SIX simple changes that would improve England’s Test team and enhance county cricket - Chris Waters

Was it April 1?

No, it was definitely January 17.

As such, I had to take Jonathan Agnew’s suggestion that the County Championship be replaced to save England’s Test cricket with the seriousness it warranted.

Agnew’s plan, outlined on the BBC website following the Ashes debacle, is to take the eight teams from The Hundred, add two more and create a new first-class competition in place of the Championship.

“It would not involve the same players as The Hundred, but you could have the same system of a draft,” announced the BBC cricket correspondent and former England fast bowler.

“In one move it ensures that the best are playing against the best, it cuts down on the number of games and it is easier to thread first-class cricket throughout the summer.”

Agnew admitted that his “radical” proposal to “streamline the elite level of first-class cricket in the UK… might cause anger among county members”, but “do they really want to see England lose Test matches, getting thrashed when they go to places like Australia and India?”

He added that counties would still play T20 Blast and 50-over cricket and also have their own red-ball competition, possibly of three-day games, “that produces a conveyor belt for the premier first-class competition”.

I have always enjoyed listening to Agnew on the radio. I agree with him on many subjects and respect his skills behind the microphone, which are second to none.

He has been good enough to have me on Test Match Special a couple of times to talk about books I have written that nobody wants to read, and I have no gripe with him personally.

But I have to take issue with this proposal, however well-intentioned, born as it is out of the frustration of another dismal Ashes campaign and the counties’ seeming inability to sing off the same hymn sheet, never mind the hymn sheet held aloft by the England and Wales Cricket Board’s chief executive Tom Harrison and his choir of angels.

Perhaps it’s just me, but the idea of a Championship match between, say, Southern Brave and Northern Superchargers at the Ageas Bowl is not my idea of a revolution that is going to save England’s Test cricket, while some third-rate Yorkshire team is taking on Kent thirds, for example, at the same time up north.

I would not wish to adapt The Hundred but rather to scrap it completely – or, if we must have it, then keep it for the women’s game. It is the schedule that needs streamlining, not the first-class game itself, the problems of too much cricket highlighted perfectly by the imposition of The Hundred.

Although I understand the raison d’etre of Agnew’s argument and the logical concept of best against best, this is a wider discussion, in my view, than simply the state of England’s Test cricket.

For although you often hear it said that county cricket exists to serve the England team, I would argue that it exists – or at least it should exist – just as much for the people who pay to watch it: the supporters who cherish their long-standing associations with the counties that they follow.

One of the biggest problems with English cricket, in my view, is that it has taken its eye off that particular ball and forgotten about the average man in the street who pays at the gate.

And if one is to stand up for the right of Yorkshire’s members and supporters to watch the best possible Yorkshire side in Championship action, then one must also stand up for the rights of Derbyshire supporters, Glamorgan supporters, Leicestershire supporters, and so on. Cricket exists for them as much as for anyone.

Surely it is possible to have an 18-strong County Championship, however you want to divvy it up (two divisions, three divisions, perhaps even 18 divisions knowing these bozos) and produce an England team still successful at Test level.

It has happened in the past, and surely you do not need to effectively abandon the concept of a “county” first-class competition in favour of some franchise adaptation that strikes one as being as much of a gimmick as the white-ball original.

It is an easy mistake – especially if you are covering international cricket for a living – to think that county cricket exists solely to serve that conveyor belt and to forget about the historical, emotional and familial associations that underpin so many people’s love of cricket in the first place.

The Hundred, with its fancy names and no ties of loyalty, is the antithesis of what the counties represent and what they mean at a visceral level to those who watch them.

Since “red-ball resets” are all the rage at present, mine would be pretty simple and tend back towards basics. In an ideal world, I would have one division of 18 teams but, as the world is not ideal and that is no longer realistic, I would go back to two divisions of nine (what’s all this eight-ten nonsense?), with promotion and relegation.

I would revert to 16 fixtures instead of the current 14, with each side playing the other in its division home and away.

I would scrap the Bob Willis Trophy, an initiative that performed a useful function at the height of the pandemic, but which is now superfluous unless held, as I have previously argued, as a curtain-raiser to the season in the way of the old MCC versus Champion County match.

I would play a short and sweet 50-over Cup at the start of the season (three groups of six, each playing the other five in its division home or away, followed by quarter-finals, semi-finals and final), with the Championship following on and running right through the summer, with a focus on better pitches and giving more spinners a chance.

I would reduce the number of T20 Blast group games per county to 10 (14 seems like a life sentence), followed by the quarter-finals and Finals Day, and kick The Hundred into the long grass before building a car park over it.

That would mean a total for each county of 16 Championship games and 15 white-ball matches per year, rising to 21 white-ball fixtures for a side that reached the final of both competitions.

Simples.