Play three-day cricket in one division to boost Championship’s credibility - Comment
I’VE got to be honest, I don’t like 14 County Championship matches. I don’t like 12 either. And as for 13? You’re having a laugh.
After a summer of back-and-forth on this subject, with the counties split 9-9 as to whether to cut or retain the 14-match programme, the status quo has remained, with the two-thirds majority not reached for change.
Although a victory of sorts for those who like Championship cricket, the outcome has done nothing to address the imbalance of the fixture list and the divisional structure. That disappeared once the Championship was cut from 16 to 14 games in 2017, when instead of two divisions of nine, with each team playing the other in its division home and away, which at least made sense, we ended up with the farcical situation of lop-sided leagues.
Initially, it was eight teams in Division One (which at least retained the system of playing each club home and away to give 14 matches), and ten teams in Division Two, which meant playing five opponents home and away, and the other four once, either home or away.
Now it is the other way round, with ten teams in the top-flight and eight in Division Two, meaning that Yorkshire’s programme last season consisted of home and away games against Durham, Essex, Nottinghamshire, Surrey and Sussex, but only one-off fixtures against Hampshire (away), Somerset (away), Warwickshire (home) and Worcestershire (home).
Each to their own on this emotive issue, one that has thrown up some remarkable proposals – not least, to these eyes, the rejected idea of a 13-match programme.
That would have seen a 12-team top-flight split into two groups of six, with each team playing the others in its group twice (10 games).
The groups would then have been split into two more groups, with each team playing the three counties in the corresponding half of the other group, giving the total of 13 games.
In the six-team Second Division, counties would have played two teams twice and three teams three times, also giving 13 games, with the top-two promoted and replacing the two teams who finished bottom of the top-tier groups.
I wouldn’t bother re-reading that, or dwelling on it if I were you, because, having just typed it out, I can testify that it is basically gibberish that will mess with your brain. A more convoluted, complicated, crazy system would be difficult to devise - and all for the sake of cutting one match from each county’s programme and attempting to spice up the competition. Madness.
In this humble opinion, as an absolute starting point whatever the sport, you simply must have balanced divisions and fixture lists. You wouldn’t cut the Football League programme, for example, from 46 matches per club to, say, 41, with each team playing 18 of its opponents home and and away, and the other five either home or away, or maybe you would - if you were stark, staring bonkers.
No, the divisional system and fixture list must be equal, which, bringing matters back to the Championship, means either the old system of two divisions of nine, with each team playing the others home and away (16 games), which is now off the table, or else it means a return to a single division, something that has not happened (albeit under different playing regulations) since 1999.
And the only way to do that in a fixture list now dominated by The Hundred and the T20 Blast is to go back to three-day cricket, with a single division of 18 counties playing the other teams home or away, however you want to slice it and dice it in terms of home advantage, giving a total of 17 three-day games.
Not only would that shave five days off the current schedule (51 days compared to 56), but it would also appease the Professional Complaints Association - sorry, the Professional Cricketers’ Association - which makes such laughable noises about workload, strikes and all the rest of it but, strangely you will have noticed, seems to make no protest whatsoever about the insertion of a fourth tournament into this maelstrom of misery. I wonder why.
Three-day cricket is not perfect - there would still be all the randomness now inherent the system and you would rarely see the England players, while there would inevitably be some ‘declaration bowling’ at times - but it could work provided that over-rates were better and points for the draw scrapped, which were not introduced anyway until the mid-90s.
It would encourage captains to be more attacking, rather than setting targets such as the 500-plus Yorkshire set Essex at Chelmsford in May, much to their cost, thereby increasing entertainment and the sort of positive cricket so favoured by Team England, whose apparent disregard for the current four-day system counters any argument to hang on to it for so-called pathway purposes.
Ultimately, cricket is a complicated game that does not need to be made any more complicated.