PCA calls for late changes in Morgan Review

The Professional Cricketers' Association (PCA) has called for the Morgan Review into county cricket to face late changes, to ensure that English counties are given an opportunity to enter the Champions League.

No commitment is made to the first-class counties' participation in the Champions League, the world club Twenty20 tournament, in the proposed restructuring of the game, with Morgan implying that he was constrained by a decision already taken by the ECB's Board.

The PCA, perhaps suspecting political manoeuvring, has said that the decision will cost English cricket £2.2m a year as well as potentially preventing English players from partaking in the Champions League without justification.

The ECB has insisted that Morgan's recommendations - a 14-match championship, reduced from 16, a return to 50-over cricket and 14 Twenty20 matches - must be adopted as a package when county chief executives meet at Lord's on January 23, leaving the PCA to appeal for a late change of heart.

"We are concerned about the decision to extend the Twenty20 competition to fourteen group matches, explicitly for commercial reasons," said a PCA statement. "One of the consequences of this decision is that the season cannot be completed in time to allow participation in the Champions League, a decision which - according to the analysis undertaken for ECB by Portas Consulting - will cost the game in England and Wales £2.2m a year.

"We question whether the financial upside from the additional Twenty20 games will compensate for this lost revenue, and also question whether, from a player development perspective, it makes sense to turn our backs on the opportunities afforded by the Champions League for players to experience high-level competition on the Indian subcontinent."

The Morgan Review was strikingly non-committal on such a central topic, merely remarking: "The earlier decision of the Board of the ECB not to curtail the season to accommodate entry of two first-class counties in the Champions League is clearly helpful."

The PCA has also questioned the structure proposed in the report drawn up by David Morgan, a former ECB chairman, for the championship. He recommends that it consists of two divisions of nine, so necessitating that the counties cannot play each other twice. He proposes a hybrid system of derby matches and seeding to determine fixtures and concludes that the fact that the counties do not play each other twice "need not lead to unfairness or reduced integrity of the competition".

The PCA has an alternative proposal and, considering his widespread consultations in drawing up his report, including meetings with the players' association, it is striking that the Morgan Review does not even list it as one of the options considered.

"If we are to play fourteen matches in the County Championship, we believe there is a better structure than the one proposed (two divisions of nine, with sides playing some opponents once, and some twice), which was discussed during the consultation process, but which has not been mentioned in the final report.

"We believe the best solution available is a first division of eight, and two parallel second divisions of five. In the first division, all sides would play each other home and away. In the second division, sides in division 2A would play those in division 2B home and away, and the other sides in division 2A home or away (and vice versa for teams in division 2B). The winners of Divisions 2A and 2B would be promoted, and the bottom two sides from division 1 relegated.

"In this way, all sides in each of the divisions would have an identical fixture list of fourteen fixtures, maximising the integrity of the competition, and eliminating the element of chance implicit in the structure recommended in the Morgan report."

The PCA statement offers only "qualified support" for Morgan's proposals, welcoming an overall reduction in the amount of cricket and reluctantly conceding that a trimming of the 16-match championship, which it has long championed, might have been inevitable to reach those ends.