CMJ: Two-day future looms for counties (12 May 1997)

IT is a nice coincidence that on the very morning of the arrival of the 1997 Australians, the England and Wales Cricket Board are considering for county cricket a form of the game which has been the bedrock of Australian success:

12-May-1997

Monday 12 May 1997

Two-day future looms for counties

Christopher Martin-Jenkins

Already there is a growing move at under-17 and under- 19 levels towards two-day matches of the kind played by all Australian grade cricketers.

Essentially they are one-innings matches which encourage orthodox batting, the art of building an innings, attacking bowling and field-settings designed to take wickets. There are extra points, however, for the side who can bat positively, bowl the other one out twice and gain what the Aussies call "an outright".

It is the type of cricket which has produced in the best players in Australia and South Africa, where such matches are the staple diet for the best amateur leagues, that mixture of controlled aggression, teamwork, toughness and technical rectitude which makes for success in Test cricket.

John Carr, the cricket operations manager of the ECB, confirmed this weekend that two-day matches in county cricket are on the agenda: "We generally feel that this is an idea well worth considering at first-class level," he said. Tim Lamb, the ECB`s chief executive, agrees: "If this form of cricket is going to be encouraged for our best junior and league cricket, it seems logical for the professionals to be playing it too, as a prototype for the rest."

This is not a definite proposal yet, but, as with regional cricket and a two-division championship, it is part of the debate which is still going on at Lord`s and in the counties. Two-day cricket will be one of several possibilities discussed by the First Class Forum when they meet tomorrow. These are still sensitive issues and Carr, the former Middlesex batsman now in his first full season as the administrator at the sharp end of county cricket, is wary about stating his personal preferences.

He experienced grade cricket at first hand in Sydney and New South Wales, however, and is far from alone in believing that it would be the best formula both for the top leagues in the 38 counties and for the proposed competition between the minor counties and second elevens of the 18 first-class clubs.

That the format might be extended to professional cricket, too, is a new and interesting proposal. A certain amount of first-class two-day matches would meet the one serious objection to the idea that the best England-qualified players should concentrate in future on a new competition between six regional sides distilled from county cricket.

Some county officials are worried that this relatively elite group would spend too little time with the clubs who nurtured them. If they were to play not just in each county`s major one-day games but also in two-day matches, those anxieties would be eased and it should be feasible to have a championship comprising a mixture of two and four-day games. The alternative, as already discussed, is a three-day competition on uncovered pitches.

Not until the end of the season will the counties be asked to vote for a revised format, based on a blueprint which will be identified with Lord MacLaurin, chairman of the ECB, but which will initially be the product of teamwork by the full management committee, working on recommendations by Lamb, Carr and director of coaching Micky Stewart. The overall plan, to be finalised by the end of August, will include junior, club and minor county cricket as well as the professional level.

I KNOW what my colleague Michael Parkinson was saying in his comments about the way cricket seasons begin in this country (Telegraph, May 5). It is true that the season tends to creep in almost unnoticed by some, albeit not the overall cricket readership of six million.

True, too, that cricket has to sell itself and compete with other sports both for its spectators and its young players. But I cannot agree that the season should come in with a blaring of trumpets and a television advertising campaign, if only because typical early-season weather would often lead to embarrassing anti-climax.

Marketing is actually one area where English cricket works. The game is turning over about 60 million and making a profit of some 20 million from the Tests and one-day internationals.

It is true that by introducing the Premier League the football authorities have generated far greater profits for the top clubs but in cricket, even in Australia, the more the `big` occasion is sold, the harder it is to get people to watch the essential bread and butter games. There have to be lowerkey, preparatory events too.

In other words, the striving to be competitive, which is healthy and cannot be avoided, should not mean traditions have to be thrown away. The long-established fixtures between Oxford or Cambridge and the counties are a case in point.

If they are anachronisms, they are harmless ones which sometimes hasten the progress of promising undergraduate players and often that of talented youngsters on county staffs, like Stephen Peters of Essex, who will have lost nothing in self-esteem by scoring a hundred last week against Cambridge. The Cambridge side have three first-class centurymakers, and their second eleven, the Crusaders, are competing with the Oxford Authentics and the major provincial teams in a newlyconstituted British university tournament.

There are those who think that Oxford and Cambridge should be replaced for the purposes of first-class matches by the representative British University side, but that would present huge logistical problems for students studying for exams.

At least one county coach is unhappy as it is that university players contracted to counties should be able to play against their own teams in the Benson and Hedges.

That competition, by the way, will be doomed if this week`s Queen`s Speech contains a ban on all forms of tobacco advertising. The 50-over format is guaranteed for the future, but for B and H it looks like a case of thank you and farewell.

Source :: The Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/)