Be Prepared (for more fan scrutiny)

 “Even the Barmy Army played at the Waca before the Perth Test”

The above quote, from an ‘insider’ in the England cricket camp, emphasised a truism in modern sport. If you’re performing on the field, no one cares that much what you do off it.

But if you’re not.

Ahead of the third test starting tonight, England’s cricketers have played – on the whole – quite badly in the six days of cricket they’ve managed so far as Australia have taken a huge and potentially unassailable lead in the Ashes. England have to now win all three remaining tests to reclaim the tiny urn. And to justify their preparation for what’s probably their biggest challenge.

Before the first two tests, they didn’t seem to do a great deal of it, or certainly that’s the way it was perceived. Obviously they trained (even over-trained according to their coach) but warm-up matches were few and far between. One short and not exactly testing match ahead of the first test, and then no warm up match at all ahead of the second test, when the day-night game was played with a pink ball which is – I presume – very different to the one they normally play with.

England’s narrative was that they usually prepare in this way, that they’d done enough and needed down time too. If they’d won both tests, or even been more competitive, then no one would have batted an eyelid. As they lost both, and quite convincingly, their preparation, tour schedule and every other decision is being scrutinised in tiny detail. Everything they say and do is now being held up as a further example of their lack of preparedness and even professionalism.

The players – or leadership –tried to pass if off at first, arguing the two aren’t related. The problem with that? You just can’t separate the two that easily.

Testing Times

The media doesn’t. And fans can’t – or won’t - either. The other factors impact their overall view. It’s natural. For cricket fans, and especially the Barmy Army, who follow England all over the world there is a considerable cost involved with match tickets for one day’s play alone going for well over £100 as well as massive travel expenses. They can’t be blamed for feeling short-changed if a five-day game is over in just two because the team appear undercooked.

It’s bound to raise questions.

I’ve often thought – after doing over a hundred match day assessments and reading about thousands more when compiling reports – that the fan’s experience at games isn’t completely linear, and based purely on the experience itself. It ebbs and flows depending on what is taking place around it.

If, like England’s cricketers, the home club is struggling and in a poor run of form, it doesn’t change the experience itself, but it might change the way it’s perceived. Not so much for me, and other assessors, as we’re dispassionate and don’t have a dog in the fight (so to speak). A real fan does though, and their lens will be distorted by these external – and sometimes internal – factors.

The most obvious way this happens is when fans are disgruntled by things like poor form, decisions made by the board, things being aired in the media and other things that happen to every team but that make us view them in a more negative light.

Mo Salah created a media frenzy in the last fortnight, but it it all began because Liverpool were in a bad run of form and therefore under so much scrutiny that everyone was looking for things, and this can include things that might not even be there. The on-pitch performance of club and player was key. Last season, when they were winning, there was nothing of this nature and everyone focused on Manchester United and Spurs instead. This week, after two good wins, the story has almost vanished without trace and the fans are happy again.

It happens within the experience itself too. Again it’s natural, human behaviour. Say you arrive at the stadium and the first person from the club you encounter – the steward at the car park for instance – is either rude, unfriendly or just plain ignores you. That’s a really poor early impression, and it’s almost impossible to not take that into the rest of the experience. After that, the queues feel a little bit longer, the burger is a little bit colder, the beer a little bit flatter.  

The Littler Things

Darts teenage sensation, Luke Littler, was in the away end when his beloved Manchester United beat Wolves last Monday night. Most fans revelled in the away win, and mixing with a sporting legend who’d been world champion before he was eighteen years old.

Researching this, I saw a headline where it said he’d been sacked by the club. Fearing another Jim Radcliffe-round-of-redundancies where they’d started getting rid of people now who didn’t even work at the club, I delved further.

It turned out to be click-bait. He was let go by the club – and twice no less – but it was on the Football Manager game. It’s incredible how these games are so close to real life.

Some fans though questioned his ticketing credentials. Why was he able to get one without the required history? It transpired that Adidas had coughed up a spare one. As a company who pays the club £90m per season to wear their kit, it’s not unreasonable that they get a few tickets in return.

But not all the fans in the away end at Molineux saw it that way.

As described earlier, when a club is down in the dumps, fans find a lot more wrong with it than when they are riding high.

Like the burger, beer and queue lines, fans are more likely to complain – or want to complain - when they are frustrated by what they see on the field.

It makes them look for problems they might have previously overlooked or not even noticed at all. Next time you see a team concede a corner early in a game, listen out. For a team on the up, fans won’t even care. For one on the slide, there will be a collective groan; the fans saying ‘here we go again’ as if they were fully expecting it to happen given everything else going on.

Look at the atmosphere at recent Celtic and – before that - Glasgow Rangers games to see this writ large.

But I’d suggest there’s also a link to the costs involved. Fans increasingly spend a small fortune on following their club, and they have therefore earned the right to moan if they think the club aren’t up to the task, and this is applies off the pitch as well as on it.

Football – at the top level – is increasingly becoming a sport for the wealthy. Despite it’s working man roots, we are now more likely to find celebrities at Premier League games than many working men or women.

The real problem fans had with Luke Littler’s appearance, rather than a slight against a teenager wanting to watch his club, is that it’s simply further evidence of the erosion of affordability for match tickets, with them more likely to end up in the hands of someone who knows someone, rather than the ‘ordinary’ fan?

But it also tells us that fans are less and less likely to keep stomaching this kind of thing.  

And unless teams can guarantee to only ever win, they should expect much more of it.