England: ECB try sprinting to premier system (19 Nov 1997)

19 November 1997

ECB try sprinting to premier system

Christopher Martin-Jenkins

OFFICIALS of the England and Wales Cricket Board expect most of the best 2,000 club cricketers in Britain to be playing in new regional premier leagues the season after next, writes Christopher Martin-Jenkins.

After a series of seminars attended by some 250 representatives of 85 leagues, Frank Kemp, the recently appointed cricket operations manager for the recreational game, is hopeful that the leagues will start in 1999 with a minimum incentive of £1,000 a year for each competing club.

The ambition, as expressed in Raising The Standard, the blueprint for the game published last summer, is for "a quantum leap in standards" which will favourably affect both the professional game in the level above and the rest of the club game in the tiers below.

Kemp commented after the third of the seminars at Old Trafford last Sunday: "These premier leagues are probably the most significant part of the whole blueprint. They could be the key to improving standards in English cricket."

Beneath the pioneering spirit at Lord's, however, there is still a vast area of caution and uncertainty. John Carr, the ECB's director of cricket operations, is anticipating that 200 clubs across the country will be playing in "perhaps 15 leagues" by 1999.

But from different ends of the country the opinion from what might be called the middle management of the recreational game was that it might take five years before true premier leagues, refining talent in the way that Carr and other Board officials envisage, come into being.

That is the view of David Willis, sometime Kent League cricketer, brother of former England captain Bob and the catalyst last winter for a possible London superleague based on the 12 best clubs in the M25 area.

He said: "If the whole thing is really going to lead to the best club cricketers in the country playing against each other, it would have to be limited to about six leagues in the South, six in the Midlands and six in the North, all based round the main cities.

"And yet I hear that Warwickshire are talking about having a premier league exclusively for Warwickshire clubs. That is going in the opposite direction when you consider that the Birmingham League is the only one in the country which brings together the best clubs in its region, including Worcestershire and Staffordshire."

Willis helped to arrange meetings last winter between the 11 most successful clubs from the Surrey, Middlesex, Essex and Hertfordshire leagues - judged on performances over the last 10 years - and Clive Radley, representing the MCC Young Professionals.

A sponsor was lined up to support a new league playing two-day weekend matches along the lines of Australian grade cricket. Since then, however, the Surrey Championship have agreed to start their own premier league from 1999 - the top 10 in next season's competition will qualify - and Middlesex are planning something similar. Such refining of quality within existing leagues could only be a stepping stone to regional premier leagues.

In Lancashire, plans for a premier league had to be shelved last winter, despite the offer of a £100,000 sponsorship from Thwaites brewery. The chairman of the Lancashire Cricket Board, John Brewer, is still uncertain about the pace of change in a county where the pride in traditional local leagues runs deep.

He said: "It's important to get a premier league up and running, but we think it will be very difficult to achieve that within two years. We've got 21 leagues under the umbrella of the Lancashire Board. There are entrenched views opposed to the whole idea, but at the seminar at Old Trafford it was encouraging that the ECB were prepared to recognise that each region has its own differences."

The ECB have issued a discussion document, with a warning that most new leagues are expected to involve some cross-county participation because "there will only be a minority of counties that can justify a premier league".

The Board will insist on quality control before parting with grants of about £1,000 a year to clubs and additional financial support for the administration of each new league.

Minimum standards of facilities, pitches and covering will be issued after discussions next month.

THE ECB have welcomed the proposed experiment of four two-day matches in the Yorkshire League next year, but accept that most leagues will plump for one-day 'time' matches with extended hours of play.

Premier league matches will have to be a minimum of 120 overs, with a maximum number for the side batting first, and there will probably be a limitation on the number of overs which young bowlers can deliver.

Carr and Kemp believe that a small number of leagues will achieve premier status by next season, though they will have to have applied to the Board for that privilege, and the grants that attend it, by January.

The urgency of the administrators is admirable, but they have surely underestimated the opposition which is likely from many clubs who are happy with the status quo and from others who would necessarily be excluded from the elite if the Board stick to their proposed limit of only 200 premier league clubs.

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