It’s Really not Cricket

I mentioned before the possible death of county cricket, it would appear that perhaps Scykd Berry was correct to say that county cricket was soon to die, as new plans the ECB have unveiled may mark the death of the county game as we know it.

As it stands the county cricket championship is split into two divisions, with the 18 counties playing 16 matches a piece, this appears set to change. The ECB have announced plans to change the format to 3 divisions with a 12 match format. This seems to be a drastic shift away from the 5(well, now 4 day) game towards the increasingly popular one day game, or even the one evening game that is Twenty20. The plans are for the gaps to be filled primarily by a new T20 league the “English Premiere League”, does that name sound familiar to anyone else?

The EPL will consist of the 18 current first class counties and three other teams, possibly from abroad. There will also be a change to the Pro40 game. Instead of the current 40 over innings being delivered in one chunk the innings will be split into smaller chunks of, you’ll never guess, twenty overs. Yes, that will make Pro 40 effectively two Twenty20 games tacked together. but the 50 over game, that will remain pretty much unchanged.

Now, I am aware that we are living in a society with an increasingly short attention span, but why is it that a game which is most easily identified as cricket being cut back in favour of what is effectively an English baseball. The England side performs fairly well in the test game, as has just been proved by the series win over New Zealand, however the England Captain Michael Vaughan, has warned over this shift in emphasis.

The test match is the basis for cricket, why do we now need to cut it back? The players love the game, OK so the crowd drawn at a Twenty20 match is greater than that at a day of a test match, but combine the crowd of all 4 days and you will see that the draw still exists. The players enjoy playing the game, it is where many of them started, but it would appear that all the ECB are concerned with is the money that can be drawn in, and of course we can’t have Sky losing viewers of their shiny cricket coverage because the game is too long.

The Ashes is a series of test matches, and it will hopefully remain that way. Now it is clear that we aren’t exactly the team with the best record in that particular series but there is one way to improve. Let the future country players get a bit of practice at surviving five days on the field. That isn’t going to happen by taking four games out of the county calendar and training the team up in Twenty20 matches.

The atmosphere at Twenty20 matches is clearly a plus, and it isn’t there for the 4 days of a county test match, but why is it that we need to split Pro40 down as well as taking out test matches? These changes seem to be a road towards the death of the game, and it’s something the ECB really need to think hard about before 2010 when they plan to implement all of these changes.

MTFBWY