The subtext to the changes to the structure of the county cricket schedule from 2017 is clear enough from the words of Tom Harrison, the chief executive of the England and Wales Cricket Board. “We now have a great opportunity,” he said, “to take a detailed look at a range of options and find the best structure for the long-term health of the domestic and international game.”
In other words, the decision to cut the County Championship to 14 matches, with divisions of eight and 10 teams respectively, to play the T20 Blast as a midsummer block and to relegate – the appropriate word, however it is dressed up as some sort of preparation for the Champions Trophy that summer – the 50-over competition to April and May (except for a July final), has bought them time to thrash out what is really believed to be the best structure for the future of the domestic game.
Agreeing on such changes is not as simple as many might believe – for example, those who thought it a no-brainer that there should be a franchised or city-based Twenty20 competition and that opportunities have been missed by the ECB. The stick and carrot spring to mind. Were Malcolm Tucker in charge of the ECB he would no doubt employ his own notorious version in which you “take a carrot, you stick it up his fucking arse, followed by the stick, followed by an even bigger, rougher carrot”. But he isn’t.
Essentially, while the ECB has an executive it is still a cooperative, which means that while there is a management structure, there still has to be a corporate agreement.
Persuading all the counties that any changes are to their mutual benefit is the tricky bit. Softly is better. There are also broadcasting agreements to consider, the current ones lasting until the end of the 2019 season and the future of which will already be under preliminary discussion.
The nature of broadcasting rights is changing all the time, particularly when it comes to the packaging of what they call “device rights”: the increasing prevalence of smartphones and tablets, and the demand for clips. To this end there is no one in the world more familiar than Harrison, whose previous work with the media distributor IMG involved overseeing media rights sales for Cricket Australia, Cricket South Africa and the Indian Premier League, with work for ESPN Star Sports in Singapore before that.
In particular, the Indian TV market, hitherto considered a licence to print money by any country who played the India national team, has apparently become so parochial that not only are Indian viewers reluctant to watch any cricket that does not involve India, they are also averse to watching India matches staged abroad.
But like John Betjeman in The Planster’s Vision, “ I have a vision of the future, chum”, and while it involves an increase in the amount of T20 cricket played – and due attention paid to the needs of protecting and even enhancing the County Championship – it most certainly does not, at domestic level, include 50-over cricket.
The opportunity to ensure the first-class season starts later by moving the Royal London Cup is a really sound one. The season had been bursting at the seams so the only way to incorporate all the cricket was to expand the season, with early-to-mid-April championship matches on sappy, damp pitches distorting the picture. To illustrate, in 13 seasons as a professional, I played only five championship matches that started in April, three of them on the last day of that month and none earlier than 28 April. The latest start to a championship season we had in that time was 10 May, in 1978. By that time this coming summer Middlesex will be in the middle of their fourth match, a quarter of their season.
In the future I believe County Championship cricket, which has always been a loss-leader although essential to the development of Test cricketers, will remain essentially niche, as will Test cricket around the world, despite the calls for its primacy. This is part of a democratic process in which it is blindingly obvious that the mass of spectators are demonstrating what it is they really want to watch.
By 2020 (appropriately) we should see a city-based competition blocked into the middle of the summer, closer to the Australian Big Bash model in which Cricket Australia has overall control, rather than the Indian franchise system. This will not be straightforward: our grounds are not large enough to accommodate the sort of numbers that the Big Bash has seen, and in Australia the expansion has been from six state sides to eight, with Melbourne and Sydney sustaining two each. Here, it would be necessary to shrink it down, and almost forget the county divisions.
But herein comes the real problem. A city-based competition would preclude home games for those counties – Essex and Somerset in particular – who rely on a few days’ T20 a year for a large proportion of their income.
So, two things. First, an equable way has to be found for the city competition to benefit all the counties (and minor counties to an extent) and this might have to include ancillary income from merchandising, food and drink outlets and entertainment.
Second, the T20 Blast “appointment to view” could continue through the summer anyway apart from the period of the city competition. But it would mean jettisoning 50-over domestic cricket. Personally I am convinced that T20 cricket gives proper preparation for ODIs. It might even enhance it.
