A dwindling audience

So, Gloucestershire thump Surrey at the Oval in the Twenty20. Only two Surrey batsmen hit boundaries in a feeble total of 97, and Gloucestershire win with more than half their overs remaining. The floodlights aren’t even required.

But beyond the predictable talk of (a) Surrey's pathetic capitulation, continued lack of success, and big name flops, and (b) Gloucestershire’s all-round excellence and Ian Butler’s figures of 3 for 8, one sobering statistic stands out.

The Guardian reports off-handedly that the match had an attendance of ‘a shade under 5000’. A shade under 5000? That’s awful. The ground must have been barely a quarter full.

Aren’t Twenty20 matches meant to be sold out, with queues around the block and ticket touts doing their thing? But then I remembered that that was when sides played only five group matches instead of the current fifteen, and it all made sense.

Does the stupidity of the cricket authorities know no bounds? Will the ECB ever put the interests of the game and the wider public beyond financial short-termism, and kowtowing to Sky?

The interest that has been generated in this year’s tournament, and particularly the attendance figures at matches, proves, beyond all reasonable doubt, that you can have too much of a good thing.