Players fear jobs under threat from new T20 tournament
to be involved, where the teams will be based, and it is important to look after the 90-100 players involved in that competition,” he said.
“But potentially there will be 300 or so not involved as well, so it is important we look out for those guys. We want to know the impact on the rest of the county structure as well and how they are going to work.
“There is a lot of finance talked about coming into the game, and that will obviously help those players playing in the T20, but it also has to help the county clubs and filter down to remaining players in the county dressing rooms as well.”
A survey of PCA members last year, which has not been made public but has been seen by
found that 92 per cent believe a Big Bash-style competition will be good for the English game, but 79 per cent also believed a two-divisional competition made up of ‘the best county sides’ would be an attractive option.
A total of 37 per cent believed it would reduce the number of county cricketers, amid fears it would leave some PCA members out of work if the competition takes off at the expense of the existing county game.
“Some senior players who have played various tournaments around the world [Stuart Broad, Ryan ten Doeschate, Tim Bresnan and Michael Lumb] had a meeting for a couple of hours with the ECB yesterday to feed back the good, bad and ugly scenarios,” said David Leatherdale, the PCA chief executive. “It’s ongoing. We want to ensure that the players have their say.
“There will still be cricket [for those not in the new T20]. If you have 100 off playing in a new tournament, you could find counties having larger squads. That is one of the key drivers for us, understanding how the players are affected.” Arsène Wenger’s style of football is based around those with the footballing brain capable of continually giving the player with the ball at least two possible passing options (Fabregas, Petit, Pires, Bergkamp…). Unfortunately today, Alexis Sánchez is the only Arsenal player with such a gift. It is a sobering thought, given that Test action this summer begins only in July, that new England captain Joe Root will go into an Ashes tour this winter with just half a summer’s five-day leadership experience. With Alastair Cook so obviously running out of gas as captain in recent months, surely good succession planning could have let Root take the reins earlier?
After all, England and Wales Cricket Board director of cricket Andrew Strauss, as a former England captain himself, is hardly short of insight into the demands of the leader role. Allowing Cook to drift was a poor mistake on Strauss’s part. I continue to be astounded by the ECB when it regularly wonders why cricket fans do not support the four-day game. It is they who organise far too much Test, 50-over and T20 international cricket throughout the whole of every year now, whereby the best players are continuously unavailable for their counties. Why do they expect the fans to turn up and spend good money but not be able to see the best players? In years gone by our Test players only missed a few county matches throughout the summer. But how many four-day games have the likes of Root, Bairstow, Anderson, Broad, etc played for their respective counties during the last five or so years? Last weekend we saw three highly entertaining, highly charged and very physical Six Nations rugby union matches. Each match was refereed superbly, but what was most noteworthy was the discipline of the players. Not one yellow or red card needed to be shown, and that is a testament to the way in which rugby union instils into all its players the need for disciplined play, however hard, and a total respect for match officials. Football could learn much from rugby union in this respect.