England: ECB implement clubs shake-up (23 December 1998)

23 December 1998

England: ECB implement clubs shake-up

By Charles Randall

LORD MacLaurin's proposed shake-up of club cricket looks like being implemented by the England Cricket Board within two years.

With an efficiency that would startle some of their critics, the ECB have persuaded clubs to accept fundamental changes, which will sweep across the country next summer and into 2000.

This week the ECB announced the formation of an East Anglian premier league next summer for a nucleus of clubs from Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire. This follows the announcement of a Home Counties league across the top of north London.

The formation of these area competitions is the biggest upheaval in the South since the introduction of league cricket in the Seventies, with all matches scheduled to start at 11am for a minimum of 120 overs in the day.

The Home Counties league, starting in 2000, embraces leading clubs in Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Bedfordshire, though Lord MacLaurin's own club of Welwyn Garden City are not among the founding names. They will have to qualify via the Hertfordshire feeder league.

A network of premier leagues was one of the main recommendations for grass-roots cricket in the 1997 MacLaurin Report, called Raising The Standard. The ECB expect to narrow the gap between club and professional levels - "the quantum leap," as MacLaurin called it - within a few years, certainly when county second teams are disbanded as planned.

Most leagues are being reorganised along county lines. Kent have led the way by introducing an ingenious two-day format next summer, backed by a £75,000 sponsorship deal over three years with the Canadian-owned services company Forester UK.

The ECB are monitoring the Kent system: one side bat first for a maximum of two sessions (68 overs), leaving their opponents to bat for the third. Team one's innings continues the following Saturday before their opponents attempt to win on first innings.

Premier leagues all round England and Wales are being authorised for next year, including Nottinghamshire, hitherto a splintered county in club cricket, and Cheshire. West of England is another awkward area under discussion, which could leave Lancashire and Yorkshire as the last counties to accept fully the MacLaurin ideal.

Home Counties Lge (2000): Banbury, Basingstoke, Beaconsfield, Bicester & N Oxford, Bishop's Stortford, Finchhampstead, High Wycombe, Luton, Radlett, Reading.

East Anglian Lge (1999): Bury St Edmunds, Cambridge Granta, Cambridge St Giles, Clacton, Godmanchester, Halstead, Ingham, March, Mildenhall, Norwich Barleycorns, Swardeston, Vauxhall Mallards.

Essex Premier Lge (1999): Fives & Heronians, Billericay, Woodford Wells, Hainault & Clayhall, Gidea Park & Romford, Safron Walden, Loughton, Wanstead, Shenfield, Wickford.

Kent Premier Lge (1999): Ashford, Bexley, Bickley Park, Bromley, Folkestone, St Lawrence, Sevenoaks Vine, The Mote, Tunbridge Wells, Whitstable.

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