Original Cup might need tweaking

IF the Millennium Cup is a potential solution to the fixtures logjam the County Board might be facing for the rest of the year, how might it work? What are the potential pluses and what are the potential draw-backs of it?

The single biggest sticking point we can see is that the start to the original Millennium Cup was staggered, with lower division sides out in round 1, while the bigger guns joined the fold at a later date.

In a fixtures crunch that might not be feasible or desirable. You’d want everybody starting back again at the same time and in action on every available weekend. A fully open draw would seem to be a better solution and would provide an even bigger chance of shaking things up.

It would have to be seeded to a certain extent to ensure a heavy hitter doesn’t wind up in a championship grade far below their stature, as depending on at what stage teams are knocked out of the Cup they would be graded, with round 1 losers going forward to a novice championship and so on, on a sliding scale.

Another potential draw back is that there are 58 clubs across the six divisions of the County League that would be eligible to compete to adult championship competition – that’s excluding B teams obviously – which is a somewhat ungainly number for a knock-out competition (you ideally want multiples of eight). It would require a certain number of byes to make it work.

Still if all those kinks could be worked out a Millennium Cup 2020-style could be a hugely exciting competition, if only on a one-off basis because of exceptional circumstances.