How the bash for cash has corrupted cricket

HAVING dwelt on England’s many failures in Australia in the Ashes over the past few days, there has been much debate over what and who is to blame.

Having enjoyed county and international cricket for over 35 years, I personally think a big area of blame is too much of the “crash, bang, wallop” form of the game being played.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the T20 Blast and I fret at the thought of occasionally having a miss a midweek Leicestershire T20 game away at Durham.

The format has given me much pleasure in its 18 years of existence, in which time Leicestershire have won three titles, a record that still stands to this day.

The fact is that when T20 burst on to the scene in 2003, the idea was to reinvent the county game, after years of dwindling attendances.

Sure enough, it was a success, but that’s where the greed began. After introducing the format to the international scene, before long you had all these new global formats like the IPL, which to this day I don’t understand and have no desire to, and worse still, The Hundred, a format about which I have made my feelings very clear in Mailbox.

We now have a whole generation of players who have mostly been trained in the “crash, bang, wallop” mode, with many only being interested in playing in the short formats , as the financial rewards are far greater than county and Test match cricket.

When you look at the current England set-up, the evidence is there for all to see.

The T20 Blast should have never gone further than the county game for which it was designed, leaving the best talent in the English game free to enjoy Test cricket and 50-over, one-day internationals, which had been around decades before T20.

The classic 40-over Sunday League, introduced in 1969, again designed to reinvent the county game, was never played at international and franchise level, so how did the game get so greedy?

Roll on, April and the start of the county season.

Oliver Hawke, Great Glen