And the crowd slept on
It's time for counties to wake up and smell the reform, says Matthew Engel
It's time for counties to wake up and smell the reform, says Matthew Engel
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So far as I can see, my money is most likely to be spent on business-class air fares and serviced flats for young South Africans and Australians, so they can play sometimes for as long as a fortnight and learn about English conditions for the benefit of their country's cricket. If I want to hand money to the airlines, I'll fly myself, thank you.
This is not a piece about one cricket club. Northamptonshire, with the players they nurtured all scattered and short-termism reigning supreme, are merely an extreme example. I don't blame them. They are just victims of a terrible system.
Throughout my cricket-watching life the future of county cricket has been endlessly debated. But the debate has almost always taken place against the background of an England team crisis. We have just concluded a stupendous season for English international cricket. It has also been the most dismal county season of all time: unwatchable, unfollowable, unfathomable. The game is trying the patience of its greatest enthusiasts - and I'm one - and disappearing off everyone else's radar screen completely. Unless this crisis is resolved, it will in time undo all the England team's success.
Let's be clear: county cricket's prime purpose must be to support England. But it will do that job better if it offers both credibility and entertainment in its own right. This is a big ask: no other cricketing country achieves this in its domestic cricket, not even Australia. For it to happen in Britain, reform is urgent. But sensible reformers should distrust the motives and methodology of both the counties themselves and their most vociferous critics alike. Some aspects of the current county game are too ludicrous even to be worth lengthy discussion: three-up, three-down; the financially disastrous buy-and-bring system of overseas registrations; the incomprehensible scheduling, which reached its apogee in August Bank Holiday week when eight Championship matches started on five different days. My argument is that there are less obvious crises, even in areas perceived as successes. We will leave Twenty20 for another day. In the meantime, consider the following.
Central contracts
These came in together with the massive top-level expansion of home international cricket. Core England players have now effectively ceased to be county players, which is a terrible loss to their colleagues and spectators alike. Local heroes have been abolished. The gain in revenue from the extra fixtures can be calculated; the losses lower down are hidden - but why join Somerset if you can never watch Trescothick?
But there is worse damage than that. The highest purpose of any county is to develop a great England cricketer. What's the reward? Nothing. Lancashire came up with Andrew Flintoff: they are due to get no benefit from that at all until his cricket degenerates. This is outrageous. County cricket's old tendency to mediocrity is now turned into the guiding principle. The goodish player (usually foreign) has a market value; the genius does not. The damage has been recognised, and some change is on its way. But knowing cricket, it will be insufficient and ineffectual. Jim Cumbes, the Lancashire chief executive, thinks the ECB should not merely pay Flintoff's salary as they do, but pay the club £100,000 a year so the money can be invested in unearthing the next hero. He's wrong. It should be twice that.
Promotion and relegation
Evidence that this has produced any kind of elite remains very slender. I suspect the gap between 1st and 18th in the Championship may actually have narrowed since two divisions came in. Next year, do note, England's four most indispensable players (Vaughan, Flintoff, Harmison and Trescothick) will all be nominally from Division Two. And the notion that the system would make the end of season more exciting has proved manifestly false. Even the core cricket market has stopped caring. How many people can accurately place each club in the right division for the two competitions?
Yes, Division One cricket is now different from Division Two cricket. It is ruled by fear of the drop and, at a time when Test cricket is more thrilling than ever, produces the most timorous and tedious form of the game ever seen (or more often unseen). Hampshire played some enterprising cricket to go up; let's see if they dare sustain it.
I've tried to conclude that two-up, two-down might ease the problem. I've given up. We have an alien, irrelevant system that is doing more harm than good. It heightens competition between clubs rather than players, making counties impatient with developing talent and obsessed with ready-made second-raters - some English, some quasi-English, some Kolpaks, some foreign - all irrelevant to the nation's real cricketing needs.
Australia doesn't have promotion and relegation. Nor should we. There are loads of ways of using financial and other incentives to encourage excellent players rather than time-servers. We should try them.
Four-day cricket
I don't think we should return to the old days of three-day declaration cricket on dodgy wickets. But the present set-up isn't just dull, it clogs the summer. I am quite attracted by the idea from the Leicestershire chairman, Neil Davidson, of three long days - and you could toss in an extra day for use only in case of bad weather. This would make fixture planning far easier, and allow some logic to return. Maybe even a little fun too.
Much more needs to be done. One day, the counties will adopt my idea of merging the Championship and one-day league, if that doesn't fall apart first. This was accepted by the ECB, but spurned after a nanosecond's thinking time by the county chairmen. Maybe they will one day implement a worthwhile idea of their own, though I can't offhand recall one before now.
County cricket has to reach for the stars and reach out to the public. At the moment it is failing to do either. We should use this rare moment of non-crisis at international level to produce sensible reform, instead of the half-baked, panic-stricken, reaction to criticism that has driven the changes of the past few years.
This article was first published in the November issue of The Wisden Cricketer.
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