WHY CRICKET NEEDS TO THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX

THE English domestic cricket season begins on Thursday with a quart and pint pot problem.

Against the backdrop of an England Test team in freefall, the ECB’S priority needs to be delivering a County Championship that can produce international-class red-ball cricketers worthy of the name.

Examine the fixture schedule for August, though, and there isn’t one championship game pencilled in. Instead The Hundred takes centre stage.

How to align the diverging tectonic plates of the money-making white-ball game and the lossmaking long game in a finite summer calendar is a problem that seems beyond cricket’s authorities.

To simply ditch The

Hundred is the solution of the traditionalists, who despise the 16-over singalong slogfest – but that is not going to happen.

For all the negativity it attracted ahead of its first season, it was a success – and with few star names because of Covid cry-offs.

After Tuesday’s draft, the second edition of The Hundred will deliver the likes of Babar Azam, Kieron Pollard and

David Warner (above). With an upgraded cast, it is going to be bigger and better this season.

Play more Championship cricket in mid-summer in parallel to The Hundred, then. Well, that’s one answer but it would mean weakened teams for all the counties who supply players and lower-quality matches.

There is a solution but it requires English cricket to indulge in what would literally be blue-sky thinking.

Essex and Somerset warmed up for the new season with an 11-day joint training camp in

Abu Dhabi. Yorkshire and Gloucestershire did the same thing in Dubai.

If the teams are already there, why not spend March playing competitive County Championship games in the UAE and elsewhere overseas?

The Champion County v MCC curtain-raiser game was taken to Abu Dhabi and Barbados.

Why not the whole shebang?

Four rounds on the road would give the players a month’s extra red-ball cricket and help to give them a more rounded education in the conditions they might encounter in the international arena.

And it could all be paid for out of the profits from The Hundred promised by the ECB.