Ted Rose: Amateurs relish elite plan (6 Aug 1997)

Wednesday 6 August 1997

Amateurs relish elite plan: Premier leagues playing two-day games is the ideal preparation for the county stage

Ted Rose

LORD MacLaurin`s proposals for club cricket are exciting in their vision and, as one would expect, incorporate some very good sense.

They also present league clubs with a daunting challenge. Will those clubs have the courage to demonstrate a greater devotion to their players and to cricket than the first-class counties have? Can they make the ideas work in practice? I believe they can.

The core concept is to scrap county second elevens, reduce county groundstaffs to about 13 contracted players and create a premier league of, say, eight clubs in each county. Good. Players make no progress in second eleven cricket with inadequate quality coaching and insufficient thought.

Premier league matches on the other hand would be long enough - one innings each, spread over two days - to provide a platform for all the skills. They would call for a variety of bowling, imaginative captaincy and concentration from batsmen.

Presumably a Saturday-Sunday format would be more workable than that used in Australian grade cricket, where two-day games begin one Saturday and finish the next.

Cash would be available so that premier league players had free cricket. All those players would be under scrutiny for the needs of the county side.

From the club point of view this scheme would also rectify the growing problem, certainly in the southern half of the country, of the disparity between the best half-dozen clubs in a division and the worst handful.

But the smaller clubs would have to recognise their contribution and accept their role as feeders for their most promising players into the premier clubs.

The northern leagues, with their much longer traditions and established relationships so greatly relished, will have to do some serious soul-searching as to their future role. A southern outsider is hardly qualified to comment.

The other parts of the proposals are largely common sense. There is a move to limit the numbers of overseas players and also to dis- courages excessive limited-overs cricket. Limited overs is a brilliant advance to allow knockout competition. Its use in amateur leagues is simply a cop-out and the worst form of cricket imaginable.

Minor counties cricket is great fun, but frankly is outside the mainstream route into first-class and Test cricket. However, the insistence on having at least five players under 25 in each team will prevent it becoming a backwater for has-beens.

So the club cricketer of tomorrow will have the opportunity for regular competitive cricket in the company of the best players in the country and a clear path into county cricket. What more could he ask? I go for it.

Ted Rose is a Cambridge Blue, club captain and author of How to Win at Cricket

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