Andrew Strauss has urged the first-class counties not to squander the opportunity to revolutionize elite cricket when they vote on implementing the recommendations of his High-Performance Review, which was released on Thursday after weeks of intense speculation about its contents.
Strauss, the former England captain and chair of the England and Wales Cricket Board’s performance cricket committee, has compiled a list of seventeen proposals, of which the ECB can approve and implement all but two.
He believes “the ECB board and executive are unanimous in their support,” but the counties must accept the remaining two suggestions, which deal with the reorganization of the schedule.
Strauss acknowledged that his plans contain “parts that certain individuals will believe are not in their best interests,” but he urged the game’s stakeholders to embrace them. “We can do a lot of good without those last two [recommendations], but those last two are a good illustration of the difficult decisions we must make as a game and how serious we are about pursuing this goal,” he said.
Everyone is aware that the current schedule does not work, so we must make the necessary decisions immediately.
Strauss has not yet determined the nature of the reorganization of central contracts, and county funding will be transformed to be less equitable. “We want to ensure that counties are rewarded and incentivized for creating amazing things on the field and generating great players who go on to play cricket at the Under-19, Lions, and England levels,” he said.
This is one of the most important suggestions of this review: that counties that contribute should be adequately compensated.
There will also be a trial of a new County Championships point system that awards one point for a draw, three points for a win, and up to two extra points if the winning side scores above 325 runs in any innings. In the County Championship, trials will be conducted with a Kookaburra ball to determine if bowlers unable to rely on the more pronounced swing and seam of the Dukes ball are pushed to learn new skills.
Strauss’s ideas did not arrive in time for the following year’s agenda to be altered, thus 2023 will likely replicate the arrangement that was highly criticized this year. “Throughout this entire review, we’ve been in a race against time, and we’ve sadly ran out of time,” Strauss said.
“However, it bears mentioning that these are crucial decisions, and the last thing anyone should feel is time pressure. Sometimes it is preferable to walk to the correct solution than to leap off a cliff.
A 50-over event would kick off the season in April, while a restructured County Championship – with one six-team first division sitting above two feeder divisions – would run from May to September. Due to the number of players participating in the Hundred, first-class matches will continue to be played “in a format chosen by competing counties” during the month of August.
The T20 Blast would begin in late May and last for two months, with the majority of games occurring during prime weekend timeslots. Strauss’s committee discovered that the typical county plays on 45% of days over a season, compared to an average of 31% for first-class sides in other prominent Test nations, and player surveys revealed considerable support for such a reduction. Under their ideas, the average number of playing days for counties would decrease from 79 to 68.
Strauss stated, “Everything in our home arrangement is quite contested.” “I would say that the status quo is suboptimal and that people desire an alternative solution. This is what we provide.
“We believe it’s a pretty comprehensive package, but we appreciate that certain components may not be in the best interests of some individuals. This is the truth of the household structure — you cannot cure one problem without creating another.”
Strauss stated that the success of the England Test squad this summer lessened the urgency of a review commissioned following the team’s humiliation in the Ashes last winter, but that the team’s objective of dominating the sport across all formats remained distant.
“Therefore, our role is not to be reactive; rather, we must take a step back and ask, ‘What is the goal and where are we about it?’
‘” he said. “The emotional aspect of that was rather detrimental.”
