Tom Harrison, the chief executive of the England and Wales Cricket Board, has warned struggling counties that the governing body will no longer act as a “bank of last resort” and stated a reduction in the number of championship matches is coming.
Harrison is working with ECB chairman, Colin Graves, to produce a new structure for domestic cricket. Their six-month consultation period is close to its conclusion and proposals are to be presented to counties from early September.
The ECB’s accounts for 2015 show counties owe £7.8m in loans to the board. Northamptonshire, for example, are facing problems following a loss of £300,000 last year and Harrison, who began his role at the start of the year, insists the future makeup of the English game must see clubs be commercially viable.
“The ECB is committed to ensuring counties are in a position to sustain their own business,” he told BBC’s Test Match Special. “Ultimately we are not the bank of last resort, that’s not the role the ECB should play. We are in the business of doing everything we can to put a structure in place for our county clubs to be as sustainable as possible.”
Harrison is keen for England to make the Twenty20 competition – currently the season-long NatWest T20 Blast – rival the Indian Premier League and Australia’s Big Bash, but played down talk of adopting a franchise-style model.
He remains committed to raising the standard, stating the tournament must “pit the best against the best” and that playing the three formats in blocks, rather than the current mixed schedule, is desirable. There is, however, too much cricket being played and as a result, the County Championship looks set be cut from 16 fixtures to 14.
“Sometimes [players] are playing three different formats in a week,” Harrison said. “We are hearing from director of cricket that getting players out on to the park at this time of year is very taxing and that they are more worried about getting through the game than putting in the absolute limit of their performance.
“The thing that is compromised is the one thing that shouldn’t be and that is the quality of cricket fans are watching. The desirable position is to have a block in the summer which is given to a particular format.
“Where the domestic structure proposals for next year is to create some space in the calendar – and controversially that means playing one or two first-class games fewer than this year and enabling the formats to breathe a bit – 16 games is a lot and if you take that down to 14 the implications are not significant. In fact they may enhance it and that has to be the idea.”
