Tim Wigmore, Deputy Cricket Correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, is a highly celebrated English journalist and author.
He has co-authored several best-selling cricket books, including Cricket 2.0, which was Wisden’s book of the year in 2020.
Tim joined us on our podcast to talk about the state of cricket in general and English cricket in particular, how he hones his craft, and his process for writing books alone or with a collaborator.
Transcript
Zee: And we’re here live with Tim Wigmore, Deputy Correspondent of The Daily Telegraph. Tim, so happy to have you. Thanks for joining.
Tim: Thanks very much. Cheers.
Zee: And while Tim is a guest who needs no introduction for cricket fans, I feel like I would love to give an introduction because I’ve been pestering him for a long time now to come onto our podcast. He is the Oxford-educated Daily Telegraph deputy correspondent. Not only that, but he’s the author of several award-winning cricket books, including Cricket 2.0, which was Wisden’s Book of the Year in 2020, and more recently, Crickonomics and White Hot, all of which were written with co-authors, and we’ll get into that in a bit.
But Tim, thank you so much for joining, and hope my campaign of harassment wasn’t too aggressive to get you.
Tim: Cheers and thanks for that very very kind intro.
Where does your inspiration come from for writing stories?
Zee: So let’s talk about being a cricket journalist, right? Because first and foremost, that’s how you spend your time. You know, you used to be at Cricinfo and now you’re at the Daily Telegraph and you put out a lot of great stories.
So tell me when you’re writing stories, writing pieces, where does your inspiration come from and how do you go about it?
Tim: Thanks. Yeah, I guess it’s a combination of talking to people and working out what they’re saying. And also sometimes it’s kind of working out what they’re not saying and actually trying to find something that you think that you’re thinking about that maybe others aren’t and there’s a different perspective.
So I guess I’m just trying to see, yeah, well, actually just kind of be true to what interests me in the game. In a way, I’m kind of quite a selfish writer. I’m writing for kind of what interests me. And I think that if it interests me there’s a reasonable chance it interests others and certainly interests me at least a little interest me enough to kind of want to go the extra mile as I’m writing about it.
So I guess that’s quite a simple way to start. But yeah, just trying to see, I guess the game in the round and you know, where I suppose what areas can I kind of add value as a journalist?
Zee: Yeah. So I mean, let’s take a specific example, right? The piece you just put out on Gus Atkinson, which was fantastic, and his story. How does that come about? Does your editor say, okay, Tim, this is your subject? Or are you sort of, like you said, living in the cricket world and inspired by something and decide to write?
Tim: Yeah, so my editor, yeah, it was actually his idea. So that was from Jake Goodwill. So that was a great kind of idea from him.
He said, you know, he’s accidentally had this great debut at Lord’s, we should try and find out more about him. There’s obviously been interviews with him. I’ve interviewed him before. So I guess kind of what’s interesting and sometimes in a weird way, actually, when someone’s just done something, obviously, everyone wants to talk to them. But sometimes the people around them can actually kind of have a bit more perspective and actually almost be more interesting to talk to because I guess they’ll do fewer interviews and everything.
So we went to Gus and actually through Gus, then Gus then passed me on details from his dad. And then I had a coffee, kind of had a coffee with his dad and then kind of got the whole sort of story of Gus. And, you know, obviously it’s an amazing story in terms of coming through various issues of the past, the kind of tragedy of his mom dying at a young age and he’s dealt with various injuries and had a kind of slightly interesting path to the top.
So yeah, and I suppose that’s always interesting to humanize the story is always important. And actually, you know, sometimes we forget these guys are so good, they’re such good players that we forget there’s a human being there and a kind of a human story there as well.
So that’s really important to kind of remember as well. And that helps to kind of hopefully to have a connection therefore between what we’re seeing and from these phenomenally talented players out on the pitch and actually our own kind of lived experiences and yeah, you get to see how it all marries.
What volume can you put out while maintaining quality?
Zee: What, in your experience, having written for a long time, is a reasonable pace of putting out pieces that maintains the quality, right? Like there are outlets where people are putting out, you know, pieces daily, more news oriented, but in the case of the writing you do, I mean, how much can you do? How frequently can you put out pieces of that level?
Tim: That’s a great question.
I guess the answer is, some days we’ll need more but there’s different demands on different pieces. Sometimes if you’re doing a more straight up piece, that’s not going to be as demanding and take a huge amount of time.
But I think there is a limit to how many pieces you can do at any one time that are going that bit further.
It’s about trying to juggle kind of balls in the air. And sometimes you actually – you try and juggle too much and it comes a little bit too much to kind of hold on your head.
So actually, if generally, if you’re working on two or three pieces that are bigger on the side, and then you have your day to day.
Obviously, today, I’ve been at cricket in Nottingham for a test. So I’ve done a live piece from the test. And then there’s also two or three longer pieces I’m working on in the background with that.
I guess that’s what I’m gonna say. So you kind of divide up between your day to day pieces, which have that immediacy and your longer projects as well. And I think it’s not a perfect way of doing things. But it’s just yeah, it’s the only way really, and you learn to lead it in a less bad way.
How do you come up with ideas for your books?
Zee: So Tim, you’ve talked about the shorter pieces and then the more in-depth pieces, but let’s move on into like the third format of your, the third of the three formats of your writing, which are books.
You know, you’re one of the more prolific journalists out there in terms of, you know, the volume of books that you put out, right? All with co-authors, from what I can tell, which is another thing I’ll ask you about in a second, but it’s a lot. So how do or how have you, maybe being specific, come up with the different ideas for your different books that you’ve published?
Tim: Yeah, so far all of them have been with co-authors, which has been kind of fun to work with different people and get their perspectives.
So yeah, a lot of them have been, again, like I said about writing stuff I want to read – it’s been kind of trying to write books that I want to read that haven’t been written yet.
And so yeah, so with Freddie Wilde on 2.0, that was a case of we both felt in T20, there was something happening. And there were these huge, kind of dramatic changes to the sport, which were really changing it in a way that people hadn’t really fully understood.
And there was this whole story that was waiting to be written, it felt like an open goal. And so we went about trying to do that.
But it actually took a few years to do it. It also took a while to get to a publisher actually, because there wasn’t much of a well, there weren’t really any books on T20 before.
So that was part of the challenge. But so it’s when you’re writing on something that’s, that’s a bit new, you have that.
And then I suppose with Stefan Szymanski on Crickonomics. We’d met a few times and he’d done a very good similar book on football before. And then we decided it would be, you know, we’re like, we’d kind of collaborated on a few articles before in terms of I’d, I’d kind of I’d call him out for advice and stuff. And I quoted him in articles. And then we thought that there could be something there – a longer project. So that was really fun to do.
And then most recently, White Hot with Matt Roller, it was very much his idea, he said if England you know, win the World Cup in Australia 2020, and which meant they held both titles at the same time, we should write a book and I, yeah, and I thought, that’s a, that’s nice idea, actually.
So he deserves all the credit for that one. But they’ve all been fun. And I suppose working with different people, you get insight into how they work, you also get exposed to a new way of thought, which is nice.
Obviously, the Telegraph, actually, we do cooperate really really well, which is great, but you’re generally writing under your own name.
So actually writing together is a different discipline. And I suppose it’s a way of accessing their kind of minds and their knowledge, which has also been really fun as well. So yeah, it’s just been a different challenge.
And also we talk about the kind of day to day, not almost grind of, you you do a piece every day often, and it’s just interesting to do something on a longer project and hopefully something which will stand and remain relevant for a fair while afterwards because generally after you finish a book, it’ll take at least half a year, often more for it to actually then see the light of print and actually be out there in shops. Actually even that is quite a long period.
I guess it encourages you to take a step back, which is fine, because the day to day is what’s interesting tomorrow. And then a book is actually what will be interesting in a year, two, three years time. It’s a different way of seeing things.
And it’s a good discipline, I suppose, because there are, like the rise of T20, I thought was something that had been happening for a long time.
And it was getting covered. Of course, it was getting covered. But in a way that almost – I suppose the way of explaining is if you’d stop… if a cricket fan had left in 2000 or 2003, and just just completely ignored the game for 15 years, and then they’d come back, it was probably it was easily the biggest change there had ever been like, how does this happen? We need something to explain it. But because we’ve all been living it and seeing it in an incremental way, it’s almost like yeah, you see the trees more a little bit each day, you don’t ever notice and then suddenly, my God, they’ve all come from – where they all come from.
So it’s getting that that sense of this huge thing had happened and actually by zooming out a bit, you actually get a big perspective of how much has changed.
How do you make sure your book subjects remain current for the time it takes to publish a book?
Zee: But just drilling down into that for a second, Tim, you mentioned, right, it takes a while for books to get published, make it through the process. But the subjects you write about are pretty current, right? You’re not generally writing about sort of older history. I mean your first book was, right? The Second Eleven, that had more of a historical bent to it.
But, you know, your more recent books, they’re all pretty current.
So how do you manage the speed and the subjects without sort of them getting out of date really quickly?
Tim: Yeah, that’s a great question. And yeah, it’s a real challenge. I suppose. It’s part of what I was saying in terms of, yeah, just trying to even though they are current, trying to zoom out as well.
And like, what are the big things? I suppose, like, in 2.0, we talked about the rise of leg spinners in T20 and like, how this had almost always from a tactical point of view, the biggest surprise in the game.
And so actually, that’s how that happened over a 15 year period. And so we’re pretty sure it’s all gonna be relevant in a year’s time given all the trends, actually.
So that wasn’t – but that was interesting because again, if you’re covering each match, sometimes X-players will do well, some they’ll do badly. So you won’t necessarily see it as a day-to-day trend, massive, but it’s when you zoom out. Yeah, trying to zoom out and kind of work through what’s happening and what’s changing. That’s interesting.
And I suppose in Criconomics, we looked a lot at how the kind of relationship between the international game and the domestic game was changing. Which again, something people have been aware of since 2008.
But actually, trying to try to put it in context, trying to compare it to other sports was very interesting. And you get a sense of, you know, cricket has been very, very unusual.
It’s been at one extreme in terms of how much it’s relied on Nation v nation matches really to sustain the sport. Yeah, that’s where all the money’s been.
And you have something like football at the other extreme, where only about 15 % was nation v nation in terms of where the money was.
And you get a sense cricket is moving from where it had been historically towards where football would be. But it’s actually probably not going to end up quite as extreme as football. But yeah, you get that sense. That’s interesting to try.
Sometimes I think in cricket, it’s very easy to look at other sports, which when you’re writing off the field, it’s very easy to look at other sports and you get a sense of how this game fits, what’s unusual. So again, you look at the World Cup in cricket, you know, people say, are there more teams? Are there too many teams? Are there not enough teams?
I’d say actually by looking at how cricket compares to other sports that we see cricket is actually very, very extreme in how few teams we have had in its tournaments. Therefore by looking at other sports, you get a bit more perspective as actually something cricket is doing something very unusual here. Why is it doing that? And in my view, the reason having added up and actually now we’re seeing more of an expansion again, which is great. But yeah, so it’s always by looking at those, those other sports, you’ve, you sense how cricket fits in and it’s a strange economic kind of place. And the structures are very unusual in a lot of ways. And sometimes there’s really not been the oversight and the administration that there should have been.
Who are some of your favorite cricket journalists?
Zee: So Tim, you’re starting to talk about some really interesting subjects which I want to dive into, but before we get into that and leave kind of the craft of journalism, I’d love to ask you, right, as a journalist, who are some of your favorite cricket journalists out there and why?
Tim: I think Osman Samiuddin is fantastic for ESPN. I think both the way he writes and also he has that kind of perspective and he’s very well informed. He’s really good.
My colleagues at The Telegraph are fantastic. Daniel Brettig and Gideon Haigh, Peter Lalor in Australia are all brilliant in different ways, yeah, writing from a very informed place and you can tell the kind the journalism in them, I think is really nice in terms of that, even if they’re writing opinion pieces, you get the sense that they’re grounded in a lot of a lot of chats, and the informed level is there. I think that’s really important.
I think. Yeah, I mean, I’d mark great writing. i love great writing. But it’s yeah, having that while marrying up, you know, talking, talking to people and getting perspectives. And I suppose anyone who makes you, who kind of makes you think in a different way is always really nice.
Yeah, just just makes you things in a different light, I think is always a really important thing to do. But equally, you can’t kind of overreach the strive too much, you don’t want to just be contrarian for the sake of being contrarian, you want to, if you’re being contrary, it needs to be a basis for what you’re saying, I think. So it’s that balance. And I guess you just be being true to yourself and what you believe is also really, really important, which is such a basic thing, really, but probably easier said than done at times with all the pressures in the job.
Who are some of your all-time favorite cricket books and why?
Zee: Yeah, I totally get it. So I asked about journalism. Now, as an author, what are some of your few of your favorite all time cricket books and why?
Tim: I think Rahul Bhattacharya’s book, his book, Pundits from Pakistan, on India’s Tour of Pakistan in 2004 was fantastic. Some of the writing, kind of mesmerizing writing and an account of an all-time historic series. I think that’s fantastic.
Beyond a Boundary by C.L.R. James is probably a cliche to say in these sorts of questions, but kind of reading it, reading a book like that, you’re almost…
Zee: A classic is a classic.
Tim: Yeah, reading a book like that, you’re almost expected to be, you’re expecting it, won’t be as good as you hope – you think it’s going to be like, New Year’s Eve or something, but actually reading it, it was incredible and really made me Yeah, see things in a different light.
And the book from Peter Oborne on the Basil D’Oliveira affair was fantastic. An example of cricket, you know, being much more than just cricket, which is, yeah, we do see it often.
Scyld Berry’s book, Cricket, the Game of Life, I thought was, yeah, he’s a colleague, but it was, it was, fantastic. Just, you know, you just see all the different ways of looking at cricket and thinking about the game. And it’s, I guess it’s a prism into so many different things. And that’s kind of often where I’d say it’s most interesting. So you’re not just seeing a bat and ball, you’re seeing a whole, whole story around it and the deeper, deeper themes and trends.
Yeah, so, so many it’s hard to narrow it down.Osman Samiuddin’s book actually his History of Pakistan is fantastic as well. Just the way he captures everything – that’s brilliantly written.
And then Ram Guha, A Corner of a Foreign Field – his history of Indian cricket. That’s another, that’s another book that’s fantastic.
Tim: I probably missed a lot I shouldn’t have done.
Zee: That’s alright. Shifting gears a little bit.
Tim: Sorry.
What’s your take on England’s White Ball national team’s recent struggles and possible decline from its peak?
Zee: Right, so Tim, shifting gears to talk about the substance of some cricket issues right now, let’s dig into what the subject of your last book was, and in fact, as of today, your last piece, which is the cricket landscape in England. Why don’t we start with White Hot, obviously, was about the English white ball team and its tremendous success that they’ve been having or that they had for a period of time. When I met your co -author, Matt Roller, in Barbados during the World Cup. I said: look, I love your and Tim’s latest book, right? It’s great. This was before the final. And Matt quipped, of course, he was like, I don’t think it aged very well, did it?
With that said, let’s call it the rise and the opposite of rise of the English sort of white ball team. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tim: Dramatic fall, yeah.
Zee: So what’s going on? What’s your take on where England is now? Or where the world is relative to England? These things are fluid.
Tim: They are. Yeah. Thank you for that kind intro. And so clear England from 2002 to 2015 really were hopeless in whiteball cricket.
And then we had this revolution really where England for the first time, go from being at the back of the pack, to being actually world leaders and actually trendsetters and at the vanguard of new ways of playing under Eion Morgan.
And so that’s his incredible shift, which we describe in the book. We have seen a shift in culture actually, so that the kind of younger English players now, your traditionally England’s young players would be, would play almost in a test match style in whiteball cricket and one day cricket.
And now actually, we see the new guys, you know, Phil Salt, Will Jacks, whoever, they do play in this wholly, wholly different way, this very, very modern way.
So there really has been a culture shift and that’s remained.
But I think, in terms of what’s happened with the team, I think, in a sense, the problem with going on generations often is you hold too long to them and you stunt the development of the next generation.
And I think we’ve seen, you know, the likes of Moeen Ali with Johnny Bairstow.
So you’ve seen guys probably who have been held on to for a bit too long by England in whiteball cricket.
So England’s team has been aging. I think that against South Africa in Mumbai in the ODI World Cup last year, I think every player was over 30.
So that’s, that’s a very unusual kind of age profile of a team.
So I think it’s possibly understandably, to be honest, given their pedigree, there’s been too much loyalty to these guys.
We’ve also seen, I think for 2015 -19, ODI Cricket because the World Cup at home was really the center of attention. That was route that actually got priority seats within England for probably the first time ever in history. And then very quickly England won the World Cup.
Then it was okay, we saw that the test team now and so ODI Cricket became relegated in attention.
And so you don’t have this sort of stable team in normal series playing. So you can end up then playing and actually because you can win in 2022 in Australia, that also brings an expectation that these things will be all right on the night again.
So then have an ODI, you only have one ODI series before the World Cup last year in India when they’re actually at full strength. So they have four games with New Zealand, but that’s obviously – it’s not enough.
And England only played six ODIs in Asia in the whole cycle, for example.
It was the victim of England no longer giving it the same emphasis as before and actually forgetting some of their lessons in terms of, you know, they held onto their players for too long.
They also at times, kind of before England had very much been founded on the depth of batting, and they had some strange teams that moved away from that.
So again, in Mumbai, Africa, had David Willey at seven, who only batted there a couple of times for England in eight years of playing.
So and as far as the influence of the leadership is important, the loss of Eion Morgan clearly was very significant. So I guess that’s the story of the fall.
I would say that coming off 2015, they still had to build a culture from scratch. Now, I think if you see the types of players that are coming through, there is a huge amount to build on. But equally, you know, like any of it, you do something you do well.
And the rest of the rest of the world starts to copy you and then you need to chase them again. Think there’s probably been a bit of complacency and the relative standing of white ball cricket in English cricket has declined. That’s, yeah, that’s been a factor in two poor global events.
How hard is it for a team to maintain its dominance?
Zee: Yeah, I would, would imagine kind of picking up on the last sort of thing you said, you know, these paradigms sort of there’s an innovator and then it sort of takes hold throughout the sport and throughout the world. Right. So, you know, at, at one point everyone, you know, at some go back to whatever point in history you want, right. They’re the mid 2010s or whatever. Everyone was playing, you know, T 20, just like, oh, you know, ODI or like test. And then at some point, okay, someone started to be aggressive and everyone figured out, okay, let’s all be very aggressive. Let’s attack.
Then when everyone’s doing it, right, then there’s parity again. Then how do you differentiate yourself strategically or tactically in a way that, you know, you get an upper hand?
It’s not easy. There’s no end.
Tim: Yeah, and I think in ODI cricket, especially we talked about the cruising speed. And this is the idea that England, they were good at other aspects, but their sort of super strength really was how good they were in the middle overs at scoring at basically a run a ball without taking a lot of risks.
That was Joe Root and Eion Morgan and Jos Butler, you know, they didn’t, they averaged a lot and they scored a run a ball – amazing. So they were – became – so good at that. And that’s a very, actually a very different skill to scoring at 10 an over in T20.
And a very different skill to batting in test cricket, at least maybe until the recent stall under Stokes and McCullum.
So yeah, this whole way of playing. But if you didn’t, you know, you saw with Harry Brook, who I think is going to be a fantastic player – is a fantastic player already.
But I think he only played, you know, four or five games, he didn’t play 50 over cricket at all from 2019 to 23.
And so by the time of the World Cup at the end of the year, he played I think, six 50 over games in four years.
Zee: Sure.
Tim: However talented you are, you’re not being given a proper chance really.
So that 50 over cricket is actually a very distinct version of the game.
And almost I think everyone got sort of saying it’s just a longer version of T20, but actually it is quite a distinct format.
There are still lots of players who are great at 50 overs who aren’t good at T20 and vice versa. And so if you just pick your T20 team (for ODIs) – even though being aggressive is important in 50 over cricket, it doesn’t get you everywhere.
Yeah, England forgot to treat it as a distinct format of the game. And that was it. Yeah, that’s been a real issue. And I suppose you’d also have to look at, yeah, these small things, you know, the injuries, the absence of Jofra Archer, for example, is a huge, huge, huge blow.
But yeah, so yeah, that it’s become a new difficult moment again. But what I would say is that you see the young players, the very young players, under 19 players in England, they do now play, they play in adventurous bold ways.
So it’s not that England have to go back and reinvent the wheel again, in that sense.
But the problem is now everyone else is doing it as well. They’ve actually and frankly England are only in this position because England, they treat test cricket so seriously, that’s, they still treat it probably more seriously than almost any other country in terms of how they allocate their resources. And that’s partly because they have quite a lot of resources. But and so that does also make that does make it hard to be good. It’s very difficult to be good at all three formats.
What impact can The Hundred have on England’s T20 team development?
Zee: Yeah, well, so, you know, last question, Tim, because I know we’ve got to wrap up, you know, talking about sort of England’s performance, but talking about, you were talking about the domestic setup, which is pretty timely because you’ve just been writing a lot about The Hundred and plans to sell off sort of franchise stakes in the hundred to investors, but there’s a lot going on.
So what role would you say The Hundred has been playing or will or will not be playing in continuing to support England’s white ball, especially short form.
It’s not quite T20, it’s 100, but the T20 sort of infrastructure and pipeline going forward.
Tim: Yeah, so I think it’s a bit of a kind of age old story in English cricket – English cricket invents something and then kind of sees the rest of the world then become better at it.
We saw that with one day cricket invented in England and then really perfected it elsewhere.
You know, England had to wait for Australia and various others to play… England were playing incredibly, you know, with a red ball until 1998 their home ODIs, which is mad.
And then T20 invented in 2003 does really well at domestic level, but then England, there’s talk of kind of trying to capitalize more and England don’t really know what to do.
And then India comes in with the IPL in 2008, you see other franchise competitions around the world and England are late to the party and The Hundred finally launched in 2021, a year late because of COVID.
And then now we have a basic classic English conflict between traditions and, you know, the modern, modernity and traditions basically.
And you have a lot of people who want to get involved in the English game.
And you also have the question about the counties and how you manage that.
And you also have a question in England saying, know, England this summer, for example, they play The Hundred along, but play alongside a test match, which means the best English players will be playing in a test match instead.
So that’s, again, that’s different to the model in India where the IPL gets precedence, you know, has a complete window and everything. So England is still kind of in this awkward position, not sure how to manage everything.
I guess even I gave the format of The Hundred, you know, the 100 ball concept, which hasn’t been used anywhere else.
That in a sense is the admission of English failure, because England invented T20, which works really well, there’s nothing wrong with it as a format. And actually, because England have got taken, got left behind by the countries, they’ve been that led them to create The Hundred as a, this is a different kind of, you know, trying to find a very small way – a gimmick really – to distinguish it from other other leagues around the world.
Now, of course, we’re seeing because England traditionally has had almost a monopoly on the home summer in terms of there’s been very little – the prime summer months anyway, you know, from June, July, August, there’s been very little cricket played elsewhere in the world. Now actually, we see Major League Cricket is played then, we have a league in Canada we also have had more international cricket in other countries played then. So England doesn’t have this anymore. So puts them in an awkward position.
And so yeah, and we also have… cricket within England, where at times it does get really big and there was a buzz around it.
But in general, it’s not as people as people would like it to be.
There’s been huge issues in recent years in terms of diversity and racism and very terrible things in the game. And so… part of the idea of The Hundred is a way of opening up opening up the sport and people don’t people, you know, young people don’t really think about counties or associate themselves with counties, whereas cities is how people live their lives, is also how they think in terms of football teams and so on.
And so, yeah, and that’s where we’re left with The Hundred. And where things go, I’m not exactly sure. And we’re seeing the private investors actually, what private investors generally want is a majority stake and to control the cricket operatoions of a team. Without that, it’s less attractive for them. But clearly, the host counties also want to control their positions.
Tim: So England is is locked in a familiar situation. It’s the details change, but the story is the same in terms of how does England battle the forces of modernity and traditions and respecting the game.
And we don’t know exactly how this will play out. We just know there’s a lot of quite angry people are on different sides of the debate arguing different things and where this goes from England.
But I guess I guess we just should just say the wider context really is – and why The Hundred also was created is because the TV rights, the broadcasting rights for international cricket are in decline, stagnating at best or in decline.
So there’s a huge interest in global events, there’s a huge interest in the Ashes and of course in matches involving India. But if it’s not a world event an Ashes or against India, the market for that is a lot less. So that’s really why The Hundred was created because England wanted a product that
Tim: didn’t rely on other countries being here. you know, their own product, just like the IPL, that would be there regardless of who’s touring year after year.
So the decline of international cricket has led to this.
So The Hundred was meant to be the solution to ending rights for bilateral international cricket and whether it will be and how this plays out is still uncertain. So there’s a lot of questions. So as ever, really, English cricket is in interesting times.
Zee: Yeah, absolutely. And then there’s the whole trend, which might play out in The Hundred as well of the IPL teams really being the dominant force in the T20 landscape globally and buying into and controlling franchises in other countries, right? Be it South Africa or the US or now possibly the hundred as well.
Tim: Yeah. So that multi team model is very interesting. We’ve seen it in football with Man City actually controlling although there’s some debate actually how much that works.
But I think for IPL teams, it is attractive because the smaller leagues are a way of, I guess, activating their brand as they say it – making their brand more relevant and kind of having a team that plays more they’re also a way of actually kind of R &D because you can use your coaches in different leagues, you can scout for the players you can you can
Zee: sign players.
Tim: try new strategies. And so there is you can see what’s on here.
And so yeah, guess you could have, you know, a Knight Riders buy a team 100, for example, and so be, you know, join a part of that. But again, the questions of stake and ownership and control and control of the cricket, they become really important.
So if Kolkata or whoever if they go to a Hundred team and they’re not sure whether they’ll be able to completely control their draft and how they fill their squad, if they don’t get that power, they’re probably not going be interested because I guess they’re saying if we buy the team, we want to be able to shape it as we would like. And whether it feels comfortable with this is a perennial question.
Zee: Yep, as we’re, know, in the US it was an easier conversation for the six teams of the MLC teams, or actually just be, you know, transplanted IPL teams, but there’s more history and stakeholders to contend with in the UK. Anyway, we’ll leave it at that, Tim. I could speak to you for many more hours, but rather than keep you up all night, we’ll just have to have you back on again.
Thank you so much for joining and sharing your thoughts and look forward to, last thing, do you have another book on the way that we can start getting excited about?
Tim: I do – I have a history of test cricket, which is out next May. So I’ve just submitted that. So that’s been a solo project. It’s been a hell of a project. But hopefully I’m nearly there.
Zee: All right, well, we’ll start getting ready for it right now and can’t wait till it’s released.
Tim: Thanks so much. Cheers.
Zee: All right, thanks, Tim.
