Bullet with butterfly wings

From a billionaire's playground to the iT20 numbers game: World Cup Notes #1

Getty’s mythic vision of England…

It’s a long way from the Buckinghamshire hamlet of Stokenchurch to the stadiums of India and Sri Lanka, and not just in miles. There had been 37 consecutive days of rain in southern England when I drove past Wormsley last week, and giant winter trees hung heavy overhead, water running from the verges and down the roads. But somehow those distant places just got a whole lot closer, just around the corner maybe.

MCC and Lord’s had that day issued press releases about their ‘strategic partnership’ with the Wormsley estate, turning what was once the most pathologically private cricket ground in the country into a ‘potential training base’ for London Spirit – along with Middlesex men’s and women’s development sides and perhaps in the near distance, the first teams too. The Lord’s press release was more bullish about that prospect than MCC’s, but the Overton window has opened, and through it there is a Lord’s outground in the Chiltern hills.

This newsletter began back in 2024 with a three-parter on the history of Wormsley’s creation at the hands of the tortured billionaire John Paul Getty II, who found solace in the second half of his life in this hidden place, where he built both his library and his cricket ground as bulwarks against a past that he had tried to anaesthetise in other, more destructive ways. Getty went so far as to commission Kenneth Anger, creator of the infamous underground occult movie Lucifer Rising, to make a film about the ground (we stole Anger’s prospective title as the name for this substack instead).

It was a private heaven, with admission granted to the few. Well, not any more. Getty might appreciate the irony of his creation losing the last of its mystery because of money, what with money having been what broke and rebuilt him in the first place.

The MCC’s windfall via their gifted 51 per cent ownership of a Hundred franchise amounts to around £150m and growing. The price is access to Lord’s during August, meaning a crowded summer has become impossibly congested. Rumours of Middlesex’s departure were circulating long before any franchise competition began, but it is now apparently more urgent.

Mervyn King, a former Governor of the Bank of England, was MCC president when the Hundred sale took place. He told analyst and broadcaster Simon Hughes: ‘The London Spirit franchise is the opportunity [to bring top level players to Lord’s]. And I think it will be run with a degree of professionalism and intensity that we haven’t associated certainly with county cricket. Everything has to start from now. We will only have access to the media and TV streaming rights from 2029 onwards. We have to monetize the London franchise by turning the Lord’s ‘brand’ into a global brand.’

It seems pretty likely that the aim of the nine ‘high net worth individuals’ who make up the consortium that bought the other 49 per cent of London Spirit is not simply to help MCC out by building Lord’s into a global brand, but to gain a foothold on the franchise circuit, and, ultimately, the IPL. This is the way in.

The Hundred schedule has already crept backwards in July, and it’s clear that it is far more likely to expand than contract, increasing the pressure on the rest of summer as it sticks out its elbows and fights for room. That expansion is, indirectly, backing its way onto Getty real estate, a bullet on butterfly wings fired from a sleepy, monied haven in England’s hills to the game’s great engine in the sub-continent, where another World Cup is playing out.

HARRY BROOK’S Jolly Boys’ outing survived a knife-edge encounter with the Cardiac Kids of Nepal, thanks in part to an ice-cold final over from Sam Curran, a player whose star has fallen and then risen again between iterations of this competition.

T20 is a hardcore stats paradise, but there is one unexamined number that remains mysterious, and is being highlighted by this expanded competition. How many people does it take to make a team?

Yeah, okay, eleven, very good… But where do those eleven come from? England and Wales has a population base of 61.5 million to draw on. Italy has around the same. Nepal has 29 million, Australia around a million fewer. The Netherlands is up there among the 20s, Scotland has 5.5 million, Ireland about the same, as does New Zealand and Oman. Namibia has three million. Pakistan is the world’s fifth most populous country, USA the third, with India at the top on 1.4 billion.

All of these places have different levels of interest and ability to play cricket, of course, it’s not simply a numbers game. But it seems like a population as low as a few million is still deep enough to find a team of a standard to compete.

T20 is the perfect format for it, too. The shorter the game, the more equal the chances is another of those generally true rules of thumb in sport. So it almost proved with Nepal and England, unequal in so many ways.