A single email was enough to drive home the reality of inflation and its impact on county cricket clubs for Somerset's chief executive Gordon Hollins. "Our energy bill had gone up £400,000," Hollins recalls. "We turn over £7.5-8 million and our annual profit is usually around £300-500,000. That was our profit wiped out in one email."
The annual rate of inflation in the UK reached 11.1% in October 2022, its highest level in 41 years, and the effects have been felt by businesses and households across the country. "It has bitten hard for counties," Hollins says. "There's the cost of food, the impact on the hospitality element of our club… the reality is that all counties have been wrestling with that."
Hollins' comments come at a time when counties are weighing up the merits of private investment, with the ECB consulting over the future of the Hundred ahead of the 2025-28 broadcast rights cycle. "The big question at the moment is how do we, as a game, ensure that each element of the game can deliver excellence?" Hollins says.
"I'd include Surrey in that. People always talk about Surrey being wealthy, but they've got very, very high overheads. They've got to feed the monster at The Oval and they've got to generate a lot of money to do it. If ECB money wasn't there, everyone's in trouble: some clubs would be gone tomorrow, and the others would be very, very challenged.
"We've traded in profit 16 years in a row and we're proud of that. But it's getting harder: income isn't going up much in this economy, and costs are. For the first time in my 23 years in the game, there's less money - in real terms - coming from the ECB to counties than there was in the previous term: the media rights deal is broadly flat, but when you consider inflation, that's down."
"In the wider context, how do you invest in the parts of the game that deliver growth and success? I think we have to be quite creative about how we generate funds to deliver the purpose of the game. Clearly, private investment has been talked about and that discussion is ongoing."
Hollins will step down from his role at the start of this season, replaced by another Australian in Jamie Cox. He is relocating to York to spend more time with his family and says he has no interest in taking on another "all-consuming" job as a chief executive at another county, having been linked with Yorkshire in the local press.
He joined Somerset shortly before the Covid pandemic struck in 2020 and has overseen a period of on-field success which culminated in the club winning the T20 Blast for the first time in 18 years last summer, but England's other short-form competition has caused discontent in the south-west.
The Hundred takes up a prime spot in the middle of the season and Somerset did not bid to host or co-host a city-based team back in 2018, when Hollins was still chief operations officer at the ECB. The result is that Taunton stages minimal cricket in midsummer: in August, the only four matches that the County Ground hosted came in the Metro Bank One-Day Cup, where Somerset were without most of the squad that won them the Blast.
Fans in the south-west feel disenfranchised by the Hundred, with their nearest teams based in either Southampton (Southern Brave) or Cardiff (Welsh Fire). "If you live in Penzance, it's a 400-mile round trip for your nearest Hundred match," Hollins says. "That can't be right if we are looking to achieve the objective of the Hundred in the first place: to broaden the audience of the game, and to inspire boys and girls to play cricket."
The tournament is locked into contracts for at least five more seasons, and Hollins believes that the solution is for Somerset to make "a compelling case" that the south-west should host a team in future, with expansion from eight teams to ten among the various options tabled during discussions between the counties and the ECB.
"We need to make sure that the six million people in the south-west of England feel part of it, which they clearly don't at the moment. And we need to ensure that there is some top-table men's and women's cricket here during the school holidays, so that we can inspire the south-west through cricket. That's our purpose as a club, and that purpose will outlive you and me.
"We've got to remember why the Hundred was launched in the first place, and not lose sight of that. In the last five years, cricket globally has changed dramatically in terms of the number of short-form tournaments, and it's critical that the Hundred becomes the second-biggest competition and the challenger to the IPL.
"That is an absolutely key objective because that inspires kids in diverse communities, it broadens the reach of the game, and it provides you with a media rights property to off-set any reduction in the value of international cricket. We believe we should do what's needed to make it the challenger competition to the IPL that it needs to be."
Taunton is not the only possible host venue in the south-west, and Hollins does not rule out the idea Somerset could share a ninth or tenth Hundred team with Gloucestershire, who are planning a new out-of-town venue near Bristol. "We are open to all the options that allow us to deliver our purpose.
"There will be a few counties who would be very disappointed if they didn't have a team - but we'll put our best foot forward. We believe we've got a rich history, healthy performance levels, have developed a lot of excellent cricketers and a cricket-loving population down here that deserve a presence in that competition."
Counties will also shortly have the opportunity to apply to be one of the eight fully professional teams in the new women's domestic structure that will be rolled out from 2025, replacing the existing regional set-up. Taunton has regularly hosted England women's internationals and Western Storm matches, and would seem a natural fit.
"We're waiting on the detail," Hollins says, "but we're very ambitious in that area. We've always had an ambition to make create a sport like tennis, where you have two competitions - men's and women's - of equal status within the same tournament. Most counties have been male-dominated for well over 100 years; in our case, it's been 148 years when Somerset has, frankly, been an overwhelmingly male club.
"Now, around 20% of our membership are female - which is terrific, but we'd love it to go up to 50%. The integration of women's cricket into the current mainstream is not just the right thing to do, but it's also the right business thing to do: you're doubling your market, right? We are very much committed to that."
Like 14 of the 17 other first-class counties, Somerset are a members' club and Hollins says that members will be consulted on any decisions when the ECB's proposals - on the women's game and on the Hundred - are more concrete. "We would always seek consensus on that. The club has such a rich history and such a strong membership that we would always want to take our members with us. But remember: memberships at cricket clubs are a very broad church.
"We had a governance change two or three years ago. Now, the 1.8% that voted it against it felt very, very strongly about it. But 98.2% of our members voted in favour. I hear a lot of negative rhetoric about members around the game but I always just say, actually, these are the people that care the most. If you've got people that care that much about your club, that's a strength, not a weakness."