STINKING TRAINS

"All train compartments smell vaguely of shit," David Mamet once wrote, "it gets so you don't mind it." Mamet can never have caught the 9.18am from London Liverpool Street to Chelmsford. The malodorous aroma on that particular train wasn't vague, but exact. I defy anyone not to "mind it". Occasionally, if you're unlucky, catching a train in Britain feels more like catching a time machine. Step through the doors and you're transported back 40 years, to a time when we wore donkey jackets, drove Austin Allegros, and worked a three-day week. This was such a service.

Which was appropriate, as it was carrying me to the Ford County Ground. There, as you turn off the Parkway and loop back around under graffiti-slathered underbelly of the bridge across the River Can, it can also feel like you're passing through a warp to a place almost untouched by modern times, where Camp Coffee, brawn and boiled cabbage are still on the menu, and olive oil is something they sell in pharmacies and you use to clean your ears.

The reason for this is the average age of the fans, who are, almost uniformly, retirees. The few exceptions tend to be students and eccentrics. Chelmsford is like all county grounds in that respect. The weekday spectators are, by necessity, either bunking off, enviably unemployed, or resolutely unemployable.

Which, I'll quickly add to quell the rising hackles of county fans, isn't a criticism, more a concern. One of the best things about going to a county match is that, as dear as the £17 admittance may seem, it's still a whole lot cheaper than a holiday when you feel yourself in need of a little peace, space, and time away from the day-to-day drudgery of work. If anything, following a county team is an aspirational activity for a lot of English people, something to look forward to taking up when you have enough time to really concentrate on it. Like golf. Or whittling. There are plenty of people who dream, I'm sure, of taking up a spot in one of those apartment blocks with balconies overlooking the boundary that seem to be sprouting up at grounds around the country.

You can cut the actual attendance figures for the County Championship one of two ways, pointing out, as Stephen Brenkley does in the Independent, that "although affected by dreadful weather last summer, attendances in 2011 were 530,000, almost 10% up on the previous season". Or, like Scyld Berry in the Daily Telegraph, you could argue that "no county attracted 40,000 spectators last year, aside from members, in the whole season," and that "Warwickshire, the county champions, attracted the largest attendance of 37,164. Many football clubs have more spectators for one game than some counties manage in a year."

What's not in dispute, though, is the prevailing demographic of those who do go. Gordon Hollins, the ECB's managing director of the professional game, told Brenkley that "the retirement market is still the core audience around county cricket", adding that "there is the opportunity to develop attendances particularly to the grey market. Cricket needs to get better at doing that." It seems, to be blunt, to be doing a fair job of it already, what with the all adverts for clinics offering hip replacements or firms offering life insurance, and public service announcements urging men to check the state of their prostates. The County Championship itself may be in reasonably robust health, but you wonder about the state of its spectators.

Hollins, like so many in England, rightly points out that domestic audiences here are still healthier than those in other cricket-playing countries. Truth is that, given the size of the crowds the four-day game gets elsewhere, this is a little like boasting about being the healthiest player on the darts circuit.

You could also argue that cricket needs to do a better job of tapping into the larger, latent audience out there, the fans who are all desk-bound between the hours of 11am and 6pm, when play takes place. They're the ones who loiter on these very pages, on the Guardian's county cricket – live! blog, or tune in to the BBC's ball-by-ball radio coverage, or who are constantly refreshing the scorecards over on Cricinfo, and there are tens of thousands of them. Increasingly, it seems, those who run the Championship are trying to find ways to capitalise on this market through their own online audience. But it's not easy to make them pay, as any number of media organisations have learned.

It would make more sense, surely, to simply rejig the Championship's playing hours. Bump the start time back till after lunch during high summer, let the game run on into the evening, and attract people down after they are done working. Only two seasons ago, Glamorgan played Kent in a day/night Championship match. Only 300 spectators came to see it, something, you suspect, that owed a lot to the fact that it was the middle of September, when only the barmy expect an English evening to be balmy.

After that the appetite for experimenting with day/night Championship cricket seems to have waned, stymied by mutterings about the effect of the dew, and the seeming inability of anyone, anywhere, to come up with a ball that works well under floodlight, as though it was beyond the wit of man to do such a thing, rather than simply against the inclination of the reactionary element.

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