Foxtel’s plan to bowl over sports fans this summer

“Cricket’s not something that you pick up when it starts getting to warmer weather,” Steve Crawley, managing director of Fox Sports, explains to Mumbrella. “The way the cricket is now, it’s a 12-month-a-year job.”

This is the most important summer of cricket in years for Foxtel.

For the first time in four years, a five-test Ashes series against England will be held on Australia soil, from November 21.

The T20 series against New Zealand kicked off at the start of this month, while the first of three one-dayers against India happens in Perth this coming Sunday, October 19 (there are five additional T20 matches against India, to boot).

There are numerous T20 games, and 87 live BBL and WBBL matches dotted throughout the summer. There’s also a Women’s test match, the Sheffield Shield, Dean Jones Trophy, and the WNCL.

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In total, Foxtel will air over 3,000 hours of live action over the coming summer — and Adam Howarth, Foxtel’s director of content acquisitions and sports partnerships, is hoping this isn’t the first that cricket fans are hearing around it.

“There’s a lot of planning and science that goes behind what we’re promoting in our big rating properties”, he tells Mumbrella.

“We have just finished an unbelievable couple of months of footy finals, both AFL and NRL, with some pretty astounding audiences. We use those audiences to shout about the Ashes and to shout about the summer of cricket.

“The ability to use premium sports to convince Kayo Sports customers that they’re about to witness something amazing over the course of this summer is very important to us,” Howarth says.

“It’s really heartening to be able to use those big audiences to drive people and funnel them into a big summer of cricket like we have coming up.”

Crawley is even more enthusiastic about the coming summer.

“I reckon that we’re in a purple period of sport,” he declares. “I mean, the Rugby League and the AFL this year was like we’ve never seen before, and I think that’s going to carry through to the cricket. It’s not very often that you get India white ball and the Ashes red ball test matches in the one summer.

“I can’t remember feeling more excited leading into a summer as we do this year.”

Crawley is in Parramatta this morning, at Kayo Sports’ summer of cricket launch, and figures the level of excitement there from the likes of Fox Sport commentator Mark Waugh and Australian men’s captain Pat Cummins, is a good litmus test.

“They’re not guys that get excited easy,” he says. “They’re all talking about Reece Walsh in the grand final, and the Brisbane Lions in the same breath as they’re talking about the test matches. You can just tell in everyone’s voice that this is not going to be an ordinary summer.”

Last summer the Indian team was touring Australia, which “broke all sorts of records for us”, Howarth says.

“And we anticipate the same thing will happen again this summer. We couldn’t be happier and more excited about what’s to come.”

Over 3,000 hours of live cricket will be aired on Foxtel and Kayo this summer

As Crawley noted, for the Foxtel team, cricket is an all-year-round proposition.

“The production team have a long-term view and then a short-term view,” Howarth explains.

“When we signed this agreement with Cricket Australia, we knew what we were buying.

“The ICC ‘Future Tours’ program tells us that in 2025-26 you’re going to have the Ashes, in 2024-25, you’ve got India. So we start planning years in advance, to a certain extent. And then, obviously, it gets a little more intense as you get closer to it.”

Having the cricket rights locked in until at least 2031 helps immensely with the forward-planning.

Lengthy rights deals allow Fox Sports to build tentpole “magazine” shows over multiple seasons — for example, NRL fans know to expect the Matty Johns Show on 6pm of a Sunday once each round wraps up.  Howarth notes the ideal length for a broadcast deal differs from sport to sport, but for a seasonal favourite like cricket, locking down a long term deal is “crucial” to future planning.

“You have different tours [over] different summers that bring different personalities and different opposition, obviously, to your shores. Then you don’t know what’s happening during the year within cricket, because it’s such a moving feast that Australia could have gone to Nepal and lost over there [for example]. That makes a series against England even more important.”

Howarth notes this consistency also helps retain subscribers in a fractured broadcasting landscape, both those who may have initially signed up for the winter sports and can be tempted by the cricket, and those who expect to see the cricket follow the football follow the cricket follow the football, without interruption.

“It’s a great message for us to say, ‘Stick around because you’re going to see England. You’re going to see the Ashes. You’re going to see Formula One. You’re going to see UFC. You’re going to see all the action on ESPN, on Kayo’. It’s really important that we’re able to tell those stories long-term.”

These deals also allow Crawley to assemble the right mix of talent for his commentary and presenter teams, testing different chemistry combinations over numerous summers, and finding talent that will resonate with different pockets of the audience.

“In the old days you’d just get the cream of the Australian commentators or former cricketers and put them in,” Crawley recalls of his time as Nine’s head of sports, a job he held between 2002 and 2016.

“But now, we’ve got Ravi Shastri here for the eight matches against India — some would argue he’s the greatest player ever for India — to have him here, and the following that he has in the Indian community, it just means so much to our coverage.

“Then you have to have different sort of personalities, where a [’70s Australian cricketer] Kerry O’Keeffe’s a very different personality to, say, a Mark Waugh. Probably two people that see the world completely different. You put them side by side, and there’s a place for them in a really well-balanced commentary team.

“And then you’ve got Mark Howard, who plays fifth-grade cricket for Barwon Heads in Victoria. He’s sitting alongside the best cricketers in the history of the game, but he’s earned his place too, for other reasons. He brings his personality and his expertise to the coverage.”

Kayo Sports and Foxtel are gearing up for another big summer of cricket

Crawley says there’s “a million rules” that commentators need to abide by, in order to make the cut. He rattles off a few things to avoid: “Talking too much, using too many nicknames, being too familiar, wasting words, crossing back to someone to throw to something instead of just throwing from the original place. It’s a complicated business.

“It takes you a long time to get a team together, like any champion team. But, once you’ve got it together, it’s just a case of picking the right players on the right day.”

Despite the riches in the commentary box and on the schedule, Howarth notes what is perhaps the top selling point for any broadcaster looking to capture Australian audiences during the summer — you can bring Kayo along with you.

“A lot of Australian families become quite nomadic over summer and they might disappear to the beaches and on holidays and away from their normal homes,” he says. “So just the convenience of being able to take Kayo Sports on the road and allow you to not miss a thing is one of the things that we’re very excited about.

“I can’t think of another broadcast platform around the world that has this unique mix of all the premium sports that we carry as well as all the sport that flows through from our deal with ESPN.

“NFL runs over summer. NBA runs over summer. Baseball World Series will be in the next few weeks.

“We’ve got such an awesome lineup of sport.”

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