Is Extra Terrestrial So Alien?

Clarke - served up a veritable earful.

'Transcript' of an 'open letter' to the England and Wales Cricket Board and the BBC - from a disconsolate, disenfranchised cricket lover...

To: Giles Clarke, David Collier.

Cc: BBC.

"Sirs,

"I returned from holiday today to discover I and my family will continue, for the next five years, to be deprived of live cricket on television.

"Will it never again be a licence-payer's birthright to be able to see Test matches as they happen, from our living rooms?

"If you could indulge me momentarily, I would like to explain the impact on one life of your ongoing agreements with satellite broadcasters.

"I am a lifelong cricketer and cricket spectator, who had - selfishly, perhaps - hoped to pass on some of the pleasure I have derived from the sport to my young sons.

"I take them to watch club cricket, when time allows, and encourage them to play themselves too - in the back garden, or at the village ground.

"It was part of my initial strategy too, though, to foster their interest via the spectacle of international and first-class cricket on TV.

"As a modest earner, satellite subscriptions are and will remain out of reach and I have discovered more and more that, without prominence through live broadcast, children conclude the sport is an irrelevance.

"The absence of cricket on television, in the young minds of those whose parents cannot beam in satellite, means it must be a minority interest.

"Instead they will choose a more mainstream pastime - football, inevitably and frustratingly occupying their brains, their hearts, their ambition ... and their entire bedroom wall space.

"I foolishly hoped you might, with Twenty20 riches in your pockets, be able to rectify this situation by rising above what was once apparently the financial necessity of broadcast deals, and start to properly look after the future of English cricket.

"I understand from reports that £30million is to be made available, from your new broadcast revenue, to the grassroots game.

"What I do not understand, though, is the point in that benevolence when your method of fundraising has already eliminated the majority of those aspiring cricketers and potential spectators who might otherwise have benefited.

"You are building the facilities of the future for people who will not exist. Brilliant!

"As an optimist, I try to hope that another five years hence something will have changed.

"Public service broadcasters may no longer be obsessing quite so madly over soap operas, costume dramas and reality programming - to the exclusion of a sport once defining to England, now largely historical.

"The ECB may press the point - even forsake the myopic removal of cricket from terrestrial schedules, realising at last that millions of competitors and consumers have long been lost.

"It will be too late for me and mine, of course. At the ages of 11 and 13 by 2013, cricket will probably be a distant memory of a whim which took hold and passed during a few hours of a sunny afternoon back in summer 2005.

"They might never have been switched on to cricket, of course. It might just not have been their thing. I just wish they, and millions of others, had been given the chance.

"Yours, in resignation and isolation ... awaiting grandchildren, and other miracles."

David Clough