zero competitive context and no financial reward. Of course a cricketing outsider is going to wonder why we continue down this self-destructive path.

As a fixture, Stormont wasn’t quite a waste of time. Try instead a rung further up on the competitive ladder. For one session, Ireland truly challenged the Blackcaps, reminding enough of their top six of the importance of locating the off stump and playing the ball late. Four wickets on the morning session ensured the visitors got some sort of challenge prior to their date at Lord’s with England.

Thereafter, it was a procession. Ireland were woefully outmatched and underprepared. They looked incapable of offering any threat with the old ball or surviving the new Dukes when asked to bat. Half-centuries for Lorcan Tucker and Andy McBrine in an innings defeat was an entirely predictable result prior to day one. At least Stephen Doheny passed 50 to show the ever struggling top order could offer something of value.

As an occasion, Stormont was fine. Not spectacular, but not bad either. A daily attendance of 1,500 showed a lack of ambition. As does the 4,200 expected for the India T20s coming up at the same venue. Stands may be hard to procure and expensive, but there has to be some sort of outside the box thinking if India offer Vaibhav Sooryavanshi an international debut. Companies renting out cherry pickers to see over the trees from the Newtownards Road will make more money than CI on the gate if they don’t somehow increase the capacity.

In the freebie section last week, the pull of the red ball meant that the First and Deputy First Ministers of Northern Ireland popped over from the assembly buildings next door. These figures tend not to show up at white ball events given their lack of prestige. CI were more than happy to cash in on the photo opp and grease the wheels in a bid to get funding over the line for the wider development of the Stormont estate, a project that will benefit the cricket facilities.

But political flesh-pressing does not offset an expensive fixture in front of a sparse crowd. No performance benefit and no commercial benefit. Safe to say Stormont didn’t do a great job of convincing new leadership that Test cricket is worth the investment.

To be fair, in its current guise, it isn’t.

There is a captive audience for compelling red ball cricket in this country. The very podcast on which Keane caused jitters, Indo Sport, has dedicated significant time to Test cricket. Chris Woakes’ one-armed heroics against India were covered. As was England’s Ashes debacle. Ed Joyce was interviewed with a view to discussing his experience of being an Ashes tourist in 2007. The only reason the recording went ahead is because he insisted on also including a segment on the current goings on in Irish cricket.

The current product provided by Ireland is not compelling enough to draw in these casual viewers (note how red ball garners more non-cricketing media interest than white ball - Ireland’s most recent T20 World Cup in Sri Lanka was barely covered). With good reason. Who would take a day off work to watch an underprepared Ireland being lambs to a Kiwi slaughter?

Something has to give. Either Test cricket isn’t worth putting resources into or we need a change in approach.

Firstly, find a way of selling more tickets. There is no professional red ball cricket in England at the moment, with county cricket in T20 mode. Were the retirees that flock to county grounds targeted with advertising campaigns to draw them to Belfast? They wouldn’t even have had to pack their passport.

Were clubs such as Surrey, who have done a stellar job of rebuilding their red ball audience, approached for ideas on how to shift Test match tickets? Through old club captain Gary Wilson, CI should have a good relationship with those at the Oval.

The biggest way of drawing in crowds, though, is to win. To do that, they players need more domestic red ball cricket. Remind Irish batters what it’s like to face a moving ball. Play three First Class games prior to the Test, rather than just one. Re-introduce red ball to club cricket.

Cue outcry from the bean-counters. According to Heinrich Malan, the Emerald Challenge FC match cost in the region of €50,000. Perhaps fat can be trimmed there, but the finances are still brutal.

All of which ignores the input of players and coaches. Yes, they are cricket traditionalists hard-wired to love the longest format. But even from a white ball perspective, when asking coaches in the Irish system if limited overs cricketers need to first hone their skills with a red ball, they answer in the affirmative.

There are countless factors behind Ireland failing to reach an ODI World Cup since 2015 - an absence which has seen the sport’s visibility plummet at home - but one of them is the demise of a regular domestic First Class competition. The last time Ireland brought through a big crop of home grown players was in 2019/20, names such as Tector, Tucker, Little and Delany emerging on the scene. Coincidentally or otherwise, they were the last Irish-developed group with access to the red ball Interprovincial Championship and First Class cricket with Ireland Wolves.

If red ball is abandoned as a strategy, whatever about the future of Test cricket and pulling in an audience, what would be the consequences for talent development more generally? Senior figures within CI are already worried about the volume of recent men’s debutants emerging from overseas. Not because of their accents, but because of what it says about the state of this country’s pathway.

A handful home Tests each summer will draw in further eyeballs if the product is compelling. To achieve that, players need to be better. Spend money to make money. Next year’s ICC funding increasing from (circa) $13 million to $17m certainly helps, but the next cycle is widely expected to drop due to broadcast factors in India.

There is a world in which Irish red ball cricket can thrive without becoming a dominant part of the calendar. But it will take plenty of money and even more stomach to find it. Everything you hear about Keane suggests she has the latter. “Direct,” “Straight shooter” and “Takes no shit” are phrases used by those who have worked with the new boss.

We can therefore hope she has the gumption to make a decent fist at ensuring recent events in Stormont become a thing of the past. Given the as of yet lack of detailed public explanation of her vision (it would be unsurprising if she herself is not yet sure of this, considering the number of fires that needed putting out when she started the job), we can’t yet be sure of this.

Quite a few club cricketers are fortunate enough to meet understanding partners who acknowledge the benefits of long Saturdays featuring a lack of runs or wickets. Value can also be found in Irish red ball cricket, be it performance or commercial. It will take exceptional leadership to find it.

Maybe it’s not completely hopeless to think that Keane will ultimately agree. Perhaps the results of her tough conversations will appease red ball lovers. Everyone wants answers instantly, but until we hear fully-formed thoughts after a lengthy period of acclimatising to the job, traditionalists who are fearful for what comes next will simply have to wait in hope.