Our county system demands respect not abandonment in the wake of coronavirus

PAUL EDWARDS: County members know far more than has ever been dreamt of in outgoing ECB chairman Colin Graves' philosophy. He views them as stakeholders; I rather think they see themselves as guardians

I still remember the time I became absolutely convinced that Ollie Pope would become a major Test Match batsman.

It was the second evening of Surrey’s game against Yorkshire at Scarborough in June 2018 when the visitors were replying, somewhat hesitantly, to the home side’s 342. On nine occasions a wonderful sea fret rolled across North Marine Road, thick enough to stop play but never sufficiently enduring to cause the players to leave the field.

They were horrid conditions for batting yet, while wickets fell about him, Pope batted on, resuming his innings with perfect composure after every interruption and finishing the day on 34 not out. Yorkshire’s seam attack comprised Ben Coad, Jack Brooks, Steve Patterson and Tim Bresnan.

I thought of that innings again when I read the first of two fine articles about the future shape of county cricket published in The Daily Telegraph over the past seven days. It was written by my colleague, Tim Wigmore, and it reported that officials at some counties were considering “adopting a variant of the Bob Willis Trophy as a replacement for the two-divisional model of the County Championship which has been used since 2000”.

Other changes were also discussed, including reducing the number of professional players, changing the structure of the 50-over competition and the possibility of some counties playing only limited-overs cricket. However, for the moment, let us consider the notion that the County Championship should, with an odd tweak, become essentially a regional affair with a final at Lord’s.

Those who had previously advocated a change to three conferences of six teams had done so on the basis that this would pit the best against the best, as if Division One was not already doing that. Well, the suggested structure would not be the best against the best; it would be the same against the same. A professional cricketer from the north could go through his career and never play a first-class match at Lord’s or Taunton. Likewise one from the south might never play at Trent Bridge or Worcester.

It would seem to me that one of the strengths of the current County Championship is that it requires teams to perform well throughout the summer against as many as nine opponents on a wide range of grounds, although I take the point that the pre-Covidian fixture-list offered very little four-day cricket in July and August.

Very rarely do people argue that the eventual champions do not deserve the pennant. While I see the problems caused by the two-divisional model, promotion and relegation ensures there is something at stake in most matches, even in the final week of the season.

Yet under the current rules of the BWT, which has been a wonderful stopgap competition, two finalists will contest a five-day game in late September and if the game is drawn, the trophy will be won by the side that gains a lead on first innings. If two completed innings have not been possible, the trophy will be shared.

^{Counties must not be abandoned in the wake of Covid-19, says Paul Edwards}

Now I think that honouring one of England’s finest fast bowlers is a noble idea. I’m also delighted – and still a bit surprised – that some four-day cricket has been possible in these perilous times. But I think officials are in danger of regarding a stopgap recourse as a permanent solution to a temporary financial problem. Next year, insofar as we can predict anything, we will have three knockout finals: the 50-over, the T20 and The Hundred.

We really do not need another, especially in the first-class format, where draws are so common and their resolution – first-innings lead, sharing the trophy, maybe a bowl-out etc. – so unsatisfactory. I acknowledge that playing a two-divisional County Championship entails expenditure on travel and hotels.

Yet the current structure gives the finest prize in English cricket to the best four-day side and offers an incentive for those in Division Two. The current system commands both considerable loyalty and respect. We need to have something far better than regional groups in place before we consider abandoning it.

By now some people reading this article may have branded me a traditionalist. For it is so easy in the present climate of megaphone-debate to accuse one’s imagined opponents of adopting entrenched positions. Moderation and subtlety are unfashionable. We have lost the art of listening.

The truth is that I have no desire to return to the era when the counties played 28 three-day games and September’s Scarborough Festival was an almighty piss-up. I have no time for the maintenance of unjustified tradition. I enjoy 50-over cricket and I absolutely appreciate that Ben Stokes’ innings in the Headingley Test could not have been played without his experience of the IPL.

I do not think The Hundred is necessary but I am interested in the arguments of those who insist it is. I do not believe the new competition has emerged, hot and steaming, from Satan’s bowels.

Perhaps even more significantly, I fully accept that domestic cricket faces a series of important challenges as it adjusts to surviving on a little less money. Most of us face our own financial embarrassments but if the burdens are fairly distributed, we will cope. Very gradually we are emerging from this pandemic and I deplore the use of the coronavirus as cover for ripping apart the domestic game.

READ MORE FROM PAUL EDWARDS

Moreover, I thought it particularly ironic that in the week when the PCA had agreed emergency contract measures to protect as many cricketers’ jobs as possible – a fine example of sharing the load – some at the ECB were advocating measures that would put some fine professionals on the dole while also implementing permanent, and perhaps utterly unnecessary, changes to a structure which has served the England team and English cricket very well in the recent past.

All of which brings me to the second Telegraph article: Nick Hoult’s interview with Colin Graves the outgoing chairman of the ECB. Graves suggests that just 12 counties could play first-class cricket professionally with the other six concentrating solely on white-ball cricket.

“I just don’t see the point when looking at the bottom end of our red-ball game, where it is producing nothing,” he says, in addition to giving this advice to county members: “County cricket has a role and is important, but don’t just be blinkered and look at red-ball cricket. It is not about people turning up with a flask and sandwiches any more. People will not like me saying that but it is reality.”

One wonders to which six utterly non-productive counties Graves is referring. Let us deal with three of the usual candidates: Northamptonshire, perhaps, whose first-class cricket was so abysmal last season they won promotion to the First Division; the county where both David Willey and Ben Duckett learned the game and whose eye for talent is so sharp they signed Richard Gleeson, the fast-medium bowler recently named in an England squad. Gleeson admits he would not be a first-class cricketer without Northants. Nothing?

Maybe it’s Gloucestershire he’s after? The county that produced that fine wicketkeeper batsman James Bracey, currently a reserve for the England Test side; the county whose wonderful Cheltenham Festival with its two four-day games Graves pledged to defend when speaking at Scarborough a few years back. Of course Gloucestershire have a desperately poor red-ball team, so poor that they also won promotion last September. Nothing?

Let’s try Leicestershire. They are normally first in the queue when some at the ECB are sharpening the guillotine. The problem is that few people consider the quality of the first-class side Leicestershire might have put out had they been rich enough to keep hold of all the cricketers who learned the game at Grace Road; players like Stuart Broad, James Taylor and many others. Hassan Azad scored 1189 Championship runs last year but wouldn’t be playing county cricket if it wasn’t for Leicestershire. Is he nothing?

^{The Bob Willis Trophy is not the long-term format solution}

The reality, I suspect, is that the English game currently has 18 centres where youngsters can be prepared for the rigours of professional cricket. They are staffed by coaches of the quality of Richard Dawson, Jason Kerr and Matt Walker, proper cricket people who get by on limited budgets and will have to cope with rather less for a couple of years.

It will be tough but maybe no tougher than surviving the attentions of chaps like Graves, who seems to regard the current crisis as an opportunity to propose a long-cherished cull, one that may be designed to see all first-class cricket in England become an offshoot of The Hundred franchises. It takes a certain shamelessness to use one virus as a pretext for the propagation of another.

Most county members are not refugees from Emmerdale. They are far too diverse a group to be corralled into a stereotype. They know fine well that their sport is not only about “people turning up with a flask and sandwiches watching four-day cricket.”

They know it is also about the age-group sides and the patient coaching that contributes to their development; they know it is about the glitz of T20 cricket with its extraordinary skills, and they watch that, too; they know it is about corporate hospitality and business plans; but they know it is also about their own fund-raising through bookshops and cafés and cricket societies and raffles and subscriptions.

Above all, above everything, they know it is about talented young lads going to nets in Leicester, Taunton or Derby and sacrificing their time so that they might realise their goal of playing Test cricket, which remains the pinnacle of the game. The county members know far more than has ever been dreamt of in Graves’ brutish philosophy. He views them as stakeholders; I rather think they see themselves as guardians.

Another irony in all this is that the ECB has had a good crisis: the governing body has brought forward moneys it gives to the counties; it has arranged Test and international series at short notice; it has organised a truncated season and helped the club game. Neither Tom Harrison nor Colin Graves are triple-dyed villains.

They care about cricket, too. But the counties must stand together if Graves’ views are the opening shots of a campaign that others will wage. The next Richard Gleesons, the next Hassan Azads, the next Ben Stokes are depending on them.

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