As if investment banks didn’t compete enough with each other already, London-based employees of Barclays Capital, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley couldn’t resist the opportunity to swap pinstripes for cricket whites in the chill of February for what has been billed the City Indoor Cricket Championship, held in Docklands.
Now, we all know the old sporting clichés: sport isn’t a matter of life and death, it’s more important than that; it’s not the taking part that matters, it’s the winning, etc. Add sport and investment banking together and the competitive edge is magnified greatly: imagine crossing the Aussies at cricket with the US at baseball (although recent results against England and Canada respectively suggest ingrained superiority complexes might not be a good thing).
So it may be of some concern to Bob Diamond, Bill Harrison and John Mack that the winners of the inaugural trophy were the team from... Euromoney Institutional Investor.
The teams of eight played 16 overs per innings. In the semi-finals Euromoney saw off JPMorgan by a margin of 72 runs, and Barclays squeezed out Morgan Stanley by 13.
A convoluted scoring system that might have challenged even the sharpest quant, and would have had legendary cricket scorer Bill Frindall inserting his coloured pens in the nearest chocolate cake in frustration, saw JPMorgan take third place by restricting Morgan Stanley to a grand total of two runs in the play-off.
The final kicked off slightly late, after one of the Euromoney players went missing. He was discovered in the bar, before going on to post a record innings of minus one run. Despite this, Euromoney saw off a spirited last stand from Barclays to win the trophy.
Plans are afoot for a rematch in the summer. Any other London-based financial institutions interested in fielding a side should contact Julian Davies at jdavies@euromoneyplc.com.