Steven Elworthy, Surrey County Cricket CEO: ‘Is County Cricket Sustainable?' (Ep66)

25:03I always have been. I think even when I was living in South Africa and playing in South Africa, it was one of the most aspirational competitions in the world to want to play in. I had a stint at Lancashire in 96. I had a stint at Trent Bridge in 2003. And I absolutely loved it. And I think we're still seeing a huge appetite for county cricket from international players. When you have a look at the quality of the overseas professionals that we attract to come and play in the county championship, That must tell you a huge amount about the competition itself. And I'll defy anybody that says that it's struggling because it has to have a place in the calendar.

25:40We had over 55 ,000, 60 ,000 people come to county championship cricket last year at Surrey, just ourselves. The one change that I've seen in this and the viewership that we've seen is we were, a couple of years ago, we were, by the ECB, allowed to start streaming non-televised county cricket. Our viewership on our county stream now, and we nearly, you know, Sky and the Odd Occasion have taken our broadcast from a streaming point of view. That's the quality of the stream that we're putting out there. The numbers we're seeing on the stream are just unbelievable. And I think that has given it a real impetus.

26:17And that's all around the country. That's not just us. I think the streaming numbers are incredibly powerful. And they tell a huge story about the county game. Again, you're at the pinnacle of county championships. if we're going to Glamorgan or if we're going to Lancashire or Yorkshire or whatever it may be, 55 ,000 to 60 ,000, how does that compare? Are they still getting that interest? No, they're not. And we need to be honest about that. They are struggling with some of the county championships. I think some of them are between probably 7 ,000 to 10 ,000 across the summer, and that's seven home four-day games.

26:51So you can work out the daily average potentially of how many people are going to watch. So it's not across the board without a shadow of doubt. But this is the point about some of the stuff you're saying as a business. One of the things we've invested in, and one of the things we drive, we're upwards of 20 ,000 members at the moment. I think membership is such a critical element to the sustainability and the lifeblood of the club. And our membership is a real golden thread that runs through the club on that. What does it mean to be a member? Well, it depends on which membership you've got. But fundamentally, if you're buying a county membership, you can access any domestic county cricket free of charge.

27:26You can walk in, show your membership card, and you can come in anytime you like. And on a ranking table point of view, if you think about the most expensive membership to the cheapest membership, we're probably mid-table. We invested in the, it's now called the SSE Energy Solutions Stand, that stand that's built to the right of the pavilion. That is a members facility. We built that specifically to cater for the members that we have. And we'll have anything between 4 ,000 and 6 ,000 members pitch up to a county game tomorrow, Hampshire, at home. We're expecting 5 ,000, 5 ,500 members pitching up to watch a county game of cricket, which is incredible.

28:04But that's not across the board. I think this is the point I think I made right at the beginning. When you separate business and cricket, I think from a performance point of view, if we don't have long-form Red Bull cricket, I think you'll see a decline in the skill levels of our players. That is where you learn the game. That is the, I'll say, finishing school is the wrong phrase, but you go there to learn. When you're bowling, the skipper throws you the ball after you've bowled 25 overs because you've got the new ball and it's over 81 and he's saying, right, it's five o 'clock in the afternoon.

28:38I need you to come in with a new ball and take me a car. You know what I mean? That's where you really learn about your mental resilience, your physical, your body. have I got game plan A, B, C or D and how am I going to get through this? That's where you learn and that's where you learn as a batter, bowler, fielder and your concentration levels. So I think we've got to do everything we can to predict it's time on task, it's quality cricket and you want the best players playing against themselves as often as possible. Can we leverage the success of short form, the attention that's grabbed the new audience that it's bringing to bring those people that hadn't previously maybe engaged to something like county cricket so we can get them in the games that aren't the short form, but still showing fantastic sport product.

29:18Absolutely. I think that's one thing, if I'm really critical about the sport, it's the one thing the sport hasn't done really well is how you convert the new audience to the longer form. I think it's probably years that that happens, right? That's not going to happen overnight. There are some, and it's a big generalization, because I think as you grow older, you get to appreciate the game more, and you probably want to see a bit more of a chess match, a chess match of cricket, right? Not chess match. Because four-day cricket and test cricket is a game of chess. And the intricacies of it all are absolutely incredible when you get into it and you can get sucked in quite quickly.

29:57But I think, again, back to the stream, we allow members and we allow anybody who comes into the ground during lunch and tea to be able to go onto the field. The stream has opened up so many more people to be able to come down to their game to watch it, but also they know they can walk on the field. And the age group of the fans that are coming to watch County Championship now, you can see a noticeable difference, particularly when they get out on the field because you see the kids with their bats and balls and they're playing on the field. Absolutely brilliant. That's really interesting. Before we do some of these shows, I ask around people and just say, is there anything you'd like to know?

30:35And one of the things that came back, tongue-in-cheek, but it's actually a good point on that, is how do you change a game where you look around the stadium and you have 70 people over 60 in there and that's the attendance. And I thought, okay. But then actually here it's saying that's not actually the case now. That's an older way of looking at it. I think it is. I think it is. And I think we've got to, I think we've probably got to put our hands up as a game and say we haven't really marketed and promoted it properly. I think there's been a real focus around probably your more commercially driven competitions.

31:06And I always hate myself for saying this, but I think about when I played the game. I played 60 over cricket. I played 55 over cricket. I played 50 over cricket. I played 45 over cricket. I played 40 over cricket. And then I retired just as 20 over cricket was starting. If you think about the 100, the innovation, and this is the thing I battle with from a cricket point of view, cricket seems to think that innovation is just knocking off a few overs. And that's innovation because we're reducing it. And we've all heard, oh, we're time poor, and we don't have this, and we don't have that, and we need to cater for the new market and all that sort of stuff.

31:40And I disagree with that because some of the best-selling matches we have, last finals day, it's one of the longest days in cricket, three T20 games back-to-back, it's one of the first days that sells out. Double headers in the 100. Clearly, there's not a time issue because people are prepared to come to double headers for the whole length of both double headers. So I think the point being is, is the way the game, the way the 100 has been produced is innovation. It's not the fact that it's 20 balls less than T20 cricket. And it's not the fact that it's 60 overs to 50 overs to 40 overs. That is not innovation.

32:15That's just reducing it. The format itself is the same. It's 22 yards, it's three wickets, there's a ball, you bowl, and away you go. That's cricket. But I think we fall into that trap that thinking innovation is just a reduction in time. It's not. It's about how we produce it, how we market and promote it, and how we drive the audience. Because they've all got different things. The beauty of cricket is you've got a product for everybody. It's like music, classical music. You people love the nuances of classical music. You're going to watch opera. You've also got hip hop. You've got R &B. You've got people.

32:45They have different genres, and they've got different support in different places. And that's the beauty of the game. It's got something for everybody. But I think we need to hold our hands up and say we haven't really done a good job in promoting championship cricket. Whose responsibility is that? Is that the counties? Is it a centralized body? How can we improve that? I think it's all of us. I think it's all of us. And I think we're doing it now when we seem to have gathered a bit of momentum behind it. We've got a festival of Red Bull cricket. We started it last year. And I know that the counties and a number of the membership groups have been circling behind this.

33:14And there's a championship of Red Bull, there's a champion of Red Bull cricket going on. And I think it's about people understanding the value of the game, not only to each of the clubs and the members, but also to the actual professional sport itself and the players themselves. And they love it. You're still the players and you see to the PCA, the competition they want to win the most is the championship. Simple. It's as simple as that. They love the Blast. They love the Metro Bank 50. You know, all of those. And it's fantastic. But the one that counts the most to them is the championship. You mentioned how much cricket there is there.

33:48And there is loads, right? It's endless. And it's great in many ways, but it does create its issues. We talk in rugby a lot. The calendar alignment is a challenge when some of the big rugby clubs lose their international to international rugby. we're now in such like a star driven culture people follow athletes as much as they do teams cricket the power of the athletes and individuals is incredible as well hence why you know the back players move around franchises people will go and support those franchises often dependent on where some of their favorite players go how how much of an issue is it for a county championship when you lose some of the best players that you have to really sell maybe a county championship product two other forms of cricket.

34:28How much of an issue is that as you try and grow or re-establish the county game when the stars, the big people, as you said, that are coming in may not always be playing and therefore aren't there for you to leverage the value of? Yeah, that's the real challenge. And I think that's why, you know, it's what your definition of success is. I think, yes, obviously, people wearing trophies are a key driver and they want to put their hands on that trophy. But we also, we pride ourselves and a key marker of success is how many players we produce for England. Our pathway needs a huge amount of credit for the number of players that are generated through the pathway of the quality and the talent that we've got coming through and the identification of those players.

35:06And we see that as combined success, that we are producing players for England and we're also competing in the championship. And it's the way of the world. Players are going to be with you for a couple of games and they're not. But that's why winning it over the course of a summer for a period of time where you've got 14 championship matches over the course from the beginning of April to the end of September, the best team at the end wins. And everybody's going to go through that, whether it's test match players you lose or it's white ball players you use or it's potentially white ball players wanting to go play at MLC.

35:44There's all sorts of things. and even some of the players that are playing in the IPL because it cuts across some of our domestic summer. But at the end of the day, it's a true test of your pathway. It's a true test of your squad. It's a true test of your management, of your players, be that the pitches that you play on, the different types of the year, and at the end of the summer, you end up with a champion. But again, it's your perception of success. You can be very unlucky, and you can be playing a couple of games down south, and it's absolutely pouring with rain, but everybody in the north is playing.

36:18And you lose the championship by five points because they won a game and you drew because it was rained out. It's part of life. You just, you can't be beholden to that. But that's why I say, I think we measure success in so many different ways. What kind of budgets do you have around a playing side to try and run a county team? We have a salary cap from a playing point of view and you have to operate within that cap. depending on the number of England players you've got and depending on the players that potentially come off England contracts and come back, you have a sort of like a grace period.

36:54You have parachutes to be able to get back within the cap. What is the cap? The cap is just over three million pounds. So you're allowed one T20 player that's outside of the cap so long as they only play in blast. So you have to stay within the cap. You can spend up to the cap, some don't, and that's up to them and how they manage the squads that they've got. But we certainly know we're in the region of 75%. If you think of even in a lower year, it's less than 10 % and in a higher year, it's probably 5%. Because Vic was talking about when we were looking at the 100 franchise and its ability to compete at the top table, the inability of the 100 through a cap to pay top players was a struggle for some of the recruitment of top players now because you're getting such big deals in and around the game.

37:39And prioritization, I guess you have to prioritize now because you can't play every tournament. Is there a world where in today's sporting environment, that needs to be more flexible? They have to start kind of treating it like a modern sporting product, which ultimately is generally paying players a little bit more to get the best people into the game to then deliver on the product side. Yeah, I think that's the challenge for us because I think if we as administrators, we don't address some of these issues, I think the players will make the decision for us because they will make their own minds up.

38:08And I can't blame them. I think of myself as a player, and everybody knows as a player you're going to have to retire between touch wood that you don't pick up any injuries and there's early retirement or you're forced to retire. But you're going to retire between probably 35 and 38, somewhere around there, or probably even slightly earlier, depending on whether you're a bowler or a batter. You're probably between 32 and 38. You know you're going to retire. So you know there's an end point. So you have to maximize the revenue you generate. You're managing your own business. Your body's your own business.

38:40You've got to manage it and you've got to manage your income accordingly. And I don't blame players for doing that. So I think from an administration point of view, we've got to make sure that we allow that sort of flexibility. And this is the balance between Surrey County Cricket Club keeping players and making sure that they are Surrey players through and through, but allowing them the opportunity to play in some of these franchise competitions that generate them significant amounts of money. They're always going to need a home base to come back to. That's the point. When they're playing franchise cricket around the world, they get injured.

39:11They're not going to the Mumbai Indians Medical Center to get fixed, or they're not going to a medical center in the States to get fixed. Where are they coming? They're coming back to Surrey to get themselves right again. That is the point. We are here to help them do their job, because when they walk across that white line, we need to make sure that we have done everything we can as administration and the team behind the team has done everything we can, that when they walk across that white line, they're fully prepared and ready to go. You do a huge amount of work with community and grassroots and everything, don't you?

39:45And making sure that the opportunities are provided in the game of cricket. What are you seeing right now? We've talked about all of this and how cricket's changed and the dynamics. When you're doing your work in the community, when you're bringing people into the game, what are the kids most excited about? Are they in here looking at test match cricket? Are they in here just focused on short form? How are you doing a lot of that work? and how are you seeing this feeder system evolve? I think the thing for us is we don't really talk about format to start. We just need somebody to pick up a bat and a ball and play.

40:16We just want them to play. And it's not necessarily about high elbow, side-on action, those sorts of things. It's about see ball, hit the ball, bowl, get some of the principles right, make sure you hold the bat correctly, that type of stuff. Make sure you hold the ball properly. Try and make sure they're armed straight. They're not throwing. A couple of little things like that, but just get them enthused by actually playing this board. I think I speak now specifically from a Surrey point of view. I think we've lost contact over the years with maybe some of our local communities. And I think we've seen the success of Ace as an example, that we've lost some of that connection because Ace has just been, it's just flown.

41:01It's been absolutely incredible. and that's specifically targeting the Afro-Caribbean community. And that's very prevalent around Southeast London, particularly around the Oval. But I think the thing for us is if you've got a talented young kid and they want to improve their cricket career and they want to go somewhere, you know you can go to an independent school because there are cricket independent schools out there. We all know who those independent schools are. So we've launched now in our local community, we've launched a six-form cricket program. and I think we're in about eight schools at the moment and by the end of this year we'll be in about 14.

41:36And that's a sixth form program which has cricket embedded in their curriculum. We have coaches, we fund and we send them into the schools and it's part of their curriculum. They go to gym, they play cricket, it's part of their curriculum and in the evening they've got nets. So we've targeted specifically schools that have got facilities that potentially we can play. What I think we'll probably do from this point now is because that's all at sixth form is we're going to probably put our foot on the ball when we get to about 14-odd schools, and we're going to start driving cricket down the year groups to start at year seven.

42:09So we end up with these state schools in the local area that have cricket as part of their curriculum. It is just fantastic. We've got about 70 to 80 kids at the moment in the state school cricket program at sixth form. By the end of this year, we'll probably have close on 140, and then we're going to start driving it down. But for us, that's trying to broaden the base. We've done all sorts of things like sometimes you're restricted by personnel, numbers of personnel to be able to go out and see people. So we copied Edgebiston. They started it actually up at Edgebiston. They created this platform which you could submit videos.

42:42So how do you get onto the pathway? How do you get talent ID? You submit a video. So what we've done is we've copied that idea and we now have 1 ,000, 1 ,500 kids submit their videos to our pathway coaches so they can have a look at it and they'll have a look at all the, you know, a couple of forward defensives, a couple of hooks, a couple of bowls, specific content that they can look at. But that's opened up our eyes to a whole range of kids all of a sudden that are there. Because I think kids and parents with means are always going to find a way to get their kids into a program somewhere, whether it's at a club or it's through a Dynamo's program or whatever it happens to be.

43:20It's the kids that really struggle from a transport point of view. They don't have the facilities. They don't have a bat and a ball. Those are things we need to break those barriers and be able to get them to play. Are private schools still the major feeder into a county system? Or is it getting better? It's definitely getting better. And I think it depends on where you are in the world, because you speak to Tim Bostock up at Durham, most of their kids come through the state school program. But then you go down to Somerset and they've got four fantastic independent schools that feed them down there.

43:49So I think it depends on where you are in the world. And it's also quite difficult. I know we have these conversations. I'm not trying to put in excuses for this, but there are a lot of talented state school kids who picked up and are then given a scholarship to go to an independent school. Suddenly, oh, you've come through a private school. No, you actually came through either a club system or a state school program or you are a talent ID'd, and then you get given a scholarship and you end up at an independent school, which is fine. I get that. But I think that sometimes skews some of the numbers because they're quite aggressive.

44:24Some of the independent schools, I think, are giving as much as 110 % bursaries type of stuff. So we're dealing with that. But I think if we think about it from a core, a base level perspective, if we get that right, then I think we'll be flying. How much do you think having individuals like a Ben Stokes, relatable people, influences the appetite of people to get involved and participate at a young level? I remember 2005 of Five Ashes, right? When you had Kevin Feastson and Freddie Flintoff in there as a young person in and around that, you wanted suddenly, I wanted the torch bat. You know, you would, some people would be changing their hair colour for the KV Mohawk.

45:02Yeah, exactly. You know what I mean? It's the people to aspire to that then got everyone in a cricket net or whatever it is. How important has that been, particularly most recently with the profile of English Test Match cricket being so high, unique and attractive to many people? It's absolutely essential. I think the more relatable they are to an international, we talk about role models, it's glib and it just rolls off the tongue, you know what I mean? But it is absolutely essential. I think role models are huge. And I think the real, I suppose, light bulb moment for me actually was when we were awarded the Surrey Women's First Professional Surrey Women's Professional Team.

45:40And to actually engage from a role model point of view, because of where they had come from in terms of amateur into sort of what I would call the professional world through the Southeast Stars and then into the Surrey Professional Team, there was still a certain level of grounding with them and being able to relate and relatable individuals and players, some fantastic women players. But I think we've seen some of that definitely rub off onto the men's game. And I think we've always got this position of how relatable are you? Do you spend time signing autographs? Do you just walk past people? Those sorts of things.

46:20I remember somebody saying to me when I was in the change room at one point in time. You go through a cycle. When you first get it, you can't wait to sign autographs. And then you get to the middle of your career and it becomes a bit tedious. And then the end of your career, when you're walking out the change room and nobody wants your autograph, you go, don't you want me to sign? That type of thing. And I think you've got to really be aware of that, that your time span is short and you need to absolutely engage. And I think these role models and the likes, as you say, of Ben Stokes and those sorts of individuals, they are absolutely relatable.

46:48And we've got to make sure that they stay at the forefront. You had quite a few years in the ECB, didn't you? Yes, 12, 13. Homing your trade, obviously with the rival country. That was quite a formative time for English cricket as well, where we had real lows and then we came back and you were managing director of 2019 World Cup. And that's excellent, very happy moment, obviously. But again, that was the peak, the culture of English cricket seemed to really develop throughout that time. Was that something you were involved in? Yeah, yes and no in a way because I was contracted by the ECB to deliver their global tournaments.

47:26Now, there were periods of time between the global tournaments, 2009, the first World T20, then Champs Trophy in 2013, Women's World Cup in 2010 and Champions Trophy in 2017, and then Cricket World Cup in 2019. There were periods between that where I was involved at the ECB in a marketing comms commercial perspective. So you sort of had a bit of an arm's length relationship because you were running these global tournaments and you were sort of sitting a little bit outside, but you're contracted by the ECB to deliver these tournaments for them. And I think one of the things I learned very quickly, and this was on the back of probably 2012, and I got involved in a couple of non-executive director roles at the back end of the one of them being GB basketball.

48:09And it felt quite weird because the Olympics seemed to be pinned for the legacy of the Olympics. It was just the most incredible time in this country in 2012 when we all remember it and Super Saturday, how that sort of all evolved. But then the competition itself felt like it was getting bashed because of the legacy and some of the sports was never carried through. And I'm sitting there thinking as somebody's running an event, how am I going to find a way of, you know, the ECB needs to pick this ball up at the end of this. The competition can't be held responsible for it. We've got to put the mechanisms in place for that to be able to happen.

48:48So you create this legacy program on the back of it. So there's a massive integration between ourselves and the ECB and the responsibility after these tournaments, once you've created this massive bubble in the house, you've got this fantastic tournament. How do you take the baton from that? And you keep on going and you keep on driving the interest and what have you on the back of it. I think that's where it came. But thinking about the transformation of the white ball game, I was part and parcel of some of those conversations, but Andrew Strauss was director of cricket at the time, and there was a real focus on actually what we need to do here is have a white ball 50 over focus that we can win our home Cricket World Cup in 2019.

49:29That was a focus, a goal, a specific North Star. That was an absolute focus specifically. Yeah, exactly. And even to the point we had North-South and they flew them into the UAE, into Dubai and played matches out there. So there was a real focus around the 50-over game that it was a home World Cup and we needed to win that. And that was also on the back of the England woman winning the 2017 World Cup against India at Lourdes, which was a solid crowd and absolutely brilliant. So it felt like there was this momentum and this shift to really focus on that. And it was an unbelievable year when you think of that.

50:05And then you had the ashes at the same time. It was probably one of the biggest years in English cricket. And then ultimately we had COVID hit in March of 2020 and it all went sideways. But I think there was a definite shift and focus in 50 over white ball cricket to get to that point by 2019. How was that job? I mean, what is the job? Managing director of the tournament. What are you actually tasked with? That must have been full of chaos and excellence at the same time. Yeah, listen, most of these tournaments, I think of how many was, five or six or seven I've run now, and every single one of them has got a different issue and something different to deal with.

50:40And it was an unbelievable buildup to that. I think I remember I flew a group of us out, not a group, there was only three of us, that went out in 2014, February of 2014, we flew to Australia. and this was how far out I was planning 2019. Australia were hosting the Kriger World Cup in 2015. So what I set up was three or four of us that went out to Australia a year before the competition started. So February of 2004, I spent a month in Australia with the local organising committee, putting their plans top to bottom because one of the things you learn about one of these tournaments is hindsight, exact science, right?

51:26Everybody knows that. But what I wanted to do was make sure that I was getting that hindsight before the tournament started. So what I wanted to see was a year out how they were in their planning for their February 2015 World Cup with the intention of reading their post-match report in 2016 to see where things went wrong and if there were things that they could have done better. so I had an understanding a year before the tournament of where they were in their planning and then I could read their report in 2015, 2016 afterwards and see where there were things that needed to change so that would inform my decision making in the build up to Cricket World Cup as to where I needed to be in 2018 so that I didn't have those issues in 2019 that was the idea every single plan is brilliant on paper until it all goes wrong, right?

52:22So, you know, but that's as far out as I was thinking about how we planned it. So it meticulously planned for five, six years. Meticulously planned for five. Blown up in five minutes. Well, it was in the very first two days, actually, to be fair. And actually, and I know I sit as chief exec of Surrey at the moment, the opening game was between England and South Africa at the Oval. And I knew there was an issue on day one when we walked into that ground. And the only thing that saved us was that ticket office at the key oval was just mental. It was just carnage in there. And there were queues outside the ticket office.

53:01Things were not going. And I thought to myself, this is not right. There's something going on here. And we started trying to dig into what the problem was. But we were saved by the fact that we had the manpower in that ticket office to get people into the ground. before the first ball. And it was only just, a lot of people missed the opening ceremony and what have you. It wasn't a great start, but that ticket offer saved us. And then we started trying to dig into actually what the problem was. People didn't have tickets. They didn't have their tickets. Now, what we tried to do was make sure that we distributed the tickets as late as possible because we wanted to try and avoid touting and all sorts of things that were going on.

53:41So we held off right to the very last minute. But what we did was we decided we wanted these tickets to be signed for. We didn't want to just send them in normal post. So another level of trying to make sure that they got to the right individuals at the right time and they couldn't be intercepted. In planning, great idea. In hindsight, not so good because when people buy a year out, tickets don't necessarily arrive at the doorstep when you put your original delivery address. And the next day was when it really kicked off. We had the second game up at Trent Bridge and it was the West Indies against Pakistan.

54:18and suddenly there was a queue around the block, the same issue. And what was happening in the ground was causing a problem because one of the sides was getting bowled out for nothing and the game was over in two hours and there were still people in the queue two hours out and the game was nearly over in the ground. And people were kicking off outside. It was just brutal. And we found at the same time, and I sort of uncovered it, but what happened was is the delivery and where the deliveries of these tickets were. So if you remember, I think we had a by-election and it came in quite late. And the ballot papers and the ballot distribution of those ballot papers took precedence over World Cup tickets.

54:57And a lot of people didn't get their tickets on time. So what we did that night was we turned on Print at Home and we went out with a massive comms campaign to everybody. Print your tickets at home. Get your stuff sorted. We'll be at the gates. We're opening the gates a couple of hours early. and we were fine from then. But with all that meticulous planning, it didn't make a job of difference. Technology? Yeah, technology now is completely different technology now. So now you just run it on the online? Now you can just run it on digital tickets and away you go. Because now you can protect them, right?

55:30You have the changing barcodes all the time. So it's not like you can screenshot, share. You have complete centralized control. Absolutely, absolutely. So we did all of that. We had app, we had printed home. We said, right, here we go. Just do what you need to do to get your tickets. So, yeah, but it was an unbelievable tournament. Yeah, and then after the tournament just went from strength to strength and finally culminating with that final against New Zealand at Lourdes was just an unbelievable day. Two England wins in two World Cups was lovely. The stars aligned. I was standing in that room with the super over, and people were like, what about the super over?

56:07What about the super? I said, and the problem with the super over, which was quite interesting, actually, funny enough, because there was a countback, if you remember. If it was tied in the super over, how did you find a winner in tying the super over? And funny enough, I remember writing those rules in 2009 for the World T20, and they hadn't changed for the 50-over competition. And I think it was number of boundaries hit to a number of sixes, because at the time it was all about the most exciting cricket played. You wanted to reward the team that played the most exciting cricket, and that would be the team that scored the most boundaries.

56:39So it would have been your rules. So my rules. It would have been your rules that determined our World Cup. This is magnificent. It was. It was. It was quite weird because we wrote them and I wrote them for the ICC for that and they adopted them and then they adopted them for the 50-over game as well. You must have been quite relieved when actually the second run came and you... I didn't need them. You didn't need them. Just quickly, I want to finish something you touched on, but it covers both the work you were doing in tournaments and at Surrey. And it's the birth and prevalence of women's cricket alongside men's.

57:09Because you have these flagship moments, you said the win in 2017, you now have something like Product 100, which is putting men's and women's cricket together, an entertainment package. It feels like there's a real movement for that sport to be developing, not just at a top end, a professional end, but also at a lower end. How do you see it as a key kind of administrator and person in charge of cricket in this country as a part of the game that's developing and the importance of that? Massively important. I think we spoke about the business of cricket earlier. And one of the things I've been thinking about is there's a little bit of crystal balling in this, right?

57:45You've got to think, what does our club and what does our ground look like by 2030, 2031? As I said, we've got our men's and women's international cricket guaranteed now until 2031. It's part of the Future Tours program. And that's all locked away. But we've got to protect what we've currently got. We've got to continue to grow that organically. but then where are some of the growth levers coming from? And one of those is definitely, as we've just chatted about, the 100. And an integral USP of the 100 is the doubleheader in the women's game. If you think about what that has done for the women's game, it's just phenomenal.

58:20It's absolutely brilliant. And it's accelerated some of those conversations without a shadow of doubt. But at the same time, I think the professionalization of the women's game is a massive opportunity for the game. If you think about the growth, not only from a playing point of view and the broadening of the base and getting more women and girls playing the sport. Some of the fastest growing sections in Surrey at the moment are the women's sections in club cricket. Well over 400 teams. It's just incredible how rapidly it's growing, the women's game, and that's just brilliant. So I think if you think about that from a business point of view, that's a huge opportunity for us, and we've got to make sure.

59:01This is the thing, not only is there going to be a sport now potentially for, and I don't want to segregate it on gender lines, that it's for women and for men. We're seeing fantastic families attending both men's and women's cricket, which is absolutely fantastic. Dads are coming to women's games with their kids and daughters, and moms coming with their sons to men's games, vice versa. It's a brilliant demographic, and it's a brilliant blend of people who come into the game. but it is a huge growth potential for us and the women's game is something we've got to keep driving. Do you treat it as an investment?

59:38Right now, definitely. Definitely it's an investment. Because again, it's a problem that we've seen in other sports where they're going, we're just not making enough money, we don't have the money to invest because we need short-term returns and we're being chased on annual accounts rather than long-term strategic plans and therefore the women's is something that suffers because it doesn't generate the revenue in the short term. You can actually build it into a business plan where you recognize an investment now and five to 10 years time returns significantly enough that you think this fits our model.

1:00:03Yeah. And I think we've said that we want to sell out a women's domestic standalone game by 2030. That's our ambition. We're not going to hold back on it. We see it as an investment and we see it as an investment in the future. And this is about, you talk about diversifying audience and having a product for everybody and being able to come down to the ground. And as a business, where are we going to continue our growth from? Whether it's the diversification of income from a hotel or it's actually an investment into something which is again it's all about the cricket at the end of the day we are a cricket club members own cricket club and that would be 20 odd thousand yes absolutely well it's 20 odd thousand now it could be it could be 22 21 22 fairly soon you look at Wembley's had 80 odd thousand in for women's football games you know recently yes it's possible yeah absolutely possible absolutely possible brilliant look Steve thank you so much good talk for ages but I think it's been really amazing to sit down and talk about everything to do with not just Surrey but obviously broader cricket so thank you so much for joining.

1:01:01Great chatting to you, thank you. Thank you so much to Steve for coming in and joining us today. There were moments in there where I was genuinely surprised and that's for the better. I couldn't believe some of the numbers that Surrey were generating in and around their wider business as well as on the field. The fact an Ashes test can generate five million pounds for the club is quite incredible but also represents part of the challenge. Can't account for that revenue every year so what happens in the downtimes when you need to be more creative and try and generate it elsewhere it's important to state that while Surrey does seem like a very successful business this isn't replicated throughout many of the counties and there is a huge amount that still needs to be done to support the future of the game in this country at that level it was really great to have Steve come in and talk to us the way he did and I hope you enjoyed the show now if you want to hear more from today's show you can do so by going to YouTube and typing in business of sport But before we leave you, some words from our valued partners.

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