NICK FRIEND: James Harris is keen to have regulations in place to ease the burden on players at several counties and regions, who are expected to drive home from nighttime games often in the early hours ahead of another game the following day
The Professional Cricketers' Association are hopeful of having "something in place for the start of next summer" around the issue of post-match travel, according to chair James Harris.
Speaking to The Cricketer as part of a wider interview around next year's schedule, the Glamorgan seamer confirmed this publication's previous reporting of a live issue for the players' union.
As it stands, it is up to the discretion of the 26 professional men's and women's teams how they manage their travel arrangements.
Some teams lay on buses for away games, but several are still asking players to make their own way, a bone of contention that was brought up at the PCA's end-of-season summit and has previously been raised in pre-season meetings.
In simple terms, three hours alone with your own thoughts along dark roads while shattered from the evening's game cannot be a sensible option, regardless of whether it cuts costs on bus hire or hotels. That is accentuated by periods of the season – particularly during the T20 Blast – when players are on the road relentlessly, travelling from game to game.
Road-safety charity Brake estimates that up to a fifth of car crashes are caused by driver fatigue, and the Blast campaign – played primarily on evenings during the back-end of the week – is an especially intense, sleep-deprived portion of an already jampacked summer.
"Eventually, you have to sit back and think: 'Why are you allowing that person to drive that car home in the early hours of the morning?' The motorway tells you that tiredness can kill you," elite sports sleep coach Nick Littlehales said last week, speaking to The Cricketer.
"We don't want for that situation to become a reality," said Harris, who discussed the issue with PCA and ECB colleagues in a meeting on Thursday. "My take on that is: 'Well, let's get ahead of it and put something in place,' regulations and rules that make sure the situation doesn't come about.
Glenn Maxwell was critical of the T20 Blast schedule in 2023 (David Rogers/Getty Images)
"Because unfortunately, it sometimes takes something to happen before change really does come about. I really want to make sure that it doesn't come about with us or with any of my cricketing colleagues.
"It would be great to ensure safety of players in that scenario, because the other side of the unthinkable happening is not something that anyone wants to think about, to be honest."
There are, of course, nuances at play. Some players prefer the freedom of driving, while for several it is simply more convenient, given that not all players live particularly near their home ground, particularly in the women's system where some regions are vaster than others. Sunrisers, for example, comprise nine counties spread as far afield as Essex and Cambridgeshire.
So, in plenty of cases, travelling by coach to and from a designated home ground would lengthen journey times, but it would also make it easier for players to rest on the way home, which is particularly significant with a game on the following day.
"It would be great to have something in place for the start of next summer," said Harris. "I can't see why that wouldn't be possible, but failing that there is going to be a new CPA (County Partnership Agreement) to be negotiated, which is going to come into play from 2025. So, that is the worst-case scenario in my own mind, and we'd have some better, clearer, safer rules for everybody."
In his role as chair, Harris headlined a statement released by players in response to the 2024 domestic schedule, which included an increase to 52 instances of counties playing Blast matches on consecutive days, with the counties both reluctant to compromise on seven Blast home games and keen to have those matches played in the second half of the week.
As Harris pointed out: "A lot of this late-night, evening driving comes about because you need to be somewhere the next day for a game somewhere else.
"This is my whole point about the schedule as well: we can take away a lot of that worry by managing the fixture list better or changing the amount of fixtures. Whatever it is, it's making sure we're not in that scenario. I can't think of any other professional cricket team in any format that has that in their calendar.
Middlesex beat Surrey at The Oval but were back in action less than 24 hours later (Ben Hoskins/Getty Images)
"The bit that is sometimes hard to see is factoring in the travel and preparation, which sometimes gets missed in this. In its essence, if you just looked through the county schedule, it doesn't look too bad. There are some days where you just play four days per week, for example.
"However, if I run you through a little bit of the Glamorgan schedule at times last year, there was a period where we played a T20 in Cardiff on a Friday night, drove to Durham on Saturday, played a four-day game there from Sunday to Wednesday, stayed in Durham and drove to Chelmsford on Thursday to play a T20 on Friday night which finished late, and from there we drove back to Cardiff to play a T20 there on Sunday, and then on Monday we drove back to The Oval to play a T20 there on Tuesday. That game finished at 10pm, and we had a game at home against Somerset on Wednesday night.
"There are examples of those schedules throughout all the counties."
One player told The Cricketer about almost falling asleep at the wheel on the way back from an away game, while another admitted to being so burned out during a difficult Blast campaign that, when focus briefly shifted to the County Championship, he fell asleep while waiting to bat and then didn't have the energy to construct an innings.
Others have linked injuries picked up during the Blast period to a lack of proper, high-performance preparation time; one described returning home at 3am and having to be at the ground for a 9am fitness test ahead of a 7pm game.
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