Leicestershire's Example for English Cricket: The Importance of Service Over Sales | Cricket | The Guardian

The game at Grace Road is moving at a frightening pace on the fourth morning. Leicestershire, following on, are 16 without loss. The Sussex fielders are bounding and skipping across the turf in short, jerky movements. The seamer Brad Currie walks back to his mark in a droll, Charlie Chaplin-style double-step. The commentators are talking in weird electronic blips. At this point, it becomes apparent that the live stream is not working.

While these technical difficulties could happen to anyone, it is premature to draw a link between Leicestershire's inability to operate a simple two-camera feed and their lack of success in the County Championship. Leicestershire has finished bottom of the Championship in eight of the past 14 seasons and failed to win a single red-ball game in 2022. Eventually, the technical issues are resolved, but unfortunately, the home team loses one of their openers and is sliding towards a meek defeat.

However, something curious happens. The promising opener Rishi Patel goes on a spirited counter-attack, and, with the all-rounder Wiaan Mulder's support, Leicestershire bats out the day for a stirring draw. Steve Smith, here for a pre-Ashes hit, has just three runs and one risible over of leg-spin to show for his week’s work. Leicestershire, the championship's perennial punchline, is still unbeaten after six rounds. They won at Headingley for the first time in 113 years last month, and a first promotion in more than two decades is a tantalising possibility. Perhaps the case of Leicestershire offers both a parable and a warning for English cricket at a time when the very principles of the sport are being shuffled beneath our feet.

Every so often, notables from within the game wonder aloud about whether we need 18 counties. Most of the time, they're too polite to name names, but they're talking about Leicestershire. The apparent pointlessness of clubs such as Leicestershire is why the England and Wales Cricket Board debates the merits of a 12-team Premier League or a reduction in red-ball cricket. Clubs like Leicestershire are seen as a drag on the whole enterprise. Why should we continue to bear your impoverished existence?

Sean Jarvis, the new chief executive and a Leicester native who has spent most of his career working in football, set about trying to answer this question around the start of the pandemic. Membership and corporate bookings are up, and the club achieved record turnover last year. Revenue is not an end in itself. Leicestershire halved their prices to help fans who were struggling financially during the pandemic. The club often hands out free tickets to local residents. In March, Leicestershire announced plans to redevelop Grace Road with space for retail units, community housing, healthcare provision, and assisted living for the elderly. Jarvis talks a lot about identity, and he seems to grasp what English cricket has largely forgotten – any sporting team worth its space must exist not only to sell but to serve.

While the arrival of the Hundred had a tangible rationale – to generate money to fund everything else – once it was sold off, that rationale disappeared. The one-off windfall quickly vanished into a million sinkholes, and then what? Back where you started, but on the outside looking in, and with nothing left to sell. Leicestershire, like their live stream, eventually splutter and die.

Keeping the Hundred in-house allows the entity to remain whole. Perhaps Leicestershire will not get promoted, and they may end up becoming a de facto feeder team to the Trent Rockets. However, even here, there is an ecosystem with a place for them, where everyone is linked, and nobody gets forgotten. The Delhi Capitals will not build you a house, and the market's benign hand will not halve ticket prices in a cost-of-living crisis. Sign up to The Spin and subscribe to our cricket newsletter for writers' thoughts on the biggest stories and a review of the week's action.

For all its flaws and foibles, Leicestershire CC is a real thing. It exists, in a way the Trent Entertainment Vehicle does not. It has a mission that goes beyond simply shaking people down for whatever they can pay. It produces cricketers: the bewilderingly exciting leg-spinner Rehan Ahmed the latest. A wild thought: maybe it might achieve even more if the people at the top of the game didn’t keep trying to wipe it off the map.

What do we want sport to be? A pure consumer good, escapism on demand, a direct debit that you forget to cancel? Or can it be something more? Can it bring people together, provide a sense of pride and ownership, give people a stake in their town and their town a stake in something larger? You don’t have to be a Leicestershire fan, or even like cricket very much at all, to recognise that this is a vision of sport worth fighting for.