It Could Be Said #15 It's Just Cricket
A look at how to better schedule English cricket's domestic competitions
While our shock trouncing of India in the Third Test has allayed some fears about the state of the England Test Team, there can be no doubt that English cricket is not in the best of health with a calendar that has The Hundred relegating not just red-ball cricket but most of the counties to the sidelines during the peak of summer. So I thought I’d sketch out what would be a more sensible schedule.
Just a note, I’m focusing on the men’s game here because the issue for the women’s game is more getting greater investment so they can play more games domestically, rather than how to fit fixtures into a coherent format. For what it’s worth, I’d be tempted to have the regional competition use the same “Super Series” format that they typically use internationally.
Cricket’s Cinderella Format
It cannot be stressed enough that when trying to come up with a rational cricket schedule the thing that keeps messing everything up is One Day Cricket. It’s actually quite easy to balance the demands of white-ball and red-ball cricket throughout the summer, indeed the formula was set decades ago with the old Sunday League; you reserve the most marketable day of the weekend for populist hit and giggle, whilst the County Championship dominates the week. But when you’re trying to balance three tournaments that breaks down.
And what makes it even more infuriating is it’s not entirely clearly why One Day Cricket still exists. It is stuck in a no man’s land where it’s too long and slow to have the mass appeal of T20 but lacks the gladiatorial thrill that first-class cricket uniquely possesses due to the superior ball, degrading pitches and laxer rules. As thrilling as the best One Day matches can be, it’s tempting to wish for the format to be scrapped so cricket can focus on what makes it money. However, I increasingly suspect that that this understandable belief is mistaken, with the format actually acting as the glue that keeps the two profitable extremes of cricket in the same sport. It is the white-ball format that even red-ball specialists can excel at, whilst at international level it has proven a useful way to blood T20 specialists before they make their Test debut.
In any case, as long as the World Cup and Champions Trophy continue to be profitable for global cricket, the format is here to stay. And my suggestion is that the domestic One Day tournament should be played in an exclusive window at the start of the season, ending by the final weekend of May. Doing this would allow for first-class and T20 cricket to played together for most of the summer without any issue, with the glut of ODI games at the start of the tournament allowing for players who specialise in both formats to get their eye in.
But there’s another reason why limiting the ODI tournament to late-Spring makes sense, the numerous ICC tournaments. Whenever England hosts a white-ball tournament it usually starts at the very end of May and then continues into early July. So always having the One Day domestic competition scheduled for the start of the season, ensures that players can get their reps in, whilst battling for the last places in the squad. It may also ensure that we have squad that is used to playing on the wet or scratchy wickets you typically find early in the season, rather than the pristine high-summer batting tracks that Eoin Morgan’s men made their name on, before twice struggling to reach those heights in tournaments held earlier in the year.
In terms of the format for this One Day competition I would have it be a league where every side plays each other one, with games spread throughout the week. This would not only avoid the redundancy in the fixture list that trying to schedule knockout games creates, but also ensures every county gets at least one match against each other during the season.
How Can We Make This A Test?
The other big benefit of reserving the beginning of the season for One Day Cricket is that it means that we can end the farce where more County Championship matches are played in April and September than in August. This trend has left a domestic first-class that discourages spin and overly rewards swing, contrary to the conditions that exist in the English summer, let alone elsewhere.
A fourteen-round County Championship that begun during the first week of June would be completed by the middle of September, even with the inclusion of regular breaks to let players catch their breath and include some Blast double-match weekends. It would at a stroke help the domestic game better mirror the conditions that players will experience if they’re called up to play for England.
But we can do more to close the gap between the domestic and international games. Firstly, the experiment with conferences needs to end, not just because it leads to too many sides having nothing to play for in the second half of the season, but because there’s no easy and fair way to get to a satisfying knockout conclusion to the season. But of course, the pre-pandemic move to only having each side play fourteen times means that the old two-division setup can no longer be delivered fairly.
The solution is to move to three divisions of six. This would clearly highlight the elite, the middle and the bottom in English cricket, with gaining membership of Division One and avoiding relegation to Division Three being far more keenly fought than the previous setup. But in a pure “have your cake and eat it too” move, this more elite format also allows greater leeway to continue popular regional rivalries when one of the teams involve hits hard times. After all, a division of six where everyone plays everyone home and away, results in only ten matches. That means you can add bonus fixtures where teams play one side from each of the other divisions, home and away.
Of course there are those who say this would be just rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic, because we simply do not have enough good cricketers in England and Wales to justify eighteen teams. Let’s ignore whether they're right or wrong for the moment, because I have a solution that takes this objection at face value.
LET MORE FOREIGNERS PLAY IN THE COUNTY CHAMPIONSHIP!
It really is that simple. If we really cannot put out 162 high-quality English/Welshmen then let’s open up more places for people from overseas. After all, the modern peak of county cricket was built on recruiting West Indians and other underutilised international players to play whilst not busy with Test tours. Why can’t we rediscover that spirt and turn the County Championship into the IPL for first-class cricket?
Imagine if rather than paying counties to literally do nothing during most of the summer, the ECB had used that money to organise a draft of top international players that the governing body would pay to play in the County Championship. Given the money available, and the obvious benefits to improving players’ technique, do we really think far weaker boards wouldn’t come to the same conclusion the ECB has with the IPL; let the boys earn their money and hope it makes them better players. In the same way the IPL has elevated standards of T20 international cricket across the world, more overseas players in the County Championship would raise the standard of Test Cricket.
That of course invites the question how many players each side should get in the draft, but before we can answer that, we need to talk T20.
Blast Off To Infinity
The Blast is a great competition which does everything on a smaller budget that apologists claim The Hundred did. The last Blast game I attended not only saw families present, but also new fans clearly getting to grips with the game. As I’ve said before, if the Blast was limited, it’s that it has too few teams, rather than too many. And that has been vindicated this year, with the now unloved T20 competition managing to match if not surpass The Hundred in live attendance and the quality of the games. Likewise The Hundred’s mediocre viewing figures on the BBC confirmed that it was basically doing nothing more than reach the audience who would watch any cricket broadcast on free-to-air television. So providing we can get some games shown on the BBC, there’s no reason we can’t return The Blast to its rightful place as the white-ball competition that the summer is built around.
Before anything there is a question to answer – three months or two. In theory you can start T20 games as soon as One Day games end, running them for the entirety of the summer. However, my preference would actually be to limit the core competition to July and August, with some overspill into September for the knockout games. Not only does it fit within school holidays, but it makes it a more manageable commitment for T20 specialists.
As already mentioned, the envisaged County Championship schedule would have rest weeks that allowed for double headers. That means we are envisaging a ten-game group stage for The Blast, which would once again necessitate dividing the counties into six. Here though logic pushes in favour of conferences rather than divisions for two reasons. Firstly, we do not need The Blast to be the premiere T20 competition in the world, because we can send English and Welsh T20 standouts to other competitions to further build their skills.
Secondly, it’s actually quite easy to turn a three-conference format into a thrilling conclusion. In this version of the schedule, Finals Day becomes a round-robin super league between the three winners of the regional conferences. Those winners would be crowned in a series of regional finals over the August Bank Holiday, where the 2nd and 3rd place sides battle to immediately face the winner of their conference’s group stage in a Regional Championship Match. Having Northern, Central and Southern Regional Championship Double-Headers would surely go a long way to spread interest in the tournament. Furthermore this format ensure that Finals Day reflects the whole country, rather than risking it being dominated by one region.
Of course there is one issue with the format, which is how you maximise the number of T20 matches shown on television. Other than the monthly double-match weekends, we’d be looking at weekly matches. If both The Blast and The County Championship worked to the same regional conferences, then it would be easily to arrange the schedule to showcase several matches over the weekend. Instead the intersection between a national first-class tournament and regional T20, would mean that most matches take place on Friday night (with first-class matches starting the following Sunday), but the ECB and SKY/BBC would negotiate with relevant clubs to shift fixtures around to allow for isolated games to be broadcast on Saturday and Sunday. It would probably require the occasional playing of a T20 without a break from a first-class game. Meh; If Brian Lara could play a One Day game after scoring 501 for Warwickshire, today’s players can suck it up.
A bigger issue is what all this means for the overseas player draft
First-Class Class, T20 Tension
The fundamental tension in the schedule I have sketched out is that we’re trying to create the elite domestic red-ball competition whilst maintaining the reach of the game when it comes to white-ball cricket. But the players don’t divide that easily, as if we let the County Championship’s First Division hoover up the best players, they’ll dominate, and so slowly doom smaller clubs to irrelevancy, and therefore defeat the point of having broad-based white-ball competitions.
To me the way you organise the draft is that you have the ECB organise two draft pools, the first containing those who are available from the start of the County Championship, and those who will only play during the T20 window. The former has a draft format weighted to the First Division, whilst the later has a format weighted in favour of lower division sides to level the playing field. There would also have to be rules about when players could play to avoid people gaming the draft i.e. pretending a T20 ringer was a first-class pick and then not picking him before a County Championship match that occurred the same week as a big Blast match.
When you factor in that the schedule will be more intense and that the ECB will be supporting the procurement of key players, I think it would reasonable to expect that each County side in this schedule would ultimately employ twenty-four cricketers. Of them eight would be overseas players chosen in the drafts, so ensuring that at least four would be selected in every match. Yes this would reduce the pool of players England would get to select from, but those players would be tested in a higher quality competition.
More broadly if Test Cricket is to survive as the peak of the game then greater investment must be made in first-class cricket. If we want sides other than Australia and India to regularly excel in the format without performing the administrative miracles New Zealand has recently, then we have to create a structure that provides their players with a chance to earn real money whilst playing red-ball cricket. Otherwise more players will drift towards playing ever more games in the ever expanding list of T20 and T10 competitions.
What About New Fans!?!
It’s fair to say that I haven’t actually done anything to replace The Hundred as the set-piece event to attract new fans. And that’s because I don’t think domestic competitions ever actually do that; just as more people in England watch England football games than the English Premier League, more Indians watch the biggest India cricket matches than the IPL.
If you really want to reach new fans you have to think about how you showcase the international side - that’s the gateway drug for most people. I think the broadcasting of T20I games on the BBC is a good start, but because they are isolated games rather than whole series, its hard to get people engaged. Plus bilateral T20I series tend not to mean much.
So I would explore whackier ideas to get the most of those slots on the BBC schedule. An annual European Cup played out over a day a la Finals Day with the final on the BBC could become a ratings draw. You could also have England play a T20 series against an All Stars Team, with all games shown on the BBC. And if you wanted to be really radical, you could even let the occassional session of Test Cricket be shown on free-to-air television.
On second thoughts, that last idea is silly. Who’d want to watch that?