Sport administration does need businessmen. After all, modern sport is a business and that includes cricket. However, I do worry when successful businessmen talk and act as if that commercial experience automatically makes them an expert on the game. Take Lord Maclaurin, for example. His involvement in the ECB was more of a hobby yet even now his hatred of the county cricket system is given far more column inches than it deserves.
That doesn't mean there's not room for change. For most of my life, there have been calls for surgery to be applied to English domestic cricket. Some has already been carried out, from the two-tier County Championship and central contracts to the invention of Twenty20. There has been constant tinkering to rules regarding overseas signings and the one-day formats but mercifully nobody has been so daft as to destroy the long-standing county structure.
When England were scratching around in the 1970s and 1980s, winning some series and losing others, it didn't seem to matter. However, the evolving media landscape and massive increases in alternative leisure activities - most of them not requiring people to get off their backside and move more than their thumbs - means that how the national side performs does matter. And then there's the ICC rankings to worry about. A year or so ago, England were the number one Test country in the world. I don't recall hearing demands for wholesale mergers of the counties then. One away series defeat against Australia and you'd be forgiven that the world had come to an end, demanding radical overhauls of everything from the coaching staff to quality of sledging, from increasing the number of T20s to reducing them. Surely they can't both be the solution?!
In defence of the eighteen-county structure, the ECB has referred to them as 18 'centres of excellence'. Of course, some are more excellent than others. A few years ago, Northamptonshire was definitely on MacLaurin's hit list. In 2013, while in the Second Division, they looked a much better side in all competitions, attracting larger crowds (admittedly driven by T20 success) and seem to have a bright future. Leicestershire remain struggling but Derbyshire actually won a few first-class games last summer. Cricket suffers from being largely overlooked by the media and the vast majority of schools, whose education is not paid for by wealthy businessmen or aristocrats. Outside the Ashes hysteria, it's a dead zone. Cricket pitches require more resource to maintain than football, rugby or a bit of grass for rounders in the summer, and headteachers have barely enough money for books, let alone rolling and cutting cricket squares and keeping the smokers from setting up camp by the crease at lunchtime and absent-mindedly digging it up. If you don't have a feeder system from schools to clubs to counties to country, then yo have a problem, and I don't know what the answer is besides a shedload of money and a new attitude amongst the broadcasters and newspapers.
Back to the structure. If you pander to the T20 fanatics and introduce city franchises, then you effectively destroy what has made the England international successful. Yes, successful. Proper cricket fans will not go and see Derbleicstonshire against Surrisex, let alone East Midlands Eagles v London Lions. And I really can't envisage counties and T20 franchises co-existing during the summer.
I have read that it's the counties' fault that there are no top-class spinners to replace Graeme Swann. True. But where, too, are the Aussie and Sri Lankan spinners to replace Warne and Muralitharan? Or the all-rounders anywhere to outshine memories of Imran Khan, Kapil Dev or Wasim Akram? These days, you're a great all-rounder if in one IPL fixture you hit a couple of sixes and take 0-20 in four overs. A useful T20 performance, but that doesn't make you an outstanding all-round cricketer. As the world changes, so must cricket but we shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Sometimes a country sees truly great players come along, occasionally in twos or threes. In other decades they don't. It has always been thus. With three major formats, many players are content to be 'great' at only twenty-over cricket whilst being a stranger to first-class cricket. ALex Hales remains an international opener and global T20 journeyman whilst being too poor to play for his own county in the premier competition in England, but it probably doesn't bother him. I daresay there are West Indian, Indian and Aussies in the same boat.
I think the domestic schedule needed the changes being introduced for 2014 so let's see how they pan out. Sadly IPL takes precedence over everything, but we should accept that, ban English IPL contractees from Test cricket and nurture those who do want to play for England and entertain English crowds. When local sports fans start chanting the names of opening batsmen and leggies alongside centre-forwards and attacking midfielders, then we'll know it's working. A few successful Test series against India and Sri Lanka will do no harm either! Just send Maclaurin abroad while all that's going on and let the rest of us enjoy a great summer of cricket! Come on, Somerset!
