Posted by The County Championship has got a new sponsor. It’s Rothesay. Even if you have no idea who Rothesay are, you can probably make a pretty decent ballpark guess.
When the ECB seek sponsorship for a domestic cricket competition, they typically end up mining quite a narrow seam.
In no particular order, here are some of the sponsors the various competitions have had over the last couple of decades.
- Friends Life (insurance)
- AXA (insurance)
- Cornhill (insurance)
- Royal London (pensions and insurance)
- C&G (mortgages and savings)
- Vitality (insurance)
- Specsavers (opticians)
- LV= (insurance)
What a highly boring list of sponsors.
There was a certain amount of sneering when it was announced that KP Snacks would sponsor The Hundred, but personally we were some way reassured that they’d managed to attract a brand that didn’t deal in mobility scooters or ‘rise and recline’ chairs or something.
In contrast, Rothesay are the UK’s largest pensions insurance specialist.
If you’ve only skim-read that description of their field (and really, is there any other way to read it?) then you’ll perhaps have concluded that the champo must be attracting a younger crowd – because if there’s one group of people who by definition aren’t too interested in taking out pensions, it’s surely pensioners.
But no. Read it again. They do pensions insurance, a rather narrower market – albeit one where we’re not 100% certain who’s in it. We did make brief efforts to establish the exact ins and outs of Rothesay’s business and who their customers actually were, but unfortunately their promotional videos are as conspicuously vague as the one for Prestige Worldwide so we didn’t end up any wiser.
It’s all ‘setting new standards’ and ‘tailor made tech’ and ‘pioneering mindset’ and stuff like that. Our in-built glaze-over defence mechanism simply will not allow us to comprehend that sort of crap.
Well done on backing the County Championship though. We’d say “someone has to” but of course that’s not true, so double thanks for keeping the format limping on for three more years.
Extras
It’s been brought to our attention that there’s an interview with us on a podcast. Obviously, we were aware we’d been interviewed – we just didn’t know it had been published. (Published? Is that the word? Broadcast? Set live? Made available?)
It’s for the Cricket Sickos podcast and it’s largely about this website. We’ve vetted the episode and concluded it’s not too embarrassing if you want to have a listen. Pretty niche subject matter all told, but we’d guess anyone likely to be interested surely reads this site. Here’s the link. Just spotted it’s on YouTube as well (thankfully without visuals).
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