Cricinfo - Blogs - Different Strokes - 2010

The basic problem is that hardly anyone watches county four-day cricket. It costs vastly more to stage in terms of player salaries and staffing of the grounds than it ever takes in through the turnstiles. Even if you allot all of the income from membership subscriptions to the four-day account, every county makes a huge loss on the first-class game.

However, a successful England Test team is a huge revenue-earner. Broadcasters aren’t prepared to pay much to show a team which usually loses, but a winning team attracts top dollar for the TV rights. A successful Test team needs a strong first-class competition to supply its personnel, so the financial justification for the championship is that it provides that nursery.

In my ideal world, we’d have Championship matches starting every Friday and Twenty20 every Wednesday evening, but that’s simply what I want to watch; there is no specific cricketing justification for it. Though the present 16-game Championship seems pretty meagre to me, it is futile to pretend that it is the minimum necessary for Test preparation. Fifty years ago, Australia used to be able to come up with a side to beat us on eight games a season while we played 32.

Players know that first-class cricket is the stiffest test of their abilities: you can do quite well in short-form cricket by riding your luck, but first-class cricket always finds you out in the end, and it is the high degree of skill developed in first-class that enables the best players to do such spectacular things to make the moolah in Twenty20. Winning the championship, whether or not it is the most lucrative, is still the most fulfilling thing a county cricketer can achieve professionally, just as an actor will judge himself on his Hamlet, Estragon or Willy Loman at the National rather than his successful TV sitcom.

The most important thing in any new structure for the championship is that it retains the players’ respect. For that to happen, it must be clear to them that the team which wins is extremely likely to be the best team. Since they were not serious challengers in 1947 or 1949, Glamorgan’s famous win in 1948 was the sort of exception that proves cricket to be a funny old game after all, and no-one will mind that happening again once in a while, but as a rule, the players of the counties who don’t win should feel that the winners deserved it by virtue of being the best-equipped and best-performed team of the season.

Before we traditionalists lacerate whatever the ECB come up with, we should in fairness at least consider whether it will still deliver a championship a player will be proud to win.

If you take out all the Aussie, Kolpak (mostly South African), NZ and others - how many English players are left? The English players currently just make up the numbers in what is, for all purposes, a free market for foreigners.
In Australia, we welcome the occasional player from overseas, but they are selected for the exceptional addition they would provide for the squad.
Instead of looking at more divisions etc, just cut the number of teams that are recognized as first class sides down to 8 or 10.
10 first class sides, 20 squad players, with just 1 or 2 non English players in each should give you a pool of 180-190 English players, and I'm sure you can find that many. From there building an attractive competition should be easy.
But this is all in theory, since the ECB will never force the weaker counties to merge.
Politics makes for rotten competition and England are doomed to remain at the lower end of the heap in world cricket.

The point that the author makes may apply to equivalent tournaments in almost all cricket playing countries. We have seen players like Yuvraj Singh represent India without having played any substantial cricket for his local Ranji team - the International cricket calendar does not allow it. I am sure a few more souls will turn out to see a Punjab vs Mumbai Ranji match, if these teams have a Yuvraj or Tendulkar playing for them. I don't know much about the Enlglish county scene to comment on how much "star" presence is needed to attract crowds to County Championship matches. But I truly hope that the 4-5 day championship games don't take a back seat.

Well, some of the difference in opinion between players, administrators and spectators has an obvious cause : they're counting the money flowing into the game, and we're counting how much it costs us to watch it!

I wonder about your claim that the Championship is too short though. 16 4-day games still use up about half the days on which it's sensible to try to play serious cricket in this country, and with the need to have some competitions which actually make money for the counties, plus the current - and correct, in my opinion - preference for more practice time, there's not a lot of room left in the calendar.

Personally, I'd like to see the Championship reduced to 14 counties in 2 divisions, playing 12 games ; and an expanded Twenty20 including minor counties in the group stages, to provide genuine national participation - and hopefully increase the audience. Which goes against the current desire for a TV-financed EPL, but that one's an idea I've never liked.

Don - it's a funny old heap when the team rated at number two is at the lower end of it. And odd that it should be the only team which has taken a series off yours in the last seven years. Still, you come from the part of the world that is the other way up to mine, so perhaps it makes sense to you.

And the problem with trying to merge counties is that the financially weak and the playing weak are not the same set. It's far more practical to work out what to to with what we've got than moan about wanting something else.

Venkat - county 4-day cricket is better attended in England than anywhere else. But what has killed attendance is daytime TV, which is free at the point of delivery. People used to go when there was nothing else to do.

Four-day cricket is often dull, and no amount of tinkering will change that without ruining it. We cannot hope to market it; we need instead to work out how much we can afford.

If you are going to split into 3 divisions, why not do as now and split by ability. The problem with Don's idea is that teams at the bottom of a single tier championship have nothing to play for. If there is relegation and promotion, then teams will have more to play for at the end of the season, which will help to produce tough cricketers, while compressing the number of teams should in theory increase the quality of games in the top tier. There should also be no Championship games held during Test matches, and maybe a final between the two top teams, similar to Australia's Sheffield Shield. At least doing this will allow room for an expanded 20-20 comp without sacrificing the quality (if not quantity) of the first class game.

Mark B - I'm not claiming that the championship is too short to do the job of developing players that it's supposed to; I just want more championship games because I like watching them more than I like watching the money-making games. I can ask Santa Claus to bring me more championship games for Xmas, but I've probably not been a good enough boy for him to do it.

As you point out, there are probably much better ways for the ECB to organise things than to pander to my eccentric wishes, which is probably why they are the ECB and I'm a spectator.

How can the ECB can get more meaningful 1st class games played in an era where TV money talks (etc) and casual fans want results in a digestible timeframe? It's decades since I saw a 1st class game in England and I have a "rose-coloured glasses" view as I recall what a pleasure it was to see a full day's County Cricket. But even then crowds were small, except on holidays or for traditional rivalries. From my exile's perspective in the US I wonder if the solution is for the 4 day game to be played by coalition "regional" teams, with the various one day variants to be played by the counties, who'll never go away because there's too much tradition there. The purpose being to get the highest level of play out of a (now smaller) group of players from whom the test team would be picked, containing only players qualified to represent England. But this "England feeder pool" approach even if practical won't make a happier cricket-watching Mike since it means less 4 day product. Sorry.

Steven - This seems to address a non-problem. The first-class games we have are not meaningless. According to such luminaries as Justin Langer and Shane Warne, Division One of the Championship in its present form is a tougher competition than the Pura Cup.

Regional teams of England-qualified-only players might conceivably be of a higher standard, although there again they might not, but that won't make any real difference to bums on seats, because that still requires substantial numbers of people to have free daytimes in midweek, and people just don't.