Time to end the Twenty20 debate

By Mark Baldwin

There is only one way to solve the debate about whether a dedicated mid-season slot or a season-long tournament is the best way forward for English cricket's ten-year-old Twenty20 Cup; or, indeed, whether the whole thing should be scrapped in favour of an IPL-style English Premier League played in a short block in mid-season with nine city franchises drawn from the 18 first-class counties (two per franchise).

The one certainty about the ongoing saga of what to do next - yet more fuel for which was added today by Surrey chief executive Richard Gould calling for a Friends Life t20 stretched throughout the season in a bid to attract more spectators to Thursday or Friday floodlit matches - is that there will never be an agreement between the various factions on what will work best commercially, or what should be done for the common good of the English game.

So, quite simply, the only answer is to come up with a Twenty20 structure that ticks all the boxes. The answer is to have an EPL and a Twenty20 Cup.

It could easily be done and, at a stroke, it would enable an English Twenty20 season to have both a world-class tournament, attracting all the game's global talent plus England-contracted players for the benefit of every domestic cricket stakeholder, and a season-long tournament to appease the growing number of counties - both those with Test match grounds like Surrey, and those without like Essex and Sussex - who see a more stretched-out event as the key to increased crowds and a minimum of interference from bad weather.

The first thing that needs to be done is to establish a mid-season window of around 15 or 16 days - in other words, the same amount of time as the current NatWest Series between England and Australia is taking - for an EPL of nine franchises. These would be based on, and would draw their core players from, the 18 counties (eg Surrey and Kent, Essex and Middlesex, Somerset and Gloucestershire, Warwickshire and Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire etc) so that each franchise would be able to play games both at an international venue (Lord's, The Kia Oval, the Ageas Bowl, Bristol, Cardiff, Edgbaston, Old Trafford, Trent Bridge and Headingley/Chester-le-Street for the Yorkshire/Durham franchise) and at a secondary venue.

With each franchise playing eight initial 'league' games, there would be a minimum of four home matches to play (eg the Surrey/Kent franchise would stage perhaps three games at the Kia Oval and one at Canterbury) before a semi-final (1 v 4, 2 v 3), with the top two league finishers earning another home fixture, and a final at Lord's.

Such a short, sharp tournament would attract some of the world's best Twenty20 practitioners (Gayle, Warner, Pollard etc) and global television interest. The revenues raised from media rights would be shared out equally between the 18 first-class counties, while gate receipts for each franchise would be shared out between the two counties behind that franchise - minus staging expenses for the host clubs.

A Friends Life t20 - ideally of ten games at the group stage, as now - would then be played between the 18 counties on a weekly match basis, starting in late May/early June for a month (acting, too, as a kind of 'taster' for the EPL) and then continuing on afterwards into August. Quarter-finals and Finals Day would then be played immediately after the group stage ends, maintaining the weekly cycle into late August.

With the County Championship staying as a two-division, 16-match tournament - as almost every player, spectator and coach in the land wants - the competition which would have to be trimmed to allow an EPL to fill the mid-summer slot is the Clydesdale Bank 40. As it is high time this was reorganised into four five-team groups (with Holland and Scotland), with the top two in each contesting quarter-finals, rather than the current illogical 21-team, three-group format, this would again be easily resolved. There is, of course, also an argument for jettisoning the CB40 altogether, but this is perhaps unrealistic given counties will not want to give it up.

Under the structure proposed here, each county would play a minimum of 10 Twenty20 games (maximum 13), a minimum of eight CB40 games (maximum 11), plus the present maximum of 64 County Championship days - well within accepted 'limits'. Elite county players - such as young thrusters like Jonny Bairstow, Jos Buttler and Alex Hales - would play an additional minimum of eight (maximum ten) Twenty20 games in the EPL, alongside world stars and leading England players. The majority of county cricketers would get a midsummer fortnight's break while the EPL was staged, which in itself would allow them an extra period of rest that would be beneficial.

*Mark Baldwin has written on county cricket for The Times since 1998, and on English cricket since the early 1980s
 

Date: 07/07/2012 13:21:22 by MBaldwin
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