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This study explores match related factors and their impact on the batting strike rate in Twenty20 cricket – an aspect which can generate excitement and fan engagement in cricket matches.

Data was collected from www.cricinfo.com using a web scraping tool based on R programming from February 17, 2005, to October 25, 2022, numbering 4,221 men’s Twenty20 international innings featuring 41 national teams that had taken place in 85 venues across 11 countries of play. Hypothesis testing was conducted using one-way ANOVA.

The findings indicate that batters score faster in the first inning of a match, and mean strike rates also vary significantly based on the country of play. Further, the study analyses the top performing national sides, venues and country of play in terms of mean batting strike rate, thus providing insights to cricket boards, international regulating bodies of cricket, sponsors, media companies and coaching staff for better decision-making based on batting strike rate.

The originality of the study lies in its focus on using non-marketing strategies to increase fan engagement. Further, this study is the first one to examine different venues from the perspective of batting strike rate in men’s Twenty20 international matches.

Mohammad Azharuddin's arrival in professional cricket served, to quote Karl Marx, as a reform of consciousness that awakened the sport ‘from its dream about itself’. His expertise with the bat invoked the wide expanse of human sensorium, provoking reactions of shock and admiration among observers. In this chapter, I examine Azharuddin's life in cricket and public through a dialectical probing of the relationship between shock and aesthetics. Azhar and cricket appear as a productive terrain to carry out the analysis, as it pushes the possibility of what or who can be considered as a valid subject for theoretical scrutiny. Taking cues from Walter Benjamin and CLR James, I theorise the shock effects created by a cricketer most unusual. From his wristy wizardry with the bat to his appointment as captain of the Indian men's cricket team during the rise of Hindu nationalism in the country, Azharuddin's presence and popularity extended beyond the boundaries that are often imposed on a sportsperson. Through his involvement in the match-fixing scandal that was exposed at the turn of the 21st century, Azhar (the name by which he was popularly known) challenged the mores of a game that had emphasised Victorian notions of purity on and off the field. For the purposes of this chapter, I discuss how Azhar constructed a bodily discourse that pushes us to reassess our very notions of art and aesthetics.

Australian cricket has traditionally been an exemplar of hyper-masculine sporting conservatism. However, cricket, as with a number of Australian sports, has recently introduced an elite women's league. Despite growth in participation and funding of women's cricket, it remains poorly understood at the elite level and particularly its fans. Drawing on the concept of gender-bland sexism (Musto et al., 2017), we investigate differences in fan engagement and perceptions of men's and women's cricket matches. Through a case study of Australian Women's Big Bash cricket team the ‘Sydney Sixers’, this chapter explores how women's cricket was experienced on match-day by fans, as well as perceptions of the value and quality of attending women's professional cricket. We first undertook participant observation at matches to understand how women's cricket was delivered, experienced and engaged with by fans. These observations informed a survey which was distributed to club members. Our findings suggest that there continue to be noticeable differences in the presentation of women's matches when compared to their male equivalents, providing evidence for the presence of gender-bland sexism in areas other than sports media.

In response to increasing competition for consumer attention, sport governing bodies have innovated short-format, action-oriented versions of traditional sports to attract new fans. This article explores how sport governing bodies (SGBs) manage the need for innovations to both conform to existing stakeholder expectations whilst offering novel benefits in comparison to competition (i.e. legitimate distinctiveness).

Created by the English Cricket Board (ECB), The Hundred competition was used as a case study to explore the conformity-differentiation tension through a legitimacy lens using document and media analysis.

Seven themes were created to explain how the ECB managed legitimacy tensions: rule modification, team creation, scheduling, game-day experience, broadcasting, gender equity and sponsorship. In each theme, differentiation and conformity were traded-off by the ECB to prioritise pragmatic legitimacy with broadcasters and sponsors.

For sport management professionals, the Hundred demonstrates the commercial value of differentiating new sporting events from competitors via hybrid broadcasting partnerships, embedded gender equity and designing game-day experiences that attract hard-to-reach consumer demographics.

SGBs must trade-off legitimacy between sources when innovating to survive, and when faced with conflicting expectations, commercial imperatives determined whether to conform or differentiate.

The purpose of this study is to critically examine the financial health and performance of the English and Australian cricket networks. This includes the county cricket clubs (CCC) and state and territory cricket associations (STCA) affiliated to the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) and Cricket Australia (CA) respectively, as well as the ECB and CA themselves. The authors apply resource dependency theory to understand if there are any financial dependencies within the networks of cricket in England and Australia.

The data for this research was obtained from the financial statements of the ECB, the 18 affiliated CCCs, CA and the six affiliated STCAs. This sample covers the last 5 years of financial information (2014–2019) for all the organisations at the time of writing. Ratio analysis was conducted on all organisations within the sample to assess financial health and performance.

Both CCCs and STCAs show signs of poor financial health. There is a clear dependence on the financial support they receive from the ECB and CA respectively and this dependence appears more prominent in Australia. The ECB and CA have better financial health which ultimately allows them to financially support the CCCs and STCAs.

The ECB and CA are facing difficult financial decisions to remain financially secure themselves due to the impact of COVID-19 but also to support their affiliated clubs. The affiliated clubs do not generate sufficient revenues and must diversity their revenue streams if they are to become financially self-sustaining. This financial structure and distribution mechanism will be vital in safeguarding the future of some of England’s and Australia’s most important cricket organisations.

The purpose of this paper is to review practices and research within the social change and community cohesion disciplines with a view to applying them in the context of British Muslims and cricket. The paper aims to discuss the role of sport and especially cricket to help build community cohesion and bring about social change between British Muslims and the wider British society.

This paper uses an inductive and critical approach.

This paper suggests that the apolitical nature of sport and the popularity of cricket within the South‐east Asian British Muslim community can be used as an effective tool to build relationships between British Muslims and the wider British society. It calls for reflexive thought and action on the part of cricket management to engage in community projects that will enhance the image of cricket as well as genuinely benefitting the society.

Growth of British Muslims has created a great amount of interest from a marketing perspective. Research into Islamic marketing and British Muslim consumers is still in its infancy. This paper introduces an under‐researched area of British Muslims (to date), namely British Muslim sport spectators, and calls for cricket managers and marketers to take an active approach to embarking upon social change.

Stick Cricket is a website visited by more than 2 million unique users every month, with each user averaging more than 20 minutes per visit. The website is positioned outside the sporting website category by internet research firms, and this oversight does not consider the valuable consumer segments that these types of websites may hold. This case study describes the business decisions of the Stick Cricket developers in taking a flash-based computer game and creating a website that has been transformed into a sporting portal. The factors that contribute to this success are discussed and provide useful tips for website developers and sports marketers.

The aim of this paper is to examine the factors that induced people to follow the 2005 Ashes cricket series on television and to explore the implications of these factors for the marketing of English cricket as a brand.

A total of 427 members of the public who reported that they had watched at least part of the 2005 Ashes series on television were questioned about their motives for having done so. Specific motives were then related to viewing intensity and to an individual's intention to follow cricket in the future.

The study finds that viewers who had been motivated to watch the Ashes series because of cricket's nostalgic associations with England's past were more likely than others to have followed the series intensively and to state that they would continue to be interested in cricket. Patriotic motivations led to short‐ but not to long‐term support. Social pressure, prior involvement with cricket, and several variables identified from a review of the general academic literature in the sports marketing area also exerted significant influences on future intentions to watch cricket.

It was not feasible to establish the socio‐demographic, cultural and economic backgrounds of individuals who exhibited strong tendencies in relation to the motivations covered by the study. Thus it was not possible to relate these background characteristics to decisions to follow cricket in the longer period.

The results suggest that English cricket may indeed be regarded as a brand, and that certain aspects of cricket's brand identity should be incorporated into marketing communications that promote the sport.

This was the first empirical study to analyse the factors underlying the highly successful rebranding of English cricket that occurred between 1997 and 2004.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the shifting nature of governance reforms, both at global and national levels, in the increasingly commercialised game of cricket. The authors explore the inter-relationship and linkages between governance and commercialism, and in the process, question the contemporary reliance placed on governance as a generic counter-commercialist force and accountability aid.

The analysis is based on a comprehensive analysis of cricketing archives, newspapers and online media. The authors specifically utilise a range of review reports, governance and accounting information from annual reports and websites of the International Cricket Council (ICC) as well as different national cricket governing bodies (NCBs).

The paper vividly demonstrates the importance of recognising the specific significance of different cultural traditions and modes of organising – and not presuming a particular form of impact. The findings highlight that the adoption of a dominant market logic by cricket administrators has resulted in a shift in the balance of power in favour of non-western nations. India has emerged as the clear leader and driving force shaping the way cricket is globally governed. The consequences have been profound but not in terms of delivering, enhanced standards of transparency and accountability. Drawing on institutional theory, the paper argues that the scale of the Board of Cricket Control of India’s financial and operational control over the ICC has not only led to an increasingly commercialised game but engendered divergent and highly questionable standards of governance at the level of NCBs.

Unlike other global games, cricket has an imperialistic root, and has gone through the process of globalisation in relatively recent times. Also, the commercialisation of cricket has resulted in the global economic and power base shifting from the West to the East, giving us the opportunity to study the dynamics between commercialisation and governance in a quite different globalisation context that allows an assessment to be made of the culturally contingent nature of governance as a substantive organising force.

The purpose of this study is to document and analyse Standard Bank of South Africa's sponsorship of Standard Bank Pro20 Cricket as a case study of effective cricket, stadium and broadcast sponsorship activation.

An in‐depth case study methodology is employed, drawing on quantitative and qualitative data.

The main conclusion is that a partnership approach to sponsorship and the creative use of multiple sponsorship activations contributes to the achievement of sponsorship objectives.

The study is limited to one case of a large‐scale sponsor of a major international sport. As such, it has limited generalisability to dissimilar sponsorship situations.

The case documented and analysed suggests that sponsoring organisations may increase their return on sponsorship investment through the adoption of a partnership approach to sponsorship.

The study answers the call of Irwin, Zwick and Sutton, Chadwick and others to significantly increase the researching of sports marketing theory and practice outside traditional Western markets. It documents the creative leverage of a new cricket format that has received no attention in the academic literature, although the 20‐over game continues to enjoy widespread and strong sponsor, media and fan support.