CMJ: Comment: Counties set to retain one-league championship (15 September 1997)

Monday 15 September 1997

Comment: Counties set to retain one-league championship

By Christopher Martin-Jenkins

IT is crunch day, as Lord MacLaurin puts it, for Raising The Standard, the ECB management board`s blueprint for the playing structure of cricket. At Lord`s this morning the First Class Forum will vote on the proposals for county cricket. This afternoon the Recreational Forum offer their verdict on the proposals for school, youth, club and minor county cricket. They are all in it together and it is important that the disagreement should end today. As Tim Lamb, the England and Wales Cricket Board chief executive, said a week ago, the general thrust of the blueprint has been widely accepted.

It is the FCF meeting, of course, which is of immediate interest. The 18 first-class counties and MCC will have one vote each on each of the proposals affecting county cricket. Most are already agreed. The enlarged NatWest was accepted, still as a 60-over competition, on Sept 2. The National League will be formally agreed today as a 50-over competition in two divisions, the top nine being determined by finishing positions in next season`s Axa Life League, with promotion and relegation for three from 1999. The present Axa Life 40-over league will disappear, along with the Benson and Hedges Cup, in that year.

The only serious debate this morning will concern the manner and speed with which the second eleven championship can be fused into one between the 38 counties, and which of the two extra proposals for the County Championship itself should be preferred to the rejected idea of three conferences with lateseason play-offs.

For all the weight of Lord Maclaurin behind a yes vote for two divisions and his promise that weaker clubs would be given financial help in future in order to retain, as he puts it "18 centres of excellence", the traditional County Championship of a single league between 18 equal counties is likely to carry the day, with the additional incentive of a `Supercup` for the top eight. For the bottom four the penalty will be to be drawn against each other (rather than a minor county) in the following season`s NatWest third round. Analysis of last week`s nine championship games shows that every one would have had a bearing on whether one or other county in each match would finish in the top eight or the bottom four.

Any majority will be sufficient to bring either proposal into being the season after next. There has to be a decision because MCC, exercising their legitimate right to represent the expert but disinterested view on matters of cricketing state, are the 19th voting member. As with the introduction of a full programme of four-day matches in 1993, the main intention behind a twodivision championship with promotion and relegation is to toughen the competition in order to breed a stronger national team. It has been confused with making the game more commercial.

It is a myth, however, that the present competition is either soft or unattractive. It has become tougher and it fre- quently produces a climax. Warwickshire won on the penultimate day of the 1995 season after being harried to the line by Mid- dlesex and Northamptonshire and one point separates Glamorgan and Kent this morning.

Of course the all-play-all championship still produces one-sided, unsatisfying games, like Surrey versus Lancashire last week, but also good and competitive ones, like Yorkshire v Kent at the top or Hampshire v Sussex at the bottom. The Sheffield Shield has good and bad games, too. Nothing would have changed had those three matches been in different divisions.

There was reason behind the failed attempt to reduce the championship to 14 games. It is a wearisome struggle for those who play it all season alongside the sinew-stretching rigours of one-day cricket, but it is full of variety, in grounds, characters and, albeit to a lesser extent than before, pitches. It is no coincidence that overseas professionals still see it as the best finishing school. Jacques Kallis will be a more knowledgeable cricketer; much more dangerous to England on South Africa`s tour next season, after playing for Middlesex this year.

I am sure that a split between first and second divi- sions, with promotion and relegation for three counties each season, would create a more vital element to a higher proportion of games. End-of-season matches would probably attract television coverage, too. The danger is that within years there would be arguments for only one or two clubs to go up or down each season and that the wealthier ones would, as happens in football and rugby, swallow up most of the best players.

Extremists argue that the Australians generate a constant stream of world-class players via only six state sides and that England could do the same. They could, but by means of regional sides playing an early-season competition picked from all 18 counties, and the subsequent selection of an England squad; not by the present proposal to make half the counties sec- ond class.

A more rarified first division would, by all logic, provide a higher standard of competition and even tougher crick- et, but there are talented cricketers already who never make it to county cricket. At a time when the board are rightly trying to expand the breeding ground for potential first-class cricket by opening up more opportunities in all 38 counties, it makes no sense to marginalise gifted cricketers in nine of the 18 firstclass counties. It is hard enough already for anyone playing in an unsuccessful county side to break into the England team.

Financially, too, the prospect would be far gloomier than it is now. Witness Robin Marlar, the Sussex chairman, after a season spent trying to create a viable business plan: "Clubs with small resources but considerable potential have to invest," he says, "but no lender would want to support any county if it might be branded second class. Cricket will go the way of professional rugby with clubs of great tradition dropping out of the top drawer for want of some local billionaire."

This debate has lost its focus. It began with the need to to make the England team more competitive. Raising The Standard calls the England team "the number one priority" and only reactionaries believe that county cricket would be vi- able (two divisions or not) without the income from international cricket. The stronger and more consistent England side everyone wants will be more effectively achieved not by concentrating the best talent in fewer clubs, but by good technical coaching of gifted young players, a more competitive structure below the level of first eleven county cricket and better care of England players once they get on to the international treadmill.

This is the nettle the counties should really be grasping today: allowing the board to take over the employment of an England team group, selected afresh early in each season, with power to add from county cricket when necessary. It is not just a question of getting more out of fast bowlers like Darren Gough and Dean Headley, who break down because of mixed priorities. It is also essential for all the England players to be honed for every international or Test match with the right amount of net and match practice under the eye of expert coaches in their own specialist arts, applying themselves single-mindedly to the goal of trying to win each match and every series.

This, and the imparting of technical excellence to young cricketers well below county level, is how England can catch up and overtake Australia: not by trying to ape a Sheffield Shield which Australian Test players no longer take part in anyway.