How to wind up cricket's purists

Never mind the World Cup, all the exciting goings on in the world of cricket are happening in the boardroom. Don't believe me? Well this week the ECB put out a Strategy Conversation Summary that is already being described as the most talked about Strategy Conversation Summary in the history of Strategy Conversation Summaries.

It's a beautiful thing, the Strategy Conversation Summary. Be honest, I bet you didn't think they did strategy at the ECB. I bet you've witnessed the goings on in England over the last few years and concluded that the ECB were abstainers in the matter of strategy.

I imagine whenever you saw Giles Clarke on the balcony at Lord's, champagne glass in hand, chuckling away with some nobody in a suit, you thought to yourself, "They're probably joking about us peasants having to pay £100 a time to sit on a tiny plastic seat in the sun."

Well, you could not be more wrong. They were talking about strategy. That's what they do at the ECB, all day long. The ECB headquarters is a hive of strategy talk. That buzzing noise you hear as you approach the ECB headquarters is the sound of a thousand people in suits all muttering, "Strategy, strategy, strategy" to themselves as they hurry in and out of lifts and queue for the vegetarian tapas in the canteen.

Every few weeks, all the strategy talk is harvested by the ECB strategy drones, poured into a document, and made available for the public to enjoy.

But this latest dollop of organic English strategy also includes a new flavour: a pungent hint of troll, courtesy of the ECB's new queen bee, Colin Graves. He faces a five-year reign of dreary board meetings, sucking up to Indian administrators and media character-assassination. So, as the only man in Yorkshire qualified to use humour in public (he has a certificate from the Barnsley Academy of Proper Comedy) he has decided to enliven his first few weeks on the job with a bit of harmless trollery.

Hence the proposal to create an English Premier League. As Colin well knows, mentioning the English Premier League to county cricket folk is like shouting, "Macbeth!" in a full cafeteria at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Try it for yourself. Just sneak into any county game before the start of play, go up to the first person you see and whisper, "English Premier League", in their ear, or if you're feeling particularly mischievous, say "franchise cricket". Come back at the tea interval and the whole ground will still be grumbling about it.

For the benefit of non-English readers, I should explain. A lot of county folk don't like the idea of franchise cricket, because it's likely to be city-based and it's likely to be successful, which might lead the ECB to conclude that organising English cricket around cities, where all the people live, rather than counties, which are mostly full of fields, sheep, antique shops and roadkill, would be a good thing, in turn leading to the end of:

a) County cricket
b) Civilisation as we know it

But Colin hasn't just been trolling county types. He's managed to wind up Test cricket's purists too with the suggestion that Test matches might be four days long instead of five.

That's right. I said four days. Unthinkable, isn't it. I mean, the five-day Test match is the essence of cricket, its very soul. The idea that a Test match is always played over five days is a tradition that goes all the way back to 1973. Obviously you'd have to think twice about tampering with a tradition that has its origins in the early 1970s.

At the risk of taking the proposal seriously for a minute, it does make some sense. Since almost no-one watches five-day Tests, why not condense that non-attendance and lack of interest into four days and cut down on the catering costs? Tests have been played over three days, four days, six days and a couple of weeks, so what's the big deal?

But anyway, there's no need to panic. The ECB can no more change the length of Test matches than they can stop it raining in April. So let's salute a fine piece of trolling from the new man at the ECB, and hope that the Graves regime brings us plenty more ripe entertainment over the next few years.