Just what will the new T20 competition bring?
Chris Stocks looks at a few of the many issues surrounding the new T20 tournament
It appears certain a new citybased Twenty20 tournament, scheduled to start in 2020, will get the go-ahead later this month when the results of a ballot of the 41 ECB members - comprising the 18 first-class counties, MCC and minor counties – is announced. There are, though, many questions that still need to be answered…
What happens next?
Once the tournament is ratified the ECB will put the broadcast rights out to tender along with those for home internationals and all other domestic cricket from 2020. The finer points about the tournament – such as venues and team names – should also be known around that point too, although getting clear answers on this from the ECB is difficult.
Will it be on terrestrial TV?
Tom Harrison, the ECB chief executive, has said this will happen, with around eight of the proposed 38 games on free-to-air platforms.
Where will the eight teams be based and how many players will be involved?
It is expected London will have two teams, based at The Oval and Lord’s, while Southampton, Birmingham, Nottingham, Leeds, Manchester and the South West – with games rotating between Cardiff, Bristol and Taunton – the other venues.
Each team will have a squad of 15, with three players from overseas, and selection will be done by a draft.
That will mean less than a third of the professional players in England will be involved.
Is trying to replicate the Big Bash a good idea?
In Australia there are only six states and eight Big Bash teams so no one area or city has been sidelined. All the games are on terrestrial TV and take place when cricket has no rival on the domestic sporting landscape. In England ten counties will be sidelined, only a fraction of the games will be on terrestrial TV and the tournament is likely to clash with the start of the Premier League football season. There’s also the weather. If we have a bad summer in 2020 how many of the 38 games in 36 days will be affected or washed out altogether?
How will the ECB get fans behind totally new teams with no history or roots?
As Gareth Batty, Surrey’s captain, said this week: “We are very tribal. Is a guy in Liverpool going to support Manchester at Old Trafford? Probably not.
ROD Bransgrove has hit back at suggestions that counties have been railroaded into accepting the ECB’s plans for a new franchise-based T20 competition – and believes it’s time that the doommongers woke up to the fact that the tournament will save English cricket’s future, not threaten it.
The Hampshire chairman has been a long-term proponent of the introduction of a tournament that mirrors the Indian Premier League (IPL) and Big Bash.
The new eight-team city franchise format was backed by an overwhelming majority last week and Bransgrove has reacted incredulously to claims that some doubters succumbed to considerable pressure by the ECB in order for the plan to gain approval.
Bransgrove said that while such tactics were commonplace under previous regimes, the consultation process around the new competition has been ‘a breath of fresh air’ in comparison. And he now believes the time has come for English cricket to pull together and set its sights far higher than has been the case in the past.
“This has been a very inclusive process – it has taken two years to get to where we are now,” he told The Cricket Paper.
“The vast majority of counties have been in favour although I appreciate it’s not easy for some county chairmen. Instead of leading their members, some are led by their members.
“What we have to remember is that people like myself, people over the age of 65, who favour the red-ball game, prefer cricket as it is.
“It has been shown, though, that if things stay as they are then the game as we know it will disappear; it will simply disintegrate because very few people are going.
“I can’t understand why people are holding onto tradition because at times like this it becomes what I call ‘gratuitous tradition’.
“There’s no place for that, it just holds the game back.”
Those in favour of maintaining the status quo point to the upsurge in attendances in T20 Blast attendances in recent years. Bransgrove, though, argues that this upturn is irrelevant given how low they were in the first place.
“We need to set our sights far higher,” he says. “We need to broaden our horizons.”