Mental fatigue leaves players jaded while dead 40-over games clutter the schedule

IT is an age-old lament. There is too much county cricket.

And no matter how often that is propounded by players and pundits, nothing seems to change. The schedule is overloaded with too many games.

Andrew Gale, the Yorkshire captain, has added his voice to the deafening majority.

According to Gale, the schedule is snowed under and needs attention.

Players are left mentally and physically drained.

This year, Yorkshire played 44 fixtures in all competitions – 16 in the County Championship, 16 in the Twenty20 Cup and 12 in the CB40 League.

Had they reached the Twenty20 final and CB40 final, they would have played a minimum of 49 matches.

As the Twenty20 Cup finalists also play two games in the qualifying pool of the Twenty20 Champions League, that could have risen to 51 matches.

In addition, qualification for the Champions League proper results in a minimum of four extra games and a maximum of six, meaning a county, theoretically, could play 57 fixtures between April and October.

That equates to a maximum of 105 days of cricket, the majority of which last up to eight hours or more.

Throw in all the travelling involved as teams constantly flit from Chester-le-Street to Canterbury and all points between, and it is easy to see why fixture-planners are about as popular as tax men, parking attendants and those responsible for the press box sandwiches at Headingley Carnegie.

As Yorkshire captain, Gale was part of a working party set-up by the England and Wales Cricket Board last year to find a solution to the problem of a saturated schedule.

The panel, which had about as much room for manoeuvre as a line of cars parked nose-to-tail, voted to retain the current number of 16 Championship games but recommended a reduction in Twenty20 group fixtures from 16 to 10, which will be implemented from next summer.

But it was little more than minor reshuffling – and Gale concedes that more must be done.

“The working party made their recommendations but I still think there is too much county cricket played at the moment,” he said. “The schedule is better from next summer onwards, but it can still be improved.

“The ECB know that and it’s a work in progress.

“I’m sure things will be tinkered with further in the next couple of years and, hopefully, we can find the right solution.”

Gale believes it was right to prune back the Twenty20, which had become more unwieldy than a caber.

But he feels more could be done with the CB40 competition.

“There were too many Twenty20 games and I welcome the fact that we’ve cut them back,” Gale added.

“When you’ve got 16 group games it does seem to drag on a bit, and that was certainly the case for us last season.

“The last four or five games dragged on and the crowds fell away, so hopefully we’ll see a rise in Twenty20 crowd figures next summer.

“I think we’ve got the Championship schedule right, but there are still too many dead games at the back end of the CB40, and I think the ECB have got to find a way of making for more interesting games towards the back end of the season.”

Gale says the biggest problem for players is not so much physical tiredness as mental fatigue.

He believes that is exacerbated by the constant flitting between different competitions.

“Mental fatigue is a problem,” he said.

“There’s probably no other sport that you play for four days in a row and then the next day you play in a totally different format.

“Switching between formats is never easy. You might play eight Twenty20 games, for example, and then suddenly you’re back into a Championship match sandwiched between another load of Twenty20 games. It’s far from ideal.

“The quality of practice is also affected.

“When you have a non-stop schedule like we do, you have to decide whether to practice for the Twenty20 or the four-day stuff.

“It’s very difficult to find the right balance.

“Players need time to work on their skills, but, unfortunately, they don’t have that time.”

Practise makes perfect, or so they say, and cricketers do enough of it in one form or other. It is by no means unusual for Twenty20 practices to go on for longer than the games themselves as players undertake various fitness regimes.

“It’s an individual thing,” explained Gale. “I thought our Twenty20 preparation last year was right and, although we came in for some criticism that we were at the ground for too long and what have you, it wasn’t as though the lads were practising all the time. The medicine ball work we did, for example, took five or 10 minutes.

“Although the practice can go on for a couple of hours in total, it’s not as though each player is practising for that amount of time.”

Gale said a key part of practice was injury prevention.

“If you look at our injury record at Yorkshire over the last two or three years, it’s been very good,” he added. “The injuries we’ve had haven’t been down to the lads being unfit or anything like that, they’ve been caused by things like when I got hit on the arm while batting in the nets.

“A lot of that is down to the injury prevention work that we do in practice. We work hard to keep the lads strong physically and to make sure that all the hard work that goes on in pre-season doesn’t go to waste during the season itself.”

One of the biggest problems with the county schedule is the sudden, inexplicable bursts of travelling.

Last year, Yorkshire played a County Championship match at Liverpool, travelled straight to Worcester for a CB40 game the following day, went straight from there to Taunton for a Championship game with Somerset two days later and, from there, to Hove for another Championship game against Sussex that started just two days after that.

As if that was not enough, just two days after that lot, Yorkshire were straight into the start of their Twenty20 campaign against Warwickshire at Headingley.

“It could definitely be spread out better,” said Gale.

“There’s probably no other job like it, travelling around like we do, but I wouldn’t moan about it too much because that’s part of county cricket and we’re very lucky to do what we do.

“I wouldn’t have it any other way because I’m very grateful to play cricket for a living.

“At the same time, it can be tough on the road.

“Some players don’t mind it, whereas others don’t like being away from home for 15, 20 days or whatever. Personally, it doesn’t bother me.

“Twenty days away doesn’t affect me, but it’s a personal preference and other players have a different point of view.”