Chris Waters: County cricket is soft target to pin blame for Ashes whitewash

Lord MacLaurin, the former chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board, believes the antidote to avoiding further humiliation at the hands of our Antipodean brethren is to reduce the number of first-class counties from 18 to 12.

“I think 12 counties would be a far better producer of Test cricketers than 18 first-class counties,” said MacLaurin, ECB chairman from 1997 to 2002.

“Some of the counties are playing pretty average cricket.”

MacLaurin, 76, believes certain counties should amalgamate to facilitate this change.

“You could put Sussex and Kent together for one,” he added, “because they are near and maybe in the south-east of England you’ll get some very good players coming through in a bigger county.

“You could go Warwickshire and Northants, you could go Gloucestershire and Glamorgan, or Gloucestershire and Somerset. You could do it easily.”

The problem I have with MacLaurin’s idea is this:

Ask most people what the main purpose of county cricket is and they will say it is to serve Team England, which, after all, keeps the counties afloat by helping to pay the bills.

But I would argue there is another, equally important purpose to the game in this country.

Namely, it is to serve and entertain the men, women and children who watch it and, by extension, to attract the next generation of players and spectators.

Consider this:

Under MacLaurin’s proposals, Leicestershire – who last season finished rock-bottom of the County Championship Second Division and failed to win a match – would be one of the most vulnerable to amalgamation/extinction.

If Leicestershire went bust, or if half of their home games took place in a different county, say Nottinghamshire, it would mean that a child in Leicester – the 10th-largest city in England – would no longer have first-class cricket on his or her doorstep as often, if at all.

As MacLaurin was also an ardent supporter of selling cricket off terrestrial television, youngsters in England’s 10th-largest city would potentially have no cricket to watch full stop unless their families possessed satellite TV – something unlikely to compel those youngsters to choose cricket over myriad competing entertainments.

But what always gets my goat is that the poor old spectator – the man who pays his hard-earned money on the gate – is almost always overlooked.

Why, it’s as if he doesn’t exist because county cricket is solely for the benefit of Team England, don’t you know?

Indeed, so deeply rooted is this perception of county cricket’s main purpose in the minds of those both inside and outside the game that it is simply accepted that we rarely see England players in action, that young players are whisked away for Lions’ matches and, lest we forget, that so many of our beloved outgrounds have fallen by the wayside – not least here in Yorkshire.

Now MacLaurin and his ilk want to impose further indignities on the nation’s cricket lovers.

It is beyond intolerable.

Moreover, the crux of his argument – that cutting/merging the number of counties would indeed improve Team England’s performance – is doubtful.

Are we really to suppose that amalgamating the likes of Gloucestershire and Glamorgan is going to trigger some great revolution?

Is it really going to help us find more fast bowlers of the quality of Mitchell Johnson, or a long-term replacement for Graeme Swann?

If MacLaurin wants to know why England lost the Ashes, he should try looking more towards the shackled Team England environment, the abundance of backroom staff and the way Australia have transformed themselves under coach Darren Lehmann.

The Championship – which gets all the brickbats when England lose and barely gets a mention when England win – is a great institution and something to be savoured.

Granted, it may lack the financial appeal of Twenty20/one-day cricket, but it is still the only form of the game that prepares players for Test cricket and the sort of world domination MacLaurin craves.

If you want to improve the standard of the Championship, how about making more efforts to make England players available to take part in it and downscaling Lions’ matches on the priority list?

Moreover, is the contempt displayed for county cricket by Team England really justified by the Ashes whitewash?

Taking a sledgehammer to the counties is the wrong and soft option.

The financial gains would be negligible at best.

Cricket would be removed from those heartlands where the game has a proud tradition and those catchment areas would fall by the wayside.

County cricket may be on life support in an ever-changing world – and yet it remains the lifeblood of the English game.

One final thought:

Under MacLaurin’s proposals, Yorkshire would have no divine right to survive in the brave new world he advocates.

Yorkshire may be the biggest county in England, but what have the county club won since 1969?

I’ll tell you.

One Championship and three one-day/limited overs trophies.

In contrast, lowly Leicestershire have won three Championships and eight one-day/limited-overs trophies.

Success is cyclical but some things, it seems, never change.

There will always be people like MacLaurin ready to shoot down county cricket at the first opportunity.

Joe Root: A successful product of county game.

and another thing...

I DOUBT if I am the only one who saw the irony in Steven Finn’s departure from the tour of Australia.

In the England and Wales Cricket Board statement confirming that Finn was to fly home early, it said the Middlesex fast bowler was going back to the UK to “continue working on technical aspects of his game”.

The underlying implication is that those necessary improvements could only be made 10,000 miles away from England’s support staff, who have perhaps caused/contributed to the problem in the first place.

This feeling was heightened when Ashley Giles, the England one-day and Twenty20 head coach, said Finn, in any case, had been “working hard over the last couple of months on technical aspects of his bowling” Down Under.

Although I have sympathy for the decision to take Finn out of the firing line, and away from what Giles calls the “performance environment”, you can only wonder what England have been doing.

Might it be impertinent to suggest that there are too many voices in Finn’s ear Down Under and that he’d be better off ignoring most of them?