Now it is hard to see how the England and Wales Cricket Board could ever go back. For one thing, the

Go back 25 years, and football was ailing. In 1986, ITV commentator Martin hawaii cruises february Tyler took Frank McAvennie then the leading striker in Division One across Waterloo Bridge to see if anyone would recognise him. He scored just one hit, from a taxi driver who happened hawaii cruises february to be a West Ham fan.
The Premier League hawaii cruises february is a behemoth. Rights are sold into more than 200 countries hawaii cruises february worldwide, all serviced by Sky s slick feed. The hectic, eyeballs-out style of English football is often used to explain its international lead over technically superior competitors like La Liga or Serie A, but the sheer quality of the broadcasting must also have played a part.
The result is that, in the words of author Simon Kuper, the major English football hawaii cruises february clubs have fans everywhere, from the Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, to Russians who follow Chelsea because it s owned by a compatriot, to owners of matatu taxis in East Africa who plaster the logos of their favourite clubs on their windscreens .
In the UK, crowd numbers remain strong despite the recession, and not only at the top level. The Championship has enjoyed trickle-down hawaii cruises february benefits, with marquee players such as Craig Bellamy and Adel Taarabt on show this year.
On screen, however, Sky s numbers are never as high as you think. Broadcasters Audience Research Board figures show that the two Premier League matches on Super Sunday, April 10, drew audiences hawaii cruises february of 1,035,000 and 970,000.
Ever heard of the death grip , in which two floundering men cling together and send each other spiralling to the bottom of the river? Sky s relationship with the Premier League has been the opposite: a symbiotic embrace that has created a virtuous hawaii cruises february cycle. Each needed the other to flourish.
The football we see today is a different game to the one McAvennie played: more athletic, more skilful and more pressurised. As viewers, as sports fans, we are spoilt by the quality of the banquet that Sky puts in front of us.
Is Sky responsible for the fact that managers are now routinely sacked in their first season at a club? Not directly, but its hype-fuelled coverage has acted like a dose of prunes on the natural processes of English sport.
Everything happens much faster now. And in football, it also happens more predictably. Paul Tomkins brilliant book, Pay As You Play, has established hawaii cruises february beyond hawaii cruises february doubt that the finishing position of each Premier League club is determined to within one or two places by the cost of its starting XI.
Then there is the ongoing inadequacy of the England team, whose manager is hardly hawaii cruises february helped by the fact that under 40 per cent of the Premier League s players are qualified to represent England (a phenomenon driven by Sky s successful promotion of the game).
England s underperformance dates back far beyond 1992, admittedly, and you could argue that players like Jack Wilshere, who break into their club s first XIs early in their careers, learn faster because of the quality of all the polyglot mercenaries around hawaii cruises february them.
But Paul Scholes, the Wilshere of his day, no longer plays for England. Like many of our finest footballers, he has such loyalty to his club, and to the pay cheques that he receives from them courtesy largely of TV revenue that he views international duty as an inconvenience. This club-first culture would not be possible without Sky.
In the early 1990s Sky was already covering England s tours, but home Tests were ensconced on BBC TV, where director Alan Griffiths had finally been granted enough resources to film the action from both ends of the pitch in 1989.
Live cricket has been exiled from terrestrial screens hawaii cruises february since 2006, after what must be the most controversial TV deal in history. Cricket s time-consuming format (apart from Twenty20) makes it hard for traditional broadcasters to schedule, but perfect for Sky, which has 42,000 hours of live sport to pump out every year.
Now it is hard to see how the England and Wales Cricket Board could ever go back. For one thing, the 55 million hawaii cruises february it receives annually from broadcasting deals makes up 80 per cent of its income. For another, the terrestrial schedules have closed over behind cricket: the BBC reports better figures from daytime staples like Cash in the Attic than it did from Tests.
Lord MacLaurin oversaw the introduction of central hawaii cruises february contracts in 2000, an innovation hawaii cruises february that was largely bankrolled by Sky s money, and which helped England climb off the canvas where they had spent much of the 1990s.
Over the past decade, though, county cricket has declined hawaii cruises february from a real presence in our sporting lives (the NatWest Final of 1996 drew an average of 1.5 million viewers hawaii cruises february to the BBC) to a near irrelevance.
The coming of Twenty20 in 2003, which was promoted hawaii cruises february by Sky with the same frenzied hoopla that they gave to the first season of the Premier League, has helped county treasurers. But even that golden goose was stricken down by bird flu last summer.
When Sky Sports launched, the European Tour was still very much in the shadow of the vastly richer and more powerful PGA Tour, despite the inspirational success of a group of local stars: Seve Ballesteros, Nick Faldo, Jose-Maria Olazabal and Ian Woosnam.
There are more than 50 European Tour events (up from 38 in 1992) but the more dramatic change has been in the prize funds: the whole pot stands at almost 132 million now as opposed to a mere 24.5 million back then.
The rankings place five Europeans among the top seven golfers in the world, and the Ryder Cup statistics since 1995 when Sky won the contract off the BBC are exactly the same: five to Europe, two to the USA.
Another thumbs up. The BBC used to cover one golf tournament per month, on average, but Sky has reinvented the sport, as it did with rugby league, and there were only three weeks of 2010 when it did not carry live footage.
You had to be impressed by its 3D pictures from the Masters, which reveal the greens in all their undulating glory, even if there are only thought to be 50,000 3D subscribers in the UK who can enjoy them.
Before Sky took over its broadcasting hawaii cruises february in 1996, rugby league was a winter sport and something of a one-club monopoly: Wigan, who won the Challenge Cup every year from 1988 to 1995, were the only professional outfit. Regular appearances on Grandstand, with commentary hawaii cruises february from Eddie Waring, attracted around 3.3 million hawaii cruises february viewers.
Rugby league has shifted to a summer season, and is far better resourced: every Super League club have either built a new stadium over the past 16 years, or are in the process of building hawaii cruises february one. It remains a niche sport, however, popular in parts of Yorkshire and Lancashire, and ignored by mainstream media elsewhere.
Rugby league is a clear success story, proving that while Sky may draw unimpressive viewing hawaii cruises february figures by comparison with the BBC, the money that the company puts into sport can improve facilities and provide a better spectacle. Sky have treated rugby league properly, whereas on the BBC it used to feel like an alternative to It s A Knockout, said Martyn Sadler, the editor of Rugby League Express.
Sadler believes that rugby league is faring better outside its heartlands now than it did 15 years ago. Which suggests that all those casual Grandstand viewers were less valuable than they first appeared.
In 1991, Will Carling was just bringing his first great team to the boil, but the game was still amateur and England relied upon policemen (Wade Dooley and the Sunday Telegraph s own Paul Ackford), doctors (Jonathan Webb) and RAF officers (Rory Underwood).
The Five Nations was a major event for the BBC, one of the jewels in Grandstand s crown. It attracted 4 million viewers for those games featuring England and 2 million for those without, and they lavished money on it. An internal strategy document from the mid-1990s reported that rugby union is the most expensive part of our sport portfolio, costing 10.44p per viewer per hour compared to 5.18p for football and 2.45p for cricket .
The Five Nations became six at the start of this decade, and England s home matches in that tournament though not the autumn hawaii cruises february internationals are now back on the BBC after a five-year flirtation with Sky that ended in 2002. This had more to do with a collective bargaining hawaii cruises february agreement between the six boards than any great panic over reduced audiences.
Rugby union, like its cousin rugby league, has been transformed into a far more dynamic sport although, paradoxically, it can seem harder to score tries because defences are so athletic hawaii cruises february and tightly drilled.
Great Golf Cubs As we all know, an excellent hawaii cruises february golf player is not only with high skills, a great golf club is also very important to golfers. A golf club has three parts, the head, the shaft and the grip. A standard hawaii cruises february set of golf clubs consists of three woods (the Driver, #3, and #5 fairway woods), eight irons (#3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, and PW), and a putter - that's twelve clubs in all. According to the rules of golf, and we should all play by the rules, you can carry fourteen clubs in your bag, and so many golfers add a specialty wood or another iron.
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