Exclusive: Surrey Cricket Chief Looks for Natwest T20 Blast to Significantly Boost Attendances
April 22, 2014
By Ismail Uddin
Surrey County Cricket chief Richard Gould is expecting the new Natwest Twenty20 Blast to have record attendances.
The revamped competition, which has secured Natwest as a title sponsor for its inaugural season, is looking to attract more supporters.
Gould told iSportconnect exclusively: “I think the English game and this year’s Natwest T20 Blast, you will see higher attendances at County Cricket than you will have ever seen in any year in county cricket history. From that perspective we are moving in the right direction.”
Gould, the Chief Executive since 2011, also suggested the English game was more suited to supporters attending games rather than its international counterparts and that will result in higher attendances.
“We have seven home games here in the competition. Five of them are on Fridays, the ECB have had good foresight to ensure we focus on the customer and making sure we put on the game on a day where the customer can come. Whereas those tournaments around the world are made for TV, the Natwest T20 is made for the cricket supporter and a result of that we will see and explosion of fans attending Cricket in 2014.”
Gould also spoke about the recent trend of clubs rebranding their Twenty20 teams but believed this was not a possibility for Surrey.
He said: “I have considered it but all the 18 counties are very different and they all have very different business models. The great thing about county cricket is that most have brand names with brand equity that goes back for 150 to 160 years so it’s difficult to come up with a name in a couple of years that is going to share that level of equity.”
“I remember when I was at Somerset and I would speak to people abroad and Somerset to them was a place that had Sir Viv Richards, Joel Garner and Ian Botham. Surrey is the place where (Mark) Ramprakash and Alec Stewart played so whilst some counties have gone to a new brand name, Birmingham Bears being an example that may suit their market it would not suit the Surrey market at this stage.
“Our aim is to dominate Surrey and London in terms of domestic cricket and you can see we are very central to London, that’s the market we have got to play with but we think we can do that with the Surrey brand.”
Video Below:
{jcomments on}
