It Could Be Said #67 Another County Cricket Schedule Column
English Cricket has a hundred problems, Will joins the ECB in tying to solve something else instead....
Back in 2021 I wrote my dream schedule for the English cricket summer built around England trying to build a genuinely elite redball tournament alongside a T20 Blast built around regional rivalries and a One-Day curtain raiser. It gave short shrift to both calls to reduce the amount of cricket played and pretended that The Hundred wasn’t inevitable.
Four years later, the ECB is trying once again to fix a schedule that has long been a mess due to the need to safeguard The Hundred’s window, protect player safety and arrest The Blast’s alarming decline. Sadly the options the counties are currently debating are not much of an improvement with the options limited to small tweaks to the status quo (fewer Blast games, First Division sides play each other home and away), a thinly disguised attempt to relegate the six smallest counties to semi-professional status by creating a 12-team First Division split into two conferences, and the return of the flabby regional tournament structure used during Covid.
So its time for me, an England fan who follows the county game primarily because its important for the future prospects of my favourite sports team, to once again offer my suggestions. But first…
General Principles
No Knockout Games (Well….Maybe One)
One of the really weird things about the options currently being debated by the counties is that two of them actually add more knockout rounds into the schedule. Given that one of the aims of the exercise is to restore order to the schedule this is insane, as knockout games create redundancy, because you have to clear everyone’s diary lest they qualify. If matchweeks are at a premium (which they are) then we should actually be moving away from having any knockout fixtures at all, so as to maximise how much cricket each county gets to play.
The one exception is The Blast because unless you expand the number of games there’s no way of creating a viable competition that doesn’t have some knockout element. But in an ideal world even Finals Day would be replaced by something like a T20I European Cup that was better placed to capture casual fan interest.
Thursday - Sunday Were Made For Cricket
Nick Friend at The Cricketer has been a key voice in highlighting player concerns about the schedule, particularly the issues they face travelling when The Blast gets busy. Part of this really needs the counties to grow up and be professional about how players are transported, as it really isn’t acceptable that in 2025 professional athletes are expected to drive themselves to and from games. Each county should be made to buy a coach with their share of the proceeds from the sale of The Hundred franchises, and maybe even spring for the odd set of airplane tickets for lengthier journeys.
The reason I say this is that there’s only so much the schedule can do to address the issues. You can certainly avoid teams playing white ball games on consecutive days, but realistically the need to cram two into a long weekend means a day’s rest is all the players are going to get. That will mean the White Ball schedule will very much be divided between teams playing Thursdays and Saturdays, and those playing Fridays and Sundays. As luck would have it those are the best days to play first-class games too.
No Long Gaps In Competitions
The whole point of competitions is to provide a narrative to the action contained within the individual games. If the competition goes on a lengthy break for no-reason it completely breaks the narrative and so robs the competition of its ability to provide meaning to the action. Any sense of momentum or purpose is loss. Competitions have to be allowed to build to a natural finish rather than constantly stopping and starting.
The Best Need Chance To Play All Formats
It is a complete nonsense that the domestic one day tournament is played at the same time as The Hundred, so denying the best English white ball players the chance to play the longer form of limited overs cricket. It’s a crying shame that none of the options being considered by the counties embrace the idea I had back in 2021 that the one day game is given a window at the beginning of the season, despite such a change being seriously considered at one point. Of course the reason is that you can’t wait till May to start The Blast nevermind The Championship and have them finished before The Hundred has begun.
Proposed Formats and Schedule
County Championship - Three Divisions of Six with 10 rounds of fixtures played April to July
As I wrote back in 2021 I just cannot see the argument against a three division county championship. Not only does it allow you to pair down the number of required fixtures to a number that allows for sides in each division to play each other Home and Away but it will give more teams something to play for as teams that currently get to sleeply drift in mid-table have to fight for promotion or against relegation. That the smaller counties are the ones loudest against such a change is utterly perverse given that two of the three proposals they’re currently considering are clear steps towards a super league of the bigger counties. It is exactly the type of short-term, woolly-headed thinking that has seen the likes of Sri Lanka, West Indies and Bangaldesh oppose the creation of a sensible World Test Championship format.
A six-team Division One would ensure that at least two of the bigger counties have to battle it out with their smaller brethen, and it would give counties not going for the championship a sense of purpose as they battle to avoid relegation to the third division. If you had a system of two-up, two-down it would create an incredibly cut-throat league that would be filled with the type of drama and incident that would drive greater fan interest and teach developing players how to handle pressure.
In terms of schedule, the County Championship would begin in mid-April with three rounds played in consecutive weeks. It would then share May & June with the Blast, with each competition taking place on alternating weeks. Then in July it would end with three rounds played in consecutive weeks. All matches would be played Thursday to Sunday, thereby ensuring players weren’t playing cricket for at least three days before or after a championship match.
T20 Blast - Four Regional Conferences of Six with 10 rounds of fixtures played in May & June plus Finals Day at the end of July
The Blast has not being doing all that well since the introduction of The Hundred and it be yanked all over the schedule. Given this is meant to be a cheap and cheerful competition designed to get money to the counties a regional conference format that gives them lots of local derbies and naturally sets up Finals Day between the winners of the various regions makes the most sense. As an added benefit, this means that the amount of travel between games is minimised, especially as to fit the games into a two-month window it shares with the Championship, they’ll usually only be a day’s break between each side’s fixtures any given weekend i.e. teams play Thursday and Saturday or Friday and Sunday.
There is however a problem. Firstly three conferences does not naturally set up a Finals Day unless you prepare for some very complicated Super Over shenanigans should the three sides each secure one victory. Secondly whereas there’s natural clusters of six Midlands and six South-Eastern counties, that leaves the three Western and three Northern counties without a full dance card. You could break up the Midlands conference with three of the East Midlands going with the North, and the West Midlands going with the…erm…West. But that would cut against the attempt to centre genuine local rivalries into the Blast and lead to some fearsome journeys for the players.
The only alternative is to work with England’s neighbours and potentially some of the minor counties to fill out the Northern and Western Conferences. In an ideal world you add an additional English side into the mix and then two further afield, as that would allow the trips between nations to be taken together to minimise travel for the players and spectators. However only really a combined Devon/Cornwall side as the sixth Western side really makes sense, given unlike other minor counties they have expressed interest in the idea when its been suggested in the past and they fit geographically. Luckily for The Northern Conference you can pair two Scottish teams (presumably Edinburgh and Glasgow) and one based in Amsterdam, with special mitigations put in place to solve the travel issue.
What that leaves you with is something that looks like this:
Northern Conference: Edinburgh, Glasgow, Amsterdam, Lancashire, Yorkshire and Durham who play every other Thursday evening (5pm) and Sunday mid-afternoon (3.30pm).
Midlands Conference: Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Derbyshire and Northamptonshire who play every other Friday night (7.30pm) and Sunday night (6pm).
Western Conference: Dublin, Belfast, Glamorgan, Somerset, Gloucestershire and Devon & Cornwall who play every other Friday evening (5pm) and Sunday lunchtime (1pm)
Southern Conference: Surrey, Middlesex, Essex, Kent, Sussex and Hampshire who play every other Thursday night (7.30pm) and Saturday (2.30pm, 5pm and 7.30pm).
As you can see the fixtures are structure to create ten television shots for games to be shown on Sky, should they want them. The idea would be to stick to a regular routine whether each side has a designated home slot and away slot, so home fans know when they’ll be games for them to watch. The one exception to this will be the games involving the Irish and Scottish sides, as they will be played as double headers i.e. Durham goes up to Scotland one weekend to play Edinburgh and Glasgow, with the Scots coming down to play two English sides the following match week. As you can see the Northern Conference has been given a two-day break between games because each week Amsterdam and an English side will have to cross the North Sea. Would make sense to coordinate those fixtures as home and away double-headers so the two sides can share transport and neither side has too much of an advantage due to travel.
The ten fixtures determine who win each regional conference and so qualify for Finals Day. There’s then a break for three weeks as the Championship concludes, and people buy tickets for a Finals Day in which geographical diversity is guaranteed. That would bring the curtain down on the first phase of the English cricketing summer.
One Day Tournament - Two Regional Conferences of 10 with 9 rounds of fixtures played in September plus to-legged Play-Offs at the beginning of October
Under the current schedule all counties are expected to have participated in 14 T20 and 11 first-class games before their decimal overlords take centre stage. In this new proposals that would be reduced to 10 T20 and 10 first-class games, effectively freeing up the equivalent of two weekends. It is still a hard schedule, especially for those players participating in both white and red ball cricket, with there being cricket played Thursday to Sunday every week for 15 weeks. Make that 16 weeks for those whose teams qualify for Finals Day! Still there’s always at least three days rest before or after a championship game, and T20 games on consecutive days have been eliminated.
Even better both tournaments have completed, which creates space to rectify one of the biggest problems with the current schedule with September given over to the domestic One Day Tournament. In doing so you allow the best domestic players to gain experience in a format that England is still competing for international honours in, which means that we don’t have the fiasco of good white ball players struggling to learn the format when they make their ODI debuts. Now this still isn’t ideal as a tournament held in September really would struggle to have many more than ten rounds of fixtures unless it continues well into October. It might also make sense to make it a 40-overs tournament to mitigate against issues caused by the weather and light, and encourage the type of aggressive cricket that made England such a force under Eoin Morgan.
My suggestion is to divide the counties into North and South Conferences, with a Developmental XI added each conference, rounding them out to 10 sides a peace. Each side plays each other once, but obviously the developmental sides don’t have a home ground, so that ensures each county gets to host at least five home games. The first month would see each each side play nine times, typically on Thursday and Saturdays or Fridays and Sundays. In the first three weeks each side would have to play an additional game on a Monday or Tuesday so the final weekend sees every side complete their full set of fixtures. These may be staggered across the three weeks to ensure Sky has more TV matches to broadcast.
The following week the conferences would then play off with each side playing their equivalent in the other conference home and away to determine the overall position i.e. the two teams who came bottom meet to determine who takes the wooden spoon as well as the two teams who came top meeting to determine the overall champion. These would be divided by position; 10-6 playoffs take place on Thursday and Saturday, 5-1 playoffs taking place on Friday and Sunday. Should two teams split the play-offs then a Super Over or Net Run Rate can be used as a tie-breaker.
The benefit of these playoffs is that it meets the need to have a finale where the winners of the two conferences meet, whilst giving all the other counties games to end their season on.
Regional First Class League - One League Of Six with five rounds of fixtures played across August
So we have successfully moved the one day tournament away from a time of year that doomed it to be a secondary competition with even smaller counties often lacking their best white ball players. And whilst it will be a hard schedule throughout September with players even being asked to play three games in six days, they will ultimately only be asked to play twelve matchdays in five weeks. The current schedule has all counties play that many days in three weeks from the 8th September as they desperately cram in three championship rounds. Worse, some some sides will also be navigating Blast quarter-finals and Finals Day!
We have arrived at a core offer for each county of 5 home T20 fixtures, 6 or 7 home one day fixtures, and 5 home championship fixtures. All scheduled in a way to ensure that the counties can field a strong line-up for the matches, and with all but one matchday being scheduled for those core days of Thursday to Sunday that should attract the biggest audiences. And assuming we can get fans excited about the one day tournament again, the offer for elite white ball cricket has actually increased significantly; 7 home fixtures under the current schedule, 11 or 12 home fixtures under this proposal.
But what about first class cricket? That has clearly had a significant reduction from 7 home fixtures to five. And what about August now that the one day tournament has escaped it?
Well my proposed “solution” to both problems is to have a regional first class tournament made up of representative sides managed by the counties. The idea would be to structure the six sides so that on the whole you have two counties not involved in The Hundred sharing a side with one that is involved. The fifteen fixtures are then organised to ensure that each of the 10 smaller counties have one home game during August with the remaining five fixtures shared out at festival grounds that maximise attendance across the country. At very least the members of smaller counties get an extra first class match to watch, and depending on how easy the region is to navigate, they may end up getting to watch some extra matches in neighbouring counties.
The tournament also gives redball specialists something to do during August and as you’d only be filling out six sides rather than eighteen, the quality of cricket should still be quite high, even as its up against The Hundred. And it means that developing redball players would potentially get fifteen domestic fixtures including four in both July and August.
And we achieve all that while maintaining the equality of the eighteen counties, reducing the workload on county players, and creating a schedule that’s significantly easier to follow. Not too bad, if I say so myself.