MARSH HANNING — The Marsh Hanning Cricket Club has dismantled its ground scoreboard after concluding that fewer spectators attend the match than watch the panel show recorded beside it afterwards.

The club now withholds the result of each fixture until the analysis program, "Full Pitch", reaches its second segment. The program, filmed on the pavilion steps within minutes of the final over, runs ninety minutes and is released the same evening.

Club chair Mrs Doreen Killick said the decision followed a straightforward audit of the numbers.

"We looked at what people were actually watching," Mrs Killick said. "On a Saturday we might have eleven people at the boundary, and two of them are the scorers. The panel discussion does four hundred on a bad week."

She said the scoreboard had been kept running for reasons of sentiment. "Sentiment does not pay for the roller," she said.

The panel

The show features four club members seated on folding chairs, each given a topic card and ninety seconds to speak. Recent episodes include "Was the tea interval too long?" and "Should the sight screen be moved, and by whom?"

Panelist Mr Gerald Frith said he had prepared for the season by taking a course in broadcasting.

"The match is really the warm-up now," Mr Frith said. "Nobody wants a wicket to end things early, because then we lose the death overs, and the death overs give us something to discuss."

Second XI captain Priya Nand, who refuses to appear on the panel, said she had learned the outcome of her own fixture last Tuesday from episode 41.

"I was told the result at minute forty-three," Ms Nand said. "There was a pause while a panelist ranked my batting on a scale of one to ten. Then they came back to the collapse in the middle order, which was the whole point."

What happens next

The club has applied for a second folding chair for the boundary, positioned to appear in shot behind the panelists. Mrs Killick said the scoreboard timber would be sold and the proceeds put toward a backdrop.

A neighboring village, Lower Dockett, has asked to borrow the format. Its club still displays its score publicly, a practice Mrs Killick described as belonging to a previous era.

"Nobody is anti-score," she said. "We are simply putting the numbers where the audience is."