Cricket is not a sport I would expect to be blogging about but the ICC World Twenty20 competition has been thoroughly entertaining, and there are some good ratings figures to prove it. Sky Sports coverage of the crucial England vs India game on Sunday evening generated the best audience – 1.2 million/8% share with a peak of 1.7 million. The following night’s rain affected match against West Indies had 954,000/6% share – disappointing, as was the result as England were knocked out.
Much depends, as ever with sport, on the performance of the domestic team – in this case, England’s rollercoaster results provided momentum for the competition; Clots vs Clogs defeat by Netherlands in their opening match, the dramatic narrow win against India, to the anti-climax of defeat to West Indies which put them out of the competition.
How will the semi-finals and final fare without England? The lunchtime matches have been getting between 200,000-300,000 viewers, and the evening games from 500,000 upwards, so it might be asking a lot to manage 1m plus.
BBC2 has been showing highlights of the matches later the same evening, after Newsnight, with some relatively consistent figures, starting with 540,000/9% share on Monday 8th and peaking at 833,000/9% share on Sunday for the England vs India game. It suggests this is a traditional cricket audience – 51% aged over 55 years, compared with 35% for the Sky live matches. There’s a much stronger following of younger viewers – 32% of Sky’s audience were 25-44 years, compared with 23% for BBC2. And Sky had 73% men – 67% for BBC2.
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