Gilo wants a 7 strong premiership

The King Of Spain wants the county championship to have a 7 team premiership and the other 11 teams in a first division. Its better than a conference idea anyway though why 7-11 and not 8-10 which would seem neater? Also do we have to copy the namby pamby idea of a "premiership" and a "first division" from football which logically doesn't make any sense and has always appauled me.

Birmingham Super Kings

English cricket is looking at city franchises again (yawn), and apparently the latest thinking would be to have a city based franchise EPL T20, another T20 with 18 counties, kill the P40 and then have conference county cricket. Why don't they just kill the domestic game off now and save us all a bit of time.

George Dobell thinks the game is heading for the abyss, lets hope not though!

The future is 40

After much oohing and ahhing and various other formats both traditional and weird thrown about the ECB has decided that the third format in county cricket will be... 40 over cricket! So the Pro40 is not meaningless after all, its the future. I am very happy about this personally as 40 over cricket is an excellent format that is much maligned by the usual suspects. They moan of course that the domestic structure should mirror the international, well we have had 50 over cricket for years but it does not seem to have made us world beaters.

Intriguingly next year's competition will include 21 teams, the three extra teams could be Ireland, Scotland and a Minor Counties side which is very welcome news.

P20 is toast

The troubled EPL then P20 is toast. Thus next season will just have 3 domestic competitions not 2 T20 ones. The ECB are also to end the May test series (which of course clashes with IPL) and instead have the shorter test series in early June.

Next season's domestic season is thus a three format one with a county championship (full 16 matches), the FPT and a new T20 competition which starts in June and then continues throughout the rest of the season replacing the P40. It all looks good but the ECB will likely make a mess up of it all.

Come on the P20

So its confirmed, next season we will have 2 Twenty20 competitions, the existing cup seems like it will be moved until later in the season to replace the P40 but we will then have a new competition called P20 (which seems to have replaced EPL as the name) which could have more international stars, dancing bears and what not.

You see this is yet another example of English cricket going out of it's way to make things more difficult for itself and fans. Why two T20 competitions? Why not just beef up the existing one and spread it out a bit? What is the difference between these two competitions. The P20 will apparently have inclusion in the Champions League for the winners but what carrot will the other competition have? This was an ideal opportunity for the ECB to simplify the English season with the CC, FPL and T20 competitions spread more out in a less congested season but they blew it yet again. Now we will have T20 overkill. Wonderful.

Musings on the changes to the domestic game

The new structure of county cricket was announced last week which includes a shiny new English Premier League T20 tournament in the middle of the Summer and the Pro40 replaced by a T20 league. Broadly i am happy with the changes though there will need to be some work to differentiate between the 2 T20 competitions. Care will also need to be taken that T20 overkill does not occur.

The county championship has been left unchanged which is the most important thing for me, talk of 3 randomly drawn conferences sounded like a death of a 1000 cuts for the first class competition. Talk of city franchises would also have been the thin end of the wedge. I don't feel the British like artificial club franchises, they like clubs with history behind them even if they don't know anything much about the history (take the largely negative reaction to MK Dons for example). I am a Warwickshire CCC supporter, and although i might watch the Birmingham Barbarians (or whatever it would be) i wouldn't have the sense of history and memories i get from the Bears.

Ah the memories, that cup final won with a 4 off the last ball, the county championship glory years, Lara's 501, heroes like Dermot, almost getting hit by a 6 hit by Carts, getting sunburnt in the Raglan stand...

To be honest i became a cricket fan because of watching the Bears, on BBC2 on Sunday afternoons. But now to England. Darren Pattinson's call-up got a lot of criticism but he didn't do too badly. I suspect he was picked to have a look at him with the Ashes in mind. That is a problem with England though, they obsess too much about the Ashes when they should be concentrating on the matter at hand. I think the media and pundits have been a bit unfair on the lad and hopefully he'll have another chance one day.