Bob Willis Trophy future up in the air after omission from 2022 fixture list

ECB managing director of county cricket, Neil Snowball, confirmed that talks were ongoing with the Willis family about how best to utilise the trophy in the right manner

The Bob Willis Trophy does not feature in the domestic schedule for 2022, with its future yet to be decided.

It was initially devised in 2020 to act as the summer's emergency red-ball competition after the delay to the county season caused by Covid left insufficient time for the LV=Insurance County Championship to be played.

Essex faced Somerset in the final after coming out on top in their six-team conferences, with the Chelmsford county winning the trophy courtesy of a draw at Lord's in which they amassed a higher first-innings total.

The following year, in order to keep the trophy in circulation and as a way of paying tribute to Willis, who died in December 2019, the top two teams in the County Championship met at Lord's in the final week of September, with Warwickshire comprehensively coming out on top to complete a unique red-ball double, having won the County Championship a week earlier.

^{Lauren Clark, Bob Willis' widow, presents Will Rhodes with the trophy in 2021 (Alex Davidson/Getty Images)}

However, the one-off game failed to attract a crowd, made little sense to either teams involved and did little to pay a fitting tribute to Willis.

"I think they are really keen to honour Bob and use the trophy in some way," Lauren Clark, Willis' wife, told The Cricketer during the game. "But we have to find something meaningful. I do want to protect Bob's memory, and I'm very protective of him.

"I'm not massively obsessed with it being in circulation. It has to be the right thing for Bob. If ultimately the trophy just ends up at Warwickshire, then that would be lovely too."

Willis took more than 600 wickets for the county across 13 seasons, and Neil Snowball – now the ECB's managing director of county cricket – was previously Warwickshire's chief executive.

On Wednesday, he confirmed that talks were ongoing with the Willis family about how best to utilise the trophy in the right manner.

"We're very keen to continue to celebrate Bob's legacy with a Bob Willis Trophy in some format but we're not quite sure what that’s going to be yet," said Snowball.

"We've got a few ideas that we're looking at. Whether or not we can land that in 2022 or whether that comes out of the red-ball reset in 2023, we are determined to make sure we continue with that. We're just working on options at the moment."

^{The most recent Champion County match took place in 2019 in the UAE (Tom Dulat/Getty Images)}

One alternative idea mooted in 2021 was for the pre-season Champion County match against the MCC to be played with the Bob Willis Trophy on the line as cricket's answer to football's Community Shield.

That will not be the case in 2022 at least, with that fixture – the traditional curtain-raiser involving the previous summer's title winners – not part of the schedule.

"I'm not aware that it's completely off MCC's agenda but it's not in there for the coming season, that is for sure. That doesn’t mean to say it's off the agenda for good," said Alan Fordham, the ECB's head of cricket operations.

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