Half-empty Lord’s is a bad look, but should English cricket be panicking yet?

Tucked quietly behind the Lord’s museum is the far less interesting Lord’s car park. It’s a postage-stamp space that can accommodate more bikes than it can cars. It’s certainly not large enough for a team coach – you might get one in, but how would you get it back out? – so the players are disgorged on to the pavement outside. Their morning walk through the dark green shutters takes them past Mick, the gate steward, and the ticket office.

By the time they sauntered past on this Sunday morning, Mick already knew how many tickets had been sold for the day – 7,446. He wasn’t the only person at the ground with that figure in the front of his mind. The upper tier of the Tavern stand was taken out of use and the lower tier was barely less empty. When Dimuth Karunaratne was dropped by Joe Root in the slips on 25 in the first half-hour of the morning, there were enough voices to raise a ghostly “Ooh” around the ground. But the grandstand, its banks bereft of bodies, gleamed wide and white as the cosmetic grin of a reality show contestant.

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Why did so few people show up to watch the last live day of England’s series against Sri Lanka? There were plenty asking that question and as many possible answers. The most obvious was arguably the fairest: a lack of confidence in the opposition. In other words: are you ready to commit upwards of £80 on a team that were six for three half an hour into the series at Old Trafford?

There were other aspects, too. Scheduling was one of them, as the calendar ticked over to September and parents’ thoughts turned to school kit and packed lunch ingredients. You couldn’t miss the last-day-of-summer feel in NW8 on Sunday – after the chill wind and autumnal gloom of Saturday, Sunday seemed determined to live up to its name, greedily trapping every last ray in a muggy blanket across the ground. The jazz band by the Grace Gate played its Epicurean song: eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow, you’re back at work.

So yes, perhaps demand was dampened by the timing of this Test. Guy Lavender, the MCC’s chief executive, acknowledged as much, saying that the poor sales had been “likely in part to England’s dominant performance at Lord’s earlier this summer, and this Test being later than normal at the end of the school holidays”. But he also acknowledged a bigger concern at play, which is the future of a financial model based on five-day Tests.

If games get faster and shorter, that model will, inevitably, have to give. Lavender said: “Whilst our sales in 2024 have been the best outside an Ashes year, we will be paying particular attention to the structure of fourth-day tickets in our pricing reviews given the way that Test cricket is now being played.” With walk-up sales and members taken into account, the final attendance on Sunday was about 9,000.

A half-empty ground is a bad look indeed for the self-named home of cricket – especially when it is hoping to secure hosting rights for future World Test Championship finals. But the kneejerk “lower the ticket prices” argument ignores the fact that the lowest adult tickets, £80 (or £65 restricted view), are no more expensive than the Oval, and that Under-16s can get in for £15 on weekends. Dynamic pricing – bringing the prices down just in order to shift them – goes down equally badly when it ends up disadvantaging supporters who buy early and at full price.

Yet Dhanajaya de Silva’s men haven’t caused the same collywobbles that ran through the pavilion corridors in July when West Indies were four wickets from defeat after only two days. The fact that that game teetered into a third day saved MCC executives (and their balance sheet) a No Good Very Bad Day, including a hoard of hospitality salads that would otherwise have gone uneaten. The late-hour decision to invite spectators to “perambulate” on the outfield when the match ended just after lunch was a masterstroke. It encouraged them to stay on and drink in the bars, but also meant they left with a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

The underlying question in all the brow-furrowed discussion of ticket sales is whether English cricket should be panicking yet. Lord’s, after all, is not the only ground affected: Old Trafford reduced the size of its temporary stand for the opening Test of the Sri Lanka series as attendances hovered about 14,000 to 15,000 each day – the ground’s capacity is usually 22,000. The first three days of the final Test, which begins on Friday, are 95% sold, but while day‑four sales are ahead of where Lord’s was on Sunday, they are still notably slow.

There’s no pulling of the emergency cord at Surrey, where they point out that the India series next year is expected to bring much greater demand. Surrey, too, will resist discounting tickets, says the club’s spokesperson: “We would want a lot more data to show there’s an issue with day four before we change our strategy.” But they have sweetened the deal on next week’s Test tickets – anyone buying one will be given priority access to 2025 international fixtures, ahead of the public ballot.

Another strong show of resilience from Sri Lanka should also help. With first Dinesh Chandimal and then De Silva frustrating the England attack, spectators on Sunday ended up getting a lot more value than they may have anticipated from the overnight score. From 3.45pm, Lord’s offered a late gate price of £15 for adults and £5 for children. By the time Lahiru Kumara holed out at 5.02pm, you could have had 62 runs and three wickets for your money.