One day after a numbing, naive innings defeat against New Zealand the impetus for England to become as effective with a red ball as they are with a white one is surely redoubled. Joe Root’s team were ultimately thrashed on a true, hard, unyielding pitch upon which the Kookaburra ball seldom deviated.
Often the conditions in New Zealand are likened to those in this country but that no longer seems to apply. The announcement of the first-class fixtures for the 2020 domestic season in England offers little encouragement that our Test team can easily rectify their deficiencies.
The good news is that there are still 14 red-ball matches for every county; but they will not be played on the sort of surface upon which England were humbled in Mount Maunganui. But after the respite of 2019, when there were a surprising number of four-day games in high summer, the fixture list reverts to the pattern of the past few years.
There will be seven rounds of Championship cricket completed by 25 May; there will be four more stretching from 23 August to 25 September when the leaves are just about still on the trees. Hence there will be only three rounds of matches in the three months that constitute high summer in England.
As a consequence there will be problems for selectors seeking alternatives for the Test team. How much credence can they really give to the fact that a promising youngster has just hit a 15-ball 35? By the same token it will be tricky for the diminishing band of young men with Test ambitions to display their wares.
The situation is especially difficult for a young batsman. For the first month of the season he may well be confronted by green pitches and a devious Dukes ball; in the last month he may well have to battle with more damp surfaces at 10.30 in the morning, and even if he compiles runs aplenty the Test series with Pakistan will be over. It will be so much easier for those eager to demonstrate their one-day skills with the proliferation of so many short-form matches in the middle of the summer. From 26 May to 22 August the sighting of cricketers clutching a red ball at our county grounds will be as rare as the presence of Jacob Rees‑Mogg on our television screens throughout the remainder of the election campaign.
In the wake of England’s thrilling World Cup triumph the 50-over form of the game has been downgraded; it will be contested by the peripherals against the backdrop of The Hundred competition and the second Test series of the summer. Our best youngsters will no longer play 50-over cricket unless they are selected by England. It may well be that in 2021 Championship cricket will be scheduled alongside the Hundred instead. This could be more amenable for supporters who might enjoy the rare luxury of going to a game without their anoraks but it will skew the integrity of the Championship because of all the absentees.
Of course, once the new competition had been approved there was an almost impossible task for the fixture compilers and they may well have delivered as coherent a plan as is possible given all the requirements. On the plus side we know that the Vitality Blast Finals Day on 5 September at Edgbaston is already sold out. We do not yet know where the final of the Hundred on 15 August will take place. However, we do know that the first match of the new format will be on 17 July in south London where the Oval Invincibles will take on Welsh Fire, the team without any Welshmen.
