This is the way the county cricket season begins… with yet another structural review

3 minute read

We’re about 10 minutes into the county season as we type this sentence and already they’re talking about changing things next year. This is, paradoxically, one of the things that never changes about county cricket: they will forever be talking about changing it.

Yesterday we reposted our 2022 article about how the county season starts, “not with a bang.” A key feature of that piece is that we haven’t yet felt any need to update it from one year to the next. County cricket has many of these little touchstones that preserve its fundamental nature, even as it gets squished into endless new shapes.

One of these touchstones is talking about changing things without ever actually meaningfully doing so.

Sure, you might split the County Championship into two divisions or cut the number of games from 16 to 14. Maybe you’ll use the Kookaburra ball for a few matches.

You might play the group stages of the T20 competition in two regional divisions, or two non-regional divisions, or even three. Finals day might be in August, or September. Maybe it could be in July?

You might play the 50-over tournament in April, or you might play it in August having also introduced The Hundred.

You might do all of these things. You might also suggest any number of other dramatic alterations. It doesn’t matter. All of it will be governed by county cricket’s one, central rule, which goes: You can add to the English cricket season but you can never take away.

The headline suggestion from this latest review is reducing the County Championship to 12 matches. Maybe that’ll happen, but if it does we’re pretty sure it’ll only compel one of the other formats to swell like an inflamed haemorrhoid. Everyone agrees there is too much domestic cricket, but that doesn’t mean there won’t continue to be too much domestic cricket.

This is just how it goes. As we said in the article linked above, the fact of the matter is that the whole, horrible, confusing, huge-plate-of-food-dropped-on-the-floor mess that is the domestic season has come about because it is fundamentally easier to introduce additional things than it is to take any away.

People – the counties and their members – don’t like losing stuff. They aren’t inclined to surrender something (whether income or matches to go and watch) without getting something in return. That ‘something in return’ tends to be matches in one of the other formats.

This is how we ended up with The Hundred in the first place. The counties had a couple of decades to make the domestic game accessible and easy to follow and all that happened was they added further complexity. The ECB then decided the best move would be to start from scratch with a new competition and new teams, only for their dreams of clarity and simplicity to drown in the twin boiling seas of hubris and county realpolitik.

Commenting on the latest proposals and the challenges of getting anyone to agree to anything, Rob Andrew, managing director of the professional game, said: “We’ve got 18 counties that agree it’s not right, but 19 different versions of what the answer is.”

Twelve out of the 18 counties will need to vote in favour of any changes and, as Andrew points out, each of them has 18 different changes they’re already opposed to. We’re no statistician, but truly meaningful change seems unlikely.

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