If you love County Championship cricket, please read

This page is about proving a point. If you love County Championship cricket please read on.

The Bob Willis Trophy was heralded as an event to lift the profile of red-ball cricket - three new conferences and showpiece final at Lord’s.

The competition has been excellent with, in my opinion, the best two Championship teams of recent years in the final.

So we have our showpiece but where is the promotion?

There is no live television coverage. That is a real disappointment but at least we have a live streaming service, another superb development of an otherwise difficult summer.

But, in the days before the game, it appeared that these excellent services are not being promoted or marketed. A massive opportunity is being missed to develop long-term interest in the game and short-term monetisation via sponsorship or data collection. Compare the promotion of the Bob Willis Trophy final to that of the Blast, England games or The Hundred.

[NB: This page was published at 12.15pm on the eve of the Bob Willis Trophy. The supporting social media ads started at 12.45pm At 2.30pm, it was announced that the Bob Willis Trophy would be streamed live on BBC iPlayer, the BBC website, Sky Sports YouTube channel and there would be radio coverage on FiveLive Extra]

So I decided to experiment. I have had spent £10 on 24 hours of targeted social media advertising across Facebook and Instagram with the idea of measuring its effectiveness.

If you reading this then it has worked.

I will not be promoting this page any other way. I am looking to see what £10 of promotion could get you. And, bear in mind, I have rushed this out and my ad creative shows my lack of time.

I’ll be writing about this in my column in The Cricket Paper on Sunday, if you would like to leave a comment on this topic, please let me know using the form at the bottom of the page.

To offer value, I’ll update the page with links to all the previews I can find and, once the game is on, links to accessible streams.

And, here’s the sales bit, if you feel the same way about the importance of county cricket then please do consider buying my book, Last-Wicket Stand. See info at the bottom of this page.