Michael Atherton: Regional game is the only way forward for England (11 October 1998)

11 October 1998

Michael Atherton: Regional game is the only way forward for England

By Michael Atherton

ON the opening day of the season in 1993 I was certain I had seen an England opening bowler of the future. He was somewhat raw but quick for his age. Five years later, and after a good season, Glen Chapple is not one of the eight players from Lancashire to win a winter tour place.

His now medium-pace swing and seam bowling is maybe not what the selectors are looking for and instead another promising, raw fast bowler, Alex Tudor, has got an earlier-than-expected call.

It's a fair gamble by the selectors. Young and quick, he must have a chance of making the grade, and the sooner the selectors can get him out of our county system the better. For in terms of producing and preparing players for international cricket the county championship in its present form is a complete irrelevance. With the exception of New Zealand, no other domestic competition in the world is as inadequate as ours.

Increasingly, Test matches are won by fast bowlers or unorthodox spinners. By that I mean wrist-spinners or unorthodox off-spinners like Saqlain Mushtaq or Muttiah Muralitharan. The amount of county cricket we play and the pitches we play on render the chances of producing these bowlers as minimal.

In the past 10 years the only batsman to have really fared well on his Test debut is Graham Thorpe, who made a hundred in his second innings against Australia. Every other batsman has needed a handful of games and often more to find his feet. Batting figures in county cricket tell the selectors nothing, proving without doubt the massive leap in standard from our first-class game to Test cricket.

Nor is county cricket flourishing of its own accord. Attendances are poor, sponsors are dropping out and interest levels are low. Financially it is not self-sufficient and relies on hand-outs from the centre. Effectively the future prosperity of the game remains dependent on the international scene and therefore championship cricket's only raison d'Æ tre is to produce top-class international players. So change is needed.

This week Lord MacLaurin will conduct another review of the structure of our game. No doubt the proponents of two divisions will speak loudly again. Two divisions may increase the competitiveness of some back-end games but I cannot imagine the basic quality will improve. We need to search for a form of cricket that bridges the gap between first-class and Test cricket and it is to regional cricket that we should look.

The 18 counties could be split into six regions of three teams:

REGION A: Yorkshire, Durham, Lancashire.

REGION B: Nottinghamshire Derbyshire, Leicestershire.

REGION C: Warwickshire, Northants, Worcestershire.

REGION D: Surrey, Middlesex, Essex.

REGION E: Somerset, Gloucestershire, Glamorgan.

REGION F: Kent, Sussex, Hampshire.

It is hard to imagine these teams would have any weak links and the standard would hopefully emulate Australia's Sheffield Shield. For example, the London region team could consist of Mark Butcher, Darren Robinson, Nasser Hussain, Alec Stewart, Mark Ramprakash, Ronnie Irani, Ben Hollioake, Ian Salisbury, Peter Such, Martin Bicknell and Angus Fraser. And if the selectors wanted to rest one or two of the Test players, the likes of Alex Tudor and Richard Johnson would be readily available.

The added advantage would be to keep these players hungry, knowing they would have to play very well to get in the team and even better to keep their place.

Regional cricket needs to be dovetailed in with county cricket. The championship could be split into two groups, each team playing the others once, with the winners playing off at the end of the season. The shortfall of matches would be made up by the regional games between each Test.

No doubt people would argue that they would have little affinity for a regional team, that public support and interest would be low, as happened in rugby union's divisional championship. I think it's largely irrelevant. There are too few people watching the championship anyway and world-wide crowds for first-class cricket are poor. As these games would effectively be Test trials there would certainly be plenty of interest for the players themselves and then hopefully for the public.

The chance of this kind of change occurring is minimal, though. Lord MacLaurin has grasped the nettle but unfortunately 100 years or more of tradition is difficult to change. The advantages of change would be legion, however: a better standard of first-class cricket, better preparation for Test cricket, better form indicators for the selectors, a change that would give sponsors renewed interest, and those players not playing regional cricket would become more or less semi-professional, giving them greater opportunities.

Being under-prepared for Test cricket, our players have to learn the hard way in the glare of the international arena. Our Test team is in reasonable shape at the moment but that is in spite of, not because of, the system.

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