2010 – A county odyssey

There’s an odd contrast between the people at county matches this season. A lot of players and senior administrators at the ECB seem wildly optimistic about the future, whereas those sitting in the stands are filled with trepidation.

Everyone knows that the structure of the English season will change from 2010 onwards, but in what way? Will the ECB come up with a structure which people will want to support and patronise, or will they end up pleasing no-one by scheduling too few first-class games to satisfy the traditionalists only to discover that expanding the limited-over programme results in little or no growth in overall attendance figures as people pick and choose how to spread their cricket-watching budget?

The basic problem is that hardly anyone watches county four-day cricket. It costs vastly more to stage in terms of player salaries and staffing of the grounds than it ever takes in through the turnstiles. Even if you allot all of the income from membership subscriptions to the four-day account, every county makes a huge loss on the first-class game.

However, a successful England Test team is a huge revenue-earner. Broadcasters aren’t prepared to pay much to show a team which usually loses, but a winning team attracts top dollar for the TV rights. A successful Test team needs a strong first-class competition to supply its personnel, so the financial justification for the championship is that it provides that nursery.

In my ideal world, we’d have Championship matches starting every Friday and Twenty20 every Wednesday evening, but that’s simply what I want to watch; there is no specific cricketing justification for it. Though the present 16-game Championship seems pretty meagre to me, it is futile to pretend that it is the minimum necessary for Test preparation. Fifty years ago, Australia used to be able to come up with a side to beat us on eight games a season while we played 32.

Players know that first-class cricket is the stiffest test of their abilities: you can do quite well in short-form cricket by riding your luck, but first-class cricket always finds you out in the end, and it is the high degree of skill developed in first-class that enables the best players to do such spectacular things to make the moolah in Twenty20. Winning the championship, whether or not it is the most lucrative, is still the most fulfilling thing a county cricketer can achieve professionally, just as an actor will judge himself on his Hamlet, Estragon or Willy Loman at the National rather than his successful TV sitcom.

The most important thing in any new structure for the championship is that it retains the players’ respect. For that to happen, it must be clear to them that the team which wins is extremely likely to be the best team. Since they were not serious challengers in 1947 or 1949, Glamorgan’s famous win in 1948 was the sort of exception that proves cricket to be a funny old game after all, and no-one will mind that happening again once in a while, but as a rule, the players of the counties who don’t win should feel that the winners deserved it by virtue of being the best-equipped and best-performed team of the season.

Before we traditionalists lacerate whatever the ECB come up with, we should in fairness at least consider whether it will still deliver a championship a player will be proud to win.