Aidan11 wrote:Could the new brooms at the ECB finally be seeing sense? Probably not but they might be starting to realise that the voice of the counties is stronger than the ECB 's desire to put revenue over everything else.
http://www.espncricinfo.com/county-cric ... 14799.html
I don't think anyone should be celebrating the fact that the Counties are able to, like a small child, say "Shan't" and hold the ECB to ransom. The current state of cricket in England is completely dependant on the Sky money paid for, in large part, the TV right for International cricket. With BT muscling in for overseas rights Sky has lost its monopoly on English cricket. Should Sky say, "We're going to pay less" or should they decide that they only want to bid for the rights to International cricket the ECB and therefore the counties would be up the creek without a paddle.
The Counties, with a few exceptions such as Lancashire, need to realise that you can't *modded* on your own doorstep. Some Counties have realised this and are tightening their belts in a bid to become more self reliant for example Durham and Kent, but we've seen this season Northants make grave statements about the future of their club and even Yorkshire, the powerhouse of English cricket, have had to be bailed out in recent memory.
There needs to be changes in County cricket to build towards a situation where Counties are not up against the wall and completely stuffed should the Sky tap stop flowing. The ECB and the Counties need to realise that there has to be compromise, the ECB needs to stop throwing obviously too radical ideas in to the public domain and the Counties need to realise that they are not the paymasters.
Even ignoring the County ECB dynamic, from a players point of view there needs to be a reduction in the amount of cricket played. Jack Brooks on Sky said it is very hard on players when they have games at different ends of the country backing into each other. How this is done is very difficult. I would personally be in favour of a three division LVCC with each team playing 12 first class games a season instead of 16. Let's face it LVCC cricket does not bring money in. This would also help to make LVCC cricket more competitive and raise the standard of first class cricket in this country.
There are of course other ways, such as the full distrubition of Test match funds throughout the Counties, a set number of international ground that the ECB will directly provide funds for and the doing away of the bidding system etc. But at the end of the day, everyone needs to come up with a realistic plan of moving English cricket away from the debt ridden domestic model it has at the moment.