Better late than never

ECB chief Tim Lamb: An 11th hour agreement

By BBC Sport cricket reporter Pat Murphy

The last-minute choice of sponsor for cricket's County Championship is significant for a numbers of reasons.

For just one year Cricinfo have agreed to back the venerable competition - born more than 120 years ago and still wheezing along.

That opens up the possibility of other single sports websites getting involved in sponsorship.

Cricinfo points out that last year 20 per cent of their hits related to domestic cricket, so the market is there, even though most cricket lovers simply don't have the time any more to attend four-day championship matches.

The company did well to hold out until as late as possible before coming on board.

They knew that the England and Wales Cricket Board's marketing derpartment faced the embarrassment of the Championship season beginning without a sponsor, so the best bargaining cards were in their hands.

The deal - worth around £250,000 for one year - is less than previous sponsors, PPP Health Care, were paying and Cricinfo ought to recoup that sum easily enough through the volume of hits.

Crowds are sparse at many grounds

Logging onto websites for up to date sports news is a more attractive proposition for many modern fans.

They retain great affection for their favoured sport but would rather not batter through the traffic then endure poor facilities all day just to say they've seen the action live.

What the protracted negotiations say about the stature of the County Championship is something for the ECB to ponder.

In recent years, the Championship has been discredited in the eyes of many because the standard was low and the lack of competitiveness failed to nurture genuine Test cricketers for England.

The introduction last season of promotion and relegation injected welcome aggression, relevance and interest until the end of the season, although the absence of contracted England players at various stages did weaken some of the sidees.

Yet the County Championship has not suddenly become an unattractive product to market.

Residual loyalty has not been diluted, but it has been a commercial dilemma for the ECB, an organisation not averse to making as much money as possible from sponsorship deals and then trumpeting its business acumen.

The delay in landing a sponsor for English cricket's oldest competition was not anticipated last November.

Then, the ECB's chief executive, Tim Lamb, told us during the Test match in Lahore that sponsorship for all the domestic competitions plus seven home Test matches would be in place by the end of 2000.

So Cricinfo has come to the rescue, later rather than sooner - with the Championship like one of those Hollywood starlets from the silent movies who manage to scramble free of the ropes that bound her to the railway track just before the express thundered through.

Money concentrates the mind wonderfully in sport these days, and Cricinfo's head honchos have landed themselves a good deal by biding their time.