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).
Next, a reminder that King Cricket is funded by its readers – a bunch of wonderful people are paying to keep this site running and free of adverts. Have a look at our Patreon if you’d like to know more about that.
Finally, here’s the link to sign up to the email, if you haven’t yet done so.
Listened to the podcast.
Was nice to get a reminder of the early days of cricket blogging. Anyone remember the Corridor of Uncertainty (think the URL was cricket.mailliw.com) and the like?
Two observations though:
(1) I am devastated to learn that this website is apparently a lighthearted ‘comedy’ site rather than the hard-nosed journalism I had assumed from investigations into the weight of Jaffa Cakes and other worthy endeavours.
(2) Surely the answer to never running out of ‘content’ is just to point at the shoulder-high pile of Ged’s as-yet-unpublished match reports that will tide the site over until 2028 at least?
Really, the danger of Ged’s match reports is that if we can’t keep pace, we’ll effectively end up a minority stakeholder.
On the plus side, maybe then he’d have to take on the title of ‘King Cricket’ which would leave us free to live our onlife life under a real, not-made-up name, like ‘Ged Ladd’.
Indeed, serious people on serious websites should not mess around with noms de plume and such trivialities.
Lighthearted comedy sites, on the other hand, are allowed to be hotbeds of nominative anarchy.
More interesting, to me, in the matter of Rothesay sponsoring sports such as tennis and cricket, is the fact that they are not only an esoteric financial services company, but, to all intents and purposes, a wholesale business.
Companies such as Prudential, Cornhill and LV might be understood to be sponsoring in order to encourage more members of Joe Public to buy insurance from them, just as B&H hoped to flog cigarettes to the public and Gillette still get the occasional purchase out of me.
Rothesay are not of that world. Do they want the name recognition so that people might buy their shares? Or feel comfortable that their company’s pension scheme has been bundled into a Rothesay vehicle? This is marketing in an indirect sense, through sponsorship, that I don’t remember seeing before. That doesn’t make it wrong, but it does feel different.
My first thought was that you’d said Rothmans and we’d been catapulted back into the days of the B&H.
This, really, was the big change in domestic cricket advertising: the move from the cigarettes era to the insurance era.
To be fair, if you’ve been smoking the previous sponsor’s products then health insurance might be something you’d be a strong sales lead for.
I miss the Axa Equity & Law Sunday League.
I’m a retired Independant Financial Advisor, and a lofelpng cricket supporter and fan. I have a pension with Rothesay
( and also with several other pension providers.) I don’t have a pension with Equitable Life because when we did our research we felt their free asset ratio ( ie basically the ratio between their ‘reserves’ and their liabilities) was dangerously ‘tight’ . They subsequently went bust.
I’m happy with the choices I’ve made . However when considering any financial investment , including pension, please take proper advice from somebody who does not work for the investment organisation with whom you might place your monies.
Is Lofelpng a new insurance firm based in Papua New Guinea?
No , Sam it’s the result on my fingers of having Chemotherapy and makes some of the activities of daily living difficult . I take your comment in good humour however
On the topics of “people who can delve in excruciating detail into seemingly insignificant and/or off-topic matters”…
…and “people whose guest contributions are in danger of overshadowing years and decades of toil from the website’s lead author”…
…I have just published the following guest piece about a most extraordinary teacher at my school:
https://ianlouisharris.com/2025/03/19/guest-piece-by-andy-dwelly-memories-of-thoughts-on-stephen-jenkins-alleyns-school-teacher-extraordinaire/
Sadly, cricket never came up in his myriad diversions.
On the topic of avoiding being boring, Ben Duckett’s newfound determination to “think about what he says” is surely bad news: https://www.espncricinfo.com/story/ben-duckett-certainly-trying-to-think-more-about-what-i-say-1478121
But bless him for referring to Twitter as ‘Twitter’ throughout. “I’d like to think I’ll still be me in interviews” he says, which is reassuring in several ways.