The Yorkshire chairman and Costcutter supermarket tycoon Colin Graves has vowed to revamp Twenty20 cricket after his appointment as chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board, to follow Giles Clarke, was approved on Tuesday.
Graves, 67, will leave his county post to take up the role from mid-May on a five-year term with Clarke, who has been chairman since 2007, expected to represent the board at the International Cricket Council in the newly created position of ECB president.
Both men will work alongside the new ECB chief executive, Tom Harrison, who has begun a review of English cricket to be presented to the board by the end of the year. Graves’s tenure will span two home Ashes series, the Champions Trophy in 2017 and the 2019 World Cup, which will both be staged in England.
“When you look at cricket overall, I think it’s got some challenges ahead,”
Graves told BBC Look North. “The attendances at Test matches are going down; Twenty20 hasn’t been as successful as we thought it would have been; the 50-over competition is certainly not drawing in the crowds.
“I think we need to look at the way the County Championship is structured, and how much cricket we play. I think we need to decongest the whole season ... and I think we’ve got to look at an English [Twenty20] Premier League somewhere – how we can fit that into the calendar.”
Graves, who was elected the ECB’s deputy chairman in 2013, will leave Yorkshire after 13 years at the club. He has taken them from the brink of a financial crisis to an even keel off the pitch and their 31st outright County Championship title last summer, while overseeing the redevelopment of Headingley.
Falling participation levels at grass-roots level – 844,000 people played cricket in 2014, compared to 908,000 the year before – and a fresh attempt to revamp Twenty20 cricket in the country are at the top of his to-do list. The creation of a short 10-team mid-summer T20 tournament, played at international grounds from 2017, is one idea understood to have been floated.
Such a competition could be in addition to the existing Friday night NatWest T20 Blast and, while played by newly created regional sides, would share the profits among the 18 county clubs. The drive for a revamped stab at the shortest form of the game follows a winter of increased envy for Australia’s glitzy eight-team Big Bash League. How this early plan would fit within an already packed schedule – and alongside the existing £65m-a-year broadcast deal with Sky Sports that runs until 2019 – as well as its appeal to counties both large and small, remains to be seen.
