BARNEY RONAY: For 18 months Harrison has preached like a wartime chancellor about the need for everyone to do their bit
Is it possible to talk about the startlingly tin-eared £2.1m bonus awarded to Tom Harrison and his fellow ECB executives without also having to talk about The Hundred a bit?
Sadly not. News of Harrison’s imminent cash windfall emerged via a story from Ali Martin in The Guardian just a few days after The Hundred final. And the two things seem unavoidably linked, no matter how much the ECB may wish this not to be the case. The Daily Mail even carried a quote from one county executive making the connection explicit: “Everybody knew it [the trough-snuffling bonus] was solely to do with The Hundred”.
No doubt the ECB would dismiss as entirely cynical any suggestion of a direct connection between the promise of personal enrichment and the evangelical desire to “deliver” a speculative marketing ploy at a time of financial crisis. But then, they’re also the ones sharing the two million quid. And the fact is, whatever the truth, ‘the optics’ on this absolutely stink.
How about that Hundred anyway? It seemed to go pretty well. The matches were good and fun, because cricket is good and fun. The grounds were full, but then cricket does tend to fill grounds given a little push. The women’s game was the big winner: it now has a wonderful stage to aim for – albeit one that should have been provided anyway, and before now.
In practice the most jarring thing about the whole product was the cult-like tone, the naked desperation of everyone involved for this thing to be perfect, righteous, unstoppable, overseen by an endless round of beaming TV presenters who looked like they’d just been hit over the head with a rock and it was the greatest thing that’s ever happened to them. Sky’s three-way wrap-up after the final at Lord’s, Shane Warne, Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff burbling wildly in pastel leisurewear, was like a public information film about the dangers of smoking crack midway through a round of golf.
That maniacal sense of certainty over something that was always, by any measure, a gamble and a punt has come right from the top. “The case for The Hundred is even more important,” Harrison could be heard insisting shortly after the start of the pandemic, a time when, quite clearly there was a pretty decent case to consider it less important.
Whatever happened to… Ali Brown
But in the end that insistence that this thing absolutely must happen has been convincing. Harrison spoke so passionately, seemed so ready to bet his shirt on it. After a while you just felt, well, why else would the ECB execs be so personally invested? Maybe it really was the right thing to be so wildly sold on what is essentially a back-of-an-envelope loss-leading sales gambit.
And now, well, we have this. Harrison and Sanjay Patel, The Hundred’s managing director, are among those who stand to benefit personally when the Long-Term Incentive Plan matures in 2022, the metrics for which have The Hundred as their keystone.
The ECB hierarchy has, of course, defended paying itself this money. It is, we hear, a necessary lever to retain its executive talent, as though without these payments it would have become impossible by now to beat off the attentions of Apple, Fifa and all the other other mega-brands that routinely recruit their next crop of rainmakers from English cricket.
The ECB also points out that Harrison took a pay cut in 2020, although he had accepted a pay rise not long before that and was at the time being paid more than the chief executive of the FA, and a great deal more than should be necessary to administer a sport that has never been a cash cow, and where the greatest assets often skate close to bankruptcy.
Cricket is a well-behaved, orderly world. Harrison has a lot of useful friends in the mainstream media. But there is a genuine anger at all this. The entire sport has struggled in the last 18 months. Players have taken pay cuts. Admin staff have been furloughed or sacked. The ECB itself cut 62 jobs last year. County members have been told to suck it up, to endure the trashing of their cricketing summer. Harrison himself has preached like a wartime chancellor about the need for everyone to do their bit.
And yet here he is accepting a massively provocative personal windfall. If Harrison has anything about him, if that zeal is grounded in an actual sense of duty, he will refuse this pre-pandemic bonus on a point of principle. Those who have ultimately provided that money, cricket’s legacy audience, will be watching. Albeit in hope rather than expectation.
This article was published in the September edition of The Cricketer - the home of the best cricket analysis and commentary, covering the international, county, women's and amateur game