The ECB do not care about you.

Over the last few days…weeks…months, a lot of anger had been directed at individuals like McCullum or Key or Stokes and whilst most of that is justified, I think it misses the wider picture, and that is that the ECB just don’t care about you.

There’s many examples I could use for this, it could be that they cut our test summer from 7 tests to 6 despite us being the one country that sells our test matches no matter the opponent, it could be about the hundred and it’s detriment to the 50 over game or it’s squeezing of the county season, it could be that they just don’t care about the world test championship because we host the final so no matter what, they get there money…

I’m actually instead going to use Wednesdays T20 against India as my example.

Anyone with half a brain would’ve have foreseen when the football World Cup fixtures came out that there was a very good chance England would be playing their first knockout game at 5 o clock on Wednesday night, the ECB should have seen this and pushed the start time of the t20 back to 7, put big screens up around the concourse and made it an event for ticket holders, who would’ve come early, watched the football, spent money on beer and food and then had the cricket afterwards. They also have a rights deal with channel 5 to show two t20s a summer, so put this on there and advertise it during the football, maximise the audience at home.

But what do they do instead? They moved the start time forward by an hour to 5:30 with only a couple of weeks notice, not only making it harder for ticket holders heading down after work but also to pander to the Indian audience and scrounge a bit more money out of the Indian broadcast rights.

The ECB don’t care about you, they care only about how much money they can get from India, after we’d lost the Ashes down under and everyone’s focus was on how we turn the test side around for the 2027 Ashes, all they cared about was that India aren’t touring in 2027 so they might lose some money.

The ECB do not care about you. The ECB is currently not fit for purpose.