The counties are pointlessly arguing the finer points of yet another impenetrable bonkers compromise. This is exactly why we ended up with The Hundred

5 minute read

It’s county cricket revamp discussion season again. Except really it’s always county cricket revamp discussion season.

When we reported on county cricket’s latest structural review on the first day of the season, we expressed not so much scepticism that anything meaningful might come of it, but cast iron certainty that it would not.

As Rob Andrew, managing director of the professional game, so perfectly put it: “We’ve got 18 counties that agree [the structure’s] not right, but 19 different versions of what the answer is.”

Given that 12 out of the 18 counties need to vote in favour of any changes, those are impossible odds. T’was ever thus. It is a wearyingly familiar storyline.

To illustrate this, we always cite the (really rather good) 1890 proposal to divide county cricket into first, second and third classes with eight teams in each. This would have been clear, coherent and meritocratic with the added benefit of providing minor counties with a route to progress.

However, in Grace’s words: “The scheme of classification did not give general satisfaction, and a newspaper warfare was kept up for some time afterwards.”

It seems no-one wanted to risk losing first-class status and so it didn’t happen.

This year’s polemica

The headline suggestion from this latest review was reducing the County Championship to 12 matches. As we said at the time, people – in this case, the counties and their members – don’t like losing stuff. There was therefore significant resistance and a 12-game season has already been ruled out.

This rejection has consequently given rise to that most magnficently county cricket thing: the impenetrable bonkers compromise. We’ll get to that in a second, but let’s first revisit the muddy clarity of the original suggestion.

The 12-match idea

Cutting the County Championship from 14 games to 12 was the “only reasonable option” to protect player welfare and improve standards, according to the Professional Cricketers’ Association (PCA).

It was suggested this could be achieved by keeping a 10-team/8-team split between the two divisions and continuing with the current highly excellent system where teams play some opponents once and others twice, basically at random.

An alternative suggestion was to expand the first division to 12 teams and then split it into two ‘conferences’. Don’t bother doing the maths to work out how this would work because we’re about to outline a version of this same structure as tweaked for the latest proposal.

The 13-match idea

You’ve got to admire the sheer, route one logic of this. Counties currently play 14 matches and some don’t want to reduce this to 12, so how about they play 13?

So many of these county cricket proposals – all of them really – follow this format where you start with the answer and then try to backform a question. At this point a few people will take issue with certain elements of the most logical question, necessitating convoluted workarounds.

Our favourite version of the 13-match proposals go like this…

• 12 teams in the first division
• First division is divided into two six-team ‘conferences’
• Everyone plays everyone else in their conference twice (10 games)
• The conferences are then split in half
• Everyone plays the three teams in the other half of their conference once more
• The winner is the county with the most points

So onto (some of) the (many, many) questions.

Why 12 teams in the first divison if they’re going to be split up anyway? So that more teams have a chance of being champions, of course! This kind of limp appeasement is not how top-level sport works, but it is very much how getting enough votes to change county cricket works.

What’s that splitting in half and playing three of the teams again thing all about? It’s about getting to exactly 13 games.

How will the split work exactly? Will the top half teams play the bottom half ones? Dunno. Guess that makes sense as a reward for finishing in the top half? Who can say. We’ll stick with dunno.

If it’s a close title race, will the two leading contenders be playing in different conferences? Most likely, yes.

So they’ll have played entirely different teams that year, and not each other? Yes.

Is this seriously going to happen? Ha ha ha. Almost certainly not. See pretty much all of the rest of this article for more on that. (But at the same time… it might happen.)

So where does that leave us?

Discussions between county chairs continue and according to the BBC, “a vote could take place in the coming days.”

But even if it does, we’ll mention that main hurdle again: 12 out of the 18 counties need to vote in favour of any changes. Someone’s suggested delaying the revamp until 2027, which VoteViz currently has at 70% likely and rising.

Conclusion

Quite often a manufacturer will survey a market with three different competing design standards and think: “This needs sorting. Let’s come up with a new design that’s better than all of those and then that can become the universal standard.” Not too long after, the market in question has four different competing design standards.

So it is with the English cricket season, where it will forever be easier to add than take away. Many additions are of course rejected, but the overall direction of travel is irresistible because it’s just that little bit easier to tolerate one extra thing than to lose something.

This is how we ended up with The Hundred. The counties needed to make the domestic game accessible and easy to follow, but all they delivered was ever-greater complexity. The ECB then decided the best move would be to start from scratch with a new competition and new teams.

The addition of The Hundred has only exacerbated the need for clarity and coherence, yet this isn’t even the goal they’re debating. Instead, they’re thrashing out the finer points of a 13- or 14-game format that no-one will remotely be able to understand no matter how they ultimately go about it.

This, in turn, will sit within a four-format summer that has different teams – or sometimes just differently-named teams – competing in tournaments that stop and start seemingly at random. It’s also worth pointing out that the whole thing is an entirely secondary focus that is frequently superseded by England games.

It’s county cricket revamp discussion season again.

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