T20 Blast Finals Day returns to July in 2022

The showpiece day in the county calendar will take place on July 16, having become a September mainstay in recent years

T20 Blast Finals Day will take place in midsummer in 2022, moving away from the recent tradition of holding the occasion at the end of the season.

As part of the announcement of England’s international schedule for next year, it was confirmed that the showpiece day in the county calendar would take place on July 16, as reported last month by The Cricketer, returning to July for the first time since Middlesex defeated Kent to win the crown at the Ageas Bowl in 2008.

This year, matches from three competitions – the County Championship, Royal London Cup and The Hundred – took place between the end of the Blast’s group stage and the beginning of its knockout rounds.

While the county schedule has not yet been confirmed for next year, the presence of a three-Test series against New Zealand beginning in early June would point to a similar start to the season as this year’s, with a block of County Championship fixtures being followed by the staging of the Blast through June. The difference next year, however, will see the quarter-finals and Finals Day played immediately after the round-robin group stage rather than kept separate for the back-end of the campaign.

Speaking exclusively ahead of the quarter-final stage, ECB managing director of county cricket Neil Snowball hinted that he would be interested in making the change.

Snowball said: “What we may be able to do next year is actually do a full Blast before The Hundred, which would also be an interesting comparison to see how that works, where it goes maybe through to a full conclusion: you play Finals Day and then you go into The Hundred. It might just be interesting to see how that blends.”

One of several talking points around The Hundred has been its coexistence with the Blast, and Snowball believes that lining up one after the other could help to forge a greater link between the two, with the Vitality Wildcard Draft – where Hundred teams are able to add a player to their squads on the back of Blast performances – taking on greater resonance.

^{T20 Blast Finals Day was last held in July when Middlesex beat Kent at the Ageas Bowl}

“For me, that was one of the key connections between the two, and because of timings, it didn’t quite work like that,” he explained. “It will be really interesting to see how that works again next year.”

He explained: “What Covid has done is enable us to experiment and trial different things that we probably wouldn’t have done. It’s obviously been dubbed as Super September and there’s something I quite like about the culmination of the County Championship, with the Bob Willis Trophy final and the Blast Finals Day all in September.

“There is a lot to like about that, but at the same time it would be interesting to see how it works if the Blast was to conclude before The Hundred and see how the two can mesh together.

“I think what is really refreshing is that we’re already having conversations with The Hundred hosts for next year, where they’re saying: well, it’s gone so well and clearly there is a market for these daytime matches during school holidays that you could actually focus them even more on Saturdays and Sundays, with the first game at 11am and the second game at 2.30pm, which has already proven to be a hit, and then leave the Blast in those more traditional Wednesday, Thursday, Friday nights, which can appeal to a broad crowd anyway.”

He added: “When people say that The Hundred is going to threaten the Blast, I just don’t see that.”

The Hundred appears likely to start later in any case – perhaps in mid-August – given the added complication of the Commonwealth Games, for which the cricket event will take place between July 29 and August 7 at Edgbaston. Recent confirmation that men’s and women’s doubleheaders would continue in next year’s tournament mean that The Hundred cannot realistically begin until the end of the Commonwealth Games.

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The move to play the entire Blast in a single block will also aid the preparation of counties for the latter stages of the competition. For sides in the quarter-finals this summer, there was some frustration that staging the one-off knockout matches on the other side of the 50-over Royal London Cup quelled any momentum built up in the pool phase; Hampshire, for one, only qualified after winning five games on the bounce but had lost any impetus established then by the time they faced – and beat – Nottinghamshire at Trent Bridge.

Likewise, Sussex will be without Rashid Khan at Edgbaston this year despite the key role played by the Afghanistan leg-spinner in helping his county to beat Yorkshire in the quarter-final to qualify.

“Suddenly, the side you turn up with on Finals Day is not the same side that you’ve gone through the pool with,” one head coach told The Cricketer of his frustration at the challenges around overseas player availability caused by the Blast’s spread across the summer.