Tony Lewis on the County Championship: Less is not more in our game (6 December 1998)

6 December 1998

Tony Lewis on the County Championship: Less is not more in our game

By Tony Lewis

A CHAMPIONSHIP of two divisions will encourage players to be strictly competitive right through the 1999 season. It will be a more spicy competition for many of the media and county members may move their posteriors out of August slumber on to the edge of their seats. Matches will matter for all teams. All good fun, perhaps. But, of course, the change has little to do with raising the standard of professional play, which is the declared mission of the England and Wales Cricket Board.

Expect counties to relegate the chances of young talent. When it comes to the crunch of a relegation match, the senior man will play while the youngster watches. Anticipate, also, the regular fixing of pitches and a county versus country conflict when a Second Division side needs their star players.

The desperate struggle for sponsorship will increase for those not on television. And young players may, once trained, leave their county for more prosperous pastures new.

I have always argued that the ECB have looked at the whole problem through the wrong end of the telescope: centralising and trying to control the whole of British cricket themselves rather than using the 18 counties as the evangelists and keeping the base wide. It has prompted popular views of county cricket which I believe are wrong.

This is the truth: England have a nanny state of cricketers because they do not play enough cricket. It is astonishing that some argue for fewer matches. So many Test bowlers break down, not because they are tired but because they are not hardened. They have the wrong sort of fitness.

It is easy to scorn the former players like Fred Trueman but he has been telling the vivid truth for decades - our fast bowlers are not physically strong enough because they do not bowl enough overs in match conditions. Batsmen quake and flake at 25 for five because they have not had enough experience of battling out of those situations.

Our game has fallen victim to a load of fitness clap-trap, theoretical gobbledy-gook and nannying psychobabble. If you want to make professional cricketers harder and more competitive then keep them on the field in combat.

Toughness comes from self-determination. Frailty carries the symptoms which afflict England so badly, of talking about their faults in the jargon of cricket analysts and of believing that sessions played out before a bowling machine do more than a grafting struggle in the middle. The First Division has come to cement mediocrity into the warhead of our professional game.

My argument has been consistent but I hope I am wrong. I can be generous to those who hold the opposite view and long for their success, and I can handle the scorn of the brainwashed who have never strapped on a pad in anger.

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