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Composite UK cricket crowd shot showing older Test match spectators in the foreground and a younger Hundred crowd in the stands behind

UK Cricket Demographics

04.08.2026 • Uncategorised

A Sport with Two Audiences Living in the Same Country Spend a day at a Test match at Lord’s, then spend an evening at a men’s Hundred match at the Oval the same week. The two audiences barely overlap. The Test crowd skews heavily towards over-50s in MCC ties or in linen jackets, with a […]

UK cricket viewer at home with the Test match on television, a phone in hand showing a live ball-by-ball scorecard, and a tablet on the arm of the sofa

UK Cricket Second Screen

04.08.2026 • Uncategorised

Two Screens, One Match: How UK Viewers Watch Cricket Now Walk into any UK living room during an Ashes day and you will see the same set-up — the television on, the cricket on the big screen, and a phone propped against a mug or held in the lap. The phone has a scorecard app […]

Cricket scorecard tablet showing a Manhattan bar chart and a worm line graph side by side during a one-day match

Cricket Scoring Charts

04.08.2026 • Uncategorised

The Two Charts That Shape How Cricket Is Visualised The first time I sat down with a cricket-mad father-in-law and watched a one-day international together, he kept glancing at the bar chart on the screen rather than the action. He was reading the Manhattan. He could tell from the shape of the bars where the […]

Children's All Stars cricket session at a local club ground with coaches and parents watching from the boundary

UK Grassroots Cricket

31.07.2026 • Uncategorised

The Layer Below the Live Scoreboards I spent a Saturday morning in May at a local cricket club’s All Stars session — 36 children, three coaches, two parents handing out plastic bats, and a fixture list on a clipboard that included 22 home matches and 18 away matches for the senior team that summer. The […]

Modern English cricket stadium under floodlights during a Hundred match with packed coloured crowd filling the stands

Private Equity in Cricket

31.07.2026 • Uncategorised

Why Investor Money Suddenly Matters to Match-Day Watchers The first time a cricket-watching friend asked me about private equity in cricket, he was confused about why it mattered to him. He watched the Hundred on the BBC highlights show. He went to two T20 Blast games a season. He had no investment in any franchise […]

Television in a UK living room showing a Test match broadcast with overlay scoreboard graphics and a tea-time crowd in the background

UK Cricket TV Audience

31.07.2026 • Uncategorised

The TV Audience Story Behind Marquee UK Cricket The day after the 2023 Ashes peaked at 2.12 million UK viewers, I had a conversation with a colleague who could not understand the number. He pointed out that football matches regularly draw four or five times that figure, and asked what was special about a Test […]

Packed cricket ground in England during a 2025 Hundred match with families filling the stands under late summer light

UK Cricket Attendance

28.07.2026 • Uncategorised

What “2.84 Million” Really Tells Us About UK Cricket The first time I saw the 2.84 million attendance figure for the 2024 UK cricket year, I assumed it was a slow year. England Men hosted West Indies and Sri Lanka — neither side likely to fill grounds the way Australia or India do — and […]

Cricket scorecard showing bowling figures with overs maidens runs and wickets columns alongside calculated economy and strike rates

Bowling Statistics Explained

28.07.2026 • Uncategorised

The Three Numbers That Define a Bowler on a Live Feed When I started coaching at a local club, one of the first things I had to explain to new players was why their bowling figures looked different from what they imagined. A bowler who had taken three wickets and gone for 45 runs in […]

Close-up of a cricket scorecard on a tablet screen showing batting averages strike rates and individual innings figures during a match

Batting Statistics Explained

28.07.2026 • Uncategorised

The Three Numbers Every UK Viewer Sees First Open any cricket scorecard during a Test match and three batting numbers will catch your eye before anything else: the runs scored, the average, and the strike rate. They appear on the broadcast graphic when a new batter walks to the crease, on the scorecard line throughout […]

Aerial view of an English cricket ground with pavilion crowd stands and the boundary rope visible on a clear summer afternoon

UK Cricket Grounds

24.07.2026 • Uncategorised

Why the Ground Matters to the Score You See The first time I walked around Headingley I remember being surprised by how short the boundary was square of the wicket on the football-stand side. I had watched cricket there on television for years and never quite registered the geometry. The straight boundary felt long; the […]

Cricket scorecard showing bowling figures including overs maidens runs wickets and economy rate for both teams in a limited-overs international

Bowling Economy Rate

24.07.2026 • Uncategorised

The Single Stat That Drives Captains’ Decisions Watching a limited-overs match from the captaincy perspective is a useful exercise. The captain is looking at one number more than any other: the economy rate of each bowler still available to bowl. Wickets matter, of course. But in a chase, the question of who bowls the next […]

Cricket scoreboard close-up displaying batter statistics including runs balls faced and strike rate during a limited-overs match

Batting Strike Rate

24.07.2026 • Uncategorised

The Stat That Sounds Simpler Than It Is A friend who has watched cricket for thirty years asked me last summer what strike rate actually meant, and when I tried to explain it I realised I had been using the number for so long that I had stopped thinking about what it represents. Strike rate […]

Overhead view of a cricket field showing marked fielding positions including slips gully mid-on mid-off and deep midwicket around the thirty-yard circle

Cricket Fielding Positions

21.07.2026 • Uncategorised

Why Field Names Sound So Strange to New Viewers The first cricket match my partner ever watched with me, she paused the broadcast at about the fifth ball and asked why the commentator had said “fine leg” three times in a row. Within ten minutes she had a list — mid-off, mid-on, third man, square […]

Test match scoreboard showing the trailing team's first-innings total well short of the follow-on margin under bright pavilion lights

Cricket Follow-On Rule

21.07.2026 • Uncategorised

The Tactical Choice Most Captains Now Refuse The first time I saw a captain wave away a follow-on was in 2017 at a county match at Worcester. The visiting side had been bowled out for less than half the home total, the follow-on was sitting there as an option, and the home captain simply chose […]

The Hundred match at an English ground with the scoreboard displaying the 100-ball innings count and a batter playing through the leg side

The Hundred Rules

21.07.2026 • Uncategorised

The Format Built Around a Single Number: 100 When the Hundred launched in 2021, I watched the first match with a mate who had bowled club cricket for twenty years. About fifteen minutes in he turned to me and said the format made sense once you stopped trying to map it onto overs. That is […]

One-Day Cup match at a smaller English county ground with players in white-ball kit and a partially filled stand

One-Day Cup Guide

17.07.2026 • Uncategorised

The 50-Over Domestic Cup and Its Awkward Slot I went to a One-Day Cup match at Hove a couple of summers ago and I was, briefly, the youngest person in the row by about thirty years. The crowd was small, devoted, and made up almost entirely of members who had been coming to that ground […]

Packed Edgbaston-style crowd in the late afternoon for T20 Blast Finals Day with the floodlights coming on against the evening sky

T20 Blast Finals Day

17.07.2026 • Uncategorised

One Day, Three Matches, One Trophy I have been to Finals Day at Edgbaston more times than I can count, and the thing I tell everyone who goes for the first time is to take a jumper and forget about pacing the beer. The day starts in bright sunshine, ends under floodlights, and contains three […]

County Championship match in progress at a sunny English ground with a small pavilion crowd and the scoreboard showing first-innings totals

County Championship Guide

17.07.2026 • Uncategorised

The Oldest Tier in English Cricket The first time I tried to explain the County Championship to a friend from the US, she stopped me about a minute in and said it sounded like Test cricket organised by postcode. That is not the worst summary I have heard. The Championship is four-day red-ball cricket played […]

Packed English Test ground during an Ashes match with the iconic small urn replica displayed near the players' tunnel

Watching The Ashes

14.07.2026 • Uncategorised

Why The Ashes Pulls Cricket Out of Its Niche The morning of the third day at Headingley in 2023, I sat in a cafe in Leeds and watched four people at three separate tables all check their phones at exactly the same moment. They had probably never met. They were all looking at the same […]

Women's Hundred match at an English ground with batters running between the wickets and the scoreboard visible in the background

Women’s Hundred Live Scores

14.07.2026 • Uncategorised

The Women’s Hundred Inside the UK Live-Score Picture I was at Lord’s for the women’s Hundred final in 2025, and the moment that stuck with me was not the catch or the boundary or the trophy lift. It was the queue for the merchandise stand at lunch — twenty deep, almost entirely families, with kids […]