INDIAN IPL TELECAST

Delight in it or deride it, you have to admit county cricket is a stubborn so and so. In a media age where, to paraphrase Shane Warne, football comes first, daylight second and the rest a distant third, our domestic game looks set for another summer in which its relevance will be questioned, its gate receipts mocked and its OAP supporters hunted down in photographic evidence (“If he’s clutching a thermos, so much the better!”). Recession-hit local papers will continue to close, so threatening the livelihood of county cricket’s most faithful chroniclers, and the national press will pump most of its resources into the World Twenty20 and the Ashes. Then there’s the Indian Premier League. County cricket’s credibility has never been more tenuous.

Actually the news is not all bad – like we said, county cricket is a stubborn so and so, more of which later – but the days when press boxes contained reporters from several local papers, all the national broadsheets, a smattering of tabloids, an agency man (always a man) and radio journalists are long gone. County cricket is no longer a story in its own right. And as far as the written press is concerned, its increasing subservience to the national side is in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The economic realities of modern journalism do not help. Cost-cutting is all the rage. The Northampton Chronicle and Echo – journalistic alma mater of Matthew Engel and the Daily Telegraph’s Nick Hoult – now relies on cricket copy from the Northants Evening Telegraph. Based in Kettering, the Telegraph sends a reporter to all of Northamptonshire’s home one-day games, but does not always have the resources to staff the four-day matches. The Wantage Road press box can be a quiet place at times.

Down in Essex, the decision by the Evening Echo and the Evening Gazette to stop paying a modest fee to the county’s two freelance writers, Paul Hiscock and Nigel Fuller, and make use of the Press Association instead, means no local daily will be taking copy specifically related to Essex.

Last summer, the Birmingham Mail and the Birmingham Post – both part of the ailing Trinity Mirror group – decided to use one reporter instead of the two who for years had given Warwickshire supporters an enviable choice. And this week, the Kent Messenger Group – which in the autumn lost the services of its assiduous cricket writer Mark Pennell – was preparing to slash its sports desk from 18 to eight, with uncertain consequences for coverage of events at Canterbury.

Yorkshire – surprise, surprise – are fighting the fight in their own way. The Yorkshire Post, a regional-press heavyweight, will this summer cut back on international coverage rather than county cricket. Only the Ashes Test at Headingley will be reported extensively in its pages, but the paper’s cricket correspondent, Chris Waters, is concerned that it will be “only a matter of time” before county coverage suffers too.

Above all, forbearance is in the air. “I survived the first wave of flak last year,” says Brian Halford, who this summer will report for both Birmingham papers. “But at the moment I regard it as a bit like being in the trenches of World War One.”

If the regional cricket writers have always acted as the umbilical cord to their local communities, then the nationals – who record every banality and burp served up by players from Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool and Arsenal – have regarded the county game like lofty step-parents, with suitably varied results.

The Telegraph, traditionally county cricket’s paper of record, is moving almost all coverage in-house in a bid to save costs, thus severing ties with a small army of dedicated, knowledgeable and now disenchanted freelance writers. The mood among writers for the Times last summer veered between resignation and outrage when entire rounds of championship matches were squeezed into one tabloid page. This season they are discontinuing their online bulletins at lunch and tea, but will once more ask reporters to file longer pieces for the web if necessary.

At the time of writing, the Independent was still considering its options, having last summer released two long-serving freelance cricket journalists. And the Guardian, which unlike the Times and the Telegraph does not send a reporter to every championship game, is hoping web users tap into a new mobile-phone service to access regular updates to its county blogs.

And that is where the story takes a different tack, because this is the kind of development that is being mirrored at local level as journalists adapt to survive, in the process defying the perennial predictions of county cricket’s demise. Bruce Talbot, cricket correspondent of the Brighton Argus, says the blogs he writes during Sussex matches attract around 15,000 unique users a month. “Last season was Sussex’s poorest for some time but we still had good hits,” he says. “It’s quite gratifying.”