The English cricketing authorities were not “brave enough” to produce a Twenty20 tournament to rival the Indian Premier League, according to former England cricket captain Michael Vaughan. Vaughan was speaking on a panel called “Reinventing a Traditional Sport” on Wednesday at the London Telegraph’s Business of Sport 2017 conference. “We created Twenty20 cricket in this country [England], but I don’t think we were brave enough to deliver what India have done,” Vaughan said. The former England captain said that changing the mindset of those who ran the county game and persuading them to the virtues of the shorter format of the game meant that India and Australia stole a march on England and developed popular T20 tournaments. “We are just a little bit behind the game,” Vaughan said, adding that Twenty20 is “taking over the world of cricket.” He highlighted the popularity of the Big Bash T20 game in Australia, which he said was fundamentally an entertainment package and the cricket was secondary.
BACK IN THE GAME: However, Vaughan said the city-based, eight-team T20 tournament that has been given the go-ahead to start in '20 was what the English game was “crying out” for. He said that the administrators of English Test cricket needed to make the game easier to understand for the layperson, pointing to its opaque ranking system. Vaughan was on a panel along with England Golf CEO Nick Pink and RBS Head of Sponsorship, Hospitality & Events Martyn Wilson. Pink said that the European Tour’s GolfSixes tournament -- the sport’s version of cricket’s Twenty20 format -- had proved a hit. “I think golf has started to take a bit of a leap,” he said. Wilson was asked if RBS was no longer interested in sponsoring traditional sports, which could be perceived as old-fashioned. He said, “It’s buying audience as much as anything.” But he pointed out that younger audiences were only engaging with sports that innovated.
John Reynolds is a writer in London.
