English county cricket is in a woeful state

Does the ECB wish to kill off first-class cricket? Ridiculous question of course. So let’s re-frame it: does the ECB not care if first-class cricket withers? Not so ridiculous perhaps, if one is to judge by deeds rather than words.

The England Test side has just returned from a  long winter tour during which they played 7 Tests, lost 5, drew 2, and won none. Dreadful, even a disaster. Not at all – in the eyes of the ECB. England also played a number of ODIs and T20 matches, including a triangular tournament with Australia and New Zealand. They did rather well, and won most of their games.. So that’s all right then. The fact that almost nobody will remember any of these matches in a few months while we’ll all remember the 4-0 Ashes rout doesn’t seem to matter to the ECB.

Trevor Bayliss was appointed England coach with a  brief to improve performance and results in white-ball cricket. He has done that. Meanwhile the Test team has got worse. But this doesn’t matter. What really matters is that England should win the World Cup when it’s staged here next summer.

In other words, and as seen from the perspective of lovers of traditional cricket, success in the inferior forms of the game is more important than success in Test matches.

Is this slanderous? Well, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck… Consider this summer’s calendar. There will be two Test matches against Pakistan (May 24 –June 5). Nobody I know thinks a two-match series satisfactory, but that’s what we’ll get. The rest of June and all July will be devoted to a succession of ODIs and T20 matches. So in  what should be the height of the English summer there will be no Test cricket. Then we have – at last – a proper 5-Test series against India. It is scheduled to run to September 11, season of mists and not always mellow fruitfulness.

What of the county game? Well, the ECB may pay lip-service to the importance of the County Championship as the grooming-ground for Test cricketers. But the first-class county season is severely restricted. There are several rounds of fixtures in April and May , then almost nothing till mid-August, and the last rounds are played deep into September. In high summer there is next to no first-class cricket. Is this evidence of the ECB’s commitment to the first-class game? Or of its indifference to it?

Test cricketers emerge from the counties, usually after an apprenticeship in a county’s youth system or academy. But once someone is a Test player, centrally contracted to the ECB, he will hardly ever play for his county. He will do so only when made “available”. Joe Root and Jonny Bairstow are Yorkshire through and through. Only they almost never play for Yorkshire. Graciously this year they will be made available for two county matches in early May.

The refusal to let Test cricketers turn out for their county is bad news for county members and supporters. But who cares about them?  When I was young, you could go to Lord’s to watch Denis Compton play for Middlesex or to The Oval to watch Peter May and so on. Now any children going to a county match won’t have the chance of watching today’s heroes.

Sod the county member, sod the spectator. Who cares? The game has moved on. Well, yes, it has, but for the better? There’s a consequence to this policy. The county game is weakened by the absence of the England players. Time was when anyone who made a century against Yorkshire or Surrey had proved himself capable of taking on Test Match bowlers  successfully.

No longer.

Some of us old fools may think England might have done a bit better in Australia this winter if the standard of our domestic game was higher. Ridiculous of course, even though, in a period of transition after the departures of Andrew Strauss himself, Kevin Pieterson, Jonathan Trott, Ian Bell and Graeme Swann, their replacements had to be selected on the evidence of form and results in  the county championship.

With what result?

Some have come and gone, others have come and may be about to go. That no batsman since Root and Bairstow, no all-rounder since Stokes, no new fast bowler or spinner has secured his place in the team where the burden of the attack is still being carried by Anderson and Broad, suggests that a priority for the ECB should be seeking means of strengthening the county championship. Yet everything the ECB does might have been calculated to weaken it. Next year county cricket will be pushed further to the sidelines when the ECB’s new darling, the city-based T20 money-spinner, is launched.

The men in suits will tell us that nobody watches county cricket. Set aside the fact that the incoherent scheduling of county matches discourages spectators and games are not played when there is a better chance that the sun might be shining, it’s still the case that vast numbers –including every cricket fan I know – follow the county championship, logging on to the Cricinfo site with its ball by ball coverage or listening to local radio.

Moreover, when was the last time the ECB promoted the county championship as it promotes one-day and T20 cricket? Silly question.

What’s the consequence?  Batsmen who have little experience of playing top-class bowling and bowlers who haven’t had to learn how to dismiss top-class batsmen are plucked from the neglected county game, thrust into the Test side where, not surprisingly, more often than not, they fail. Meanwhile England are fifth –yes, fifth – in the Test match rankings, and may drop lower still if they lose to either Pakistan or India this summer.

But don’t worry because the ECB apparently doesn’t. After all the ODI and T20 sides are doing fine and of course TV and the Sponsors love them. So long as the money rolls in, everything’s lovely.