Phil Harrison: Reacquaintance with cricket’s fascinations is going to cost me

Over two weeks after Yorkshire – and not forgetting Derbyshire, of course – managed to secure promotion to County Championship Division One, and a thrilling finish in the CB40 final at Lord’s, we find ourselves in the midst of the ICC WorldTwenty20 in Sri Lanka.

My time as the host of the Yorkshire Post’s ground-breaking podcast Cricket Talk, where I have played second fiddle to my far more knowledgeable and entertaining colleague, our cricket correspondent, Chris Waters, has reawakened my interest in Britain’s summer sport.

Not that it had ever disappeared, you understand. It had just been difficult to find the amount of time required to pay it the attention it deserves, largely due to all the things that gradually take over your life as you get older such as wife, child, mortgage, credit card payments.

But this year I have been able to find a few hours here and there to take in some live cricket and thoroughly enjoyable it has been. It may only have been a couple of hours but I was able to soak up a tense County Championship meeting between Yorkshire and Derbyshire at Headingley, which ended in a draw and, in some small way, helped both teams achieve their goal of reaching Division One.

Having eloped to Yorkshire towards the end of 2006, it has been some years since I had spent any time at the County Ground in Derby and I realised how much I had missed the soothing noise of low, constant murmuring that a few hundred spectators can produce on such an occasion. Those type of crowds may be low in number but they no doubt possess far more knowledge of the game – in some cases, far too much knowledge perhaps – than an 18,000-plus capacity crowd there to watch a Twenty20 game.

This year also saw me make my long-awaited return to the Test match arena – fortunately for England not in the team, but in the crowd.

Our three-strong group had arrived on the Saturday morning expecting to be home by around 2pm having seen a weather forecast predicting solid rain throughout the day. But, save for about an hour or so lost to a midday shower, we were treated to a perfect day’s cricket.

Remember it? The one in which Kevin Pietersen made 140-odd and then spent most of the post-match press conference making sure all the headlines were about himself – the ramifications of his words still being felt now.

I also attended one of Yorkshire’s T20 group matches, just one moment in a successful campaign in the very limited format which has not yet ended as, in less than two weeks, they head to South Africa in search of a £1.2m prize in the Champions League.

While three or so days of watching cricket over the course of the season may not sound a lot – when compared to Yorkshire devotees – for me it confirmed that the game is still as fascinating as it was when I watched on a regular basis all those years ago.

This month’s goings-on in Sri Lanka, and the coming efforts of Yorkshire in South Africa, are therefore interesting enough for me to break the bank and treat myself to at least one month’s worth of satellite TV subscription to watch both events to their hoped-for thrilling conclusion.

Poles apart they may be in terms of pace and style, but the other sport closest to my heart is ice hockey.

While I regularly get along to watch games in the top-flight Elite League – usually either involving the Sheffield Steelers or the Hull Stingrays – I also follow the National Hockey League across the Atlantic.

Hugely popular among its die-hard fans, ice hockey, or simply hockey as they refer to it over there (our hockey is referred to as field hockey in North America) comes fourth in terms of popularity behind American football, baseball and basketball.

That does not mean there is not huge money to be made by players and owners alike, much on a par with, for example, Premier League footballers over here (although top-flight owners over here may rightfully argue they rarely make any money).

However, it is the distribution of the huge revenues available which has left the NHL in a perilous state for the forthcoming season.

Back in 2004-05, a failure to reach agreement over similar issues to those being questioned now saw that season wiped out after the players were effectively locked out by the team owners.

After that season was lost, a new Collective Bargaining Agreement – covering issues such as hockey related revenues and a salary cap – was drawn up.

That came to an end in the summer and, despite talks being held between the NHL team owners and the players’ association (NHLPA) no new agreement has been reached, leading to players being again locked out of their clubs’ training facilities.

The whole pre-season has already been lost with the planned October 11 regular season start in serious doubt.

In essence, the owners want – among other things – to see the players earn less money from hockey related revenues (currently 57 per cent) with the players’ union looking to dictate the terms of how that reduction is managed.

What it means is that some players have moved to other clubs, some to their NHL team’s lower-level affiliate in the American Hockey League, and yet others have headed to the higher-quality leagues in Europe such as the KHL in Russia and Sweden’s Elitserien.

The UK’s Elite League is not among those ‘higher-level’ leagues but, if the lockout continues, it is still likely to feel some kind of knock-on effect, either through NHL players switching directly to British clubs – as happened in a handful of cases eight years ago – or through the natural displacement that would occur with more players joining higher-quality European leagues.

The direct effect has already been seen this time around, however, with Carolina Hurricanes’ forward Anthony Stewart signing on a short-term deal for the Nottingham Panthers. He made his debut in Saturday night’s 2-1 shoot-out victory over arch-rivals Sheffield Steelers at the Motorpoint Arena.

Stewart is by no means in the same league as the NHL’s top stars, but he arrives in the UK with an impressive CV. By all accounts he had a steady, if not spectacular, debut for the Panthers, no doubt keen to avoid any long-term injury should the lockout end sometime soon.

The signing of Stewart, while no doubt representing something of a coup for Nottingham, is not embraced by everyone within the league. Some coaches – privately or publicly – question the wisdom of signing such a high-calibre player at the expense of another of their roster who, while perhaps less talented, has committed himself fully for the season rather than just a few weeks.

Others argue that the arrival of a player like Stewart – with others possibly to follow – can only be good for the UK’s top flight and its profile. That is possible, but beyond the regional press and media which cover their own clubs on a regular basis anyway, there has been little attention, if any, paid to Stewart’s arrival in the East Midlands.

That suggests a lot more needs to be done by the league as a whole, and the sport in general in this country, before it finds itself taking up column inches and airtime in the national media on a Monday morning on a regular basis once again.