Voltman said:
The simple fact is that there are so many other things for people to do with their time. Marry this with the seven-day working week, and it all starts to add up.
But this is just the usual myth. This was the same defeatist excuse used to explain why football crowds were so low in England in the 80´s despite admission being virtually free. Now there is even more choice of things to do and prices have risen 5000% or whatever and still there have been a massive increase in crowds throwing ridicule at the thinking in the 80´s. Why? because some real change was forced through, not least by tragedies.
Yet the same myths are now being used in cricket.
Its a fact that far more people now have far more time and opportunity to attend cricket if they choose to do that. Its also a fact that if just a fraction of every english cricket follower attended a county game once a season crowds would massively increase.
This makes it clear that, for whatever reason, a day at a county game is not appealing to cricket followers. why?
The ECB should study hard why so few people go instead of the apparent indifference with focus only being on silly marketing of music at 20 20 games. Even the invention of 2020 is a good example as it happened almost by accident with little belief that it would be popular. But they finally tried it and should also be open to experimenting with the real game.
Lots of things could be tried out. perhaps back to 3-day games as has been suggested or go the opposite way, as I would like to see tried, with a county game being 5 days of 70-80 overs a day played much faster. Historically some FC cricket has been played with almost as many runs made per hour as is made per hour now in 2020 simply because the over rate was so much higher.
It could be possible to merge the the excitement of 2020 with the quality of real cricket if a "day" was 3 hours of 24 overs per hour.