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THE crowning of Lancashire as Twenty20 champions over unfancied Northamptonshire seems a fitting time to raise the standard for cricket’s shortest form.
Twenty-overs cricket has the potential to transform the world’s second most-watched sport into a truly global entity.
A match over twenty overs is a great leveller, allowing one or two individuals to transform a contest in a manner that is not possible in the longer format. It is also the most likely route into the sport for the young and uninitiated.
Of course, there remain many ways in which T20 can improve.
For a start, what has become the marquee occasion in the domestic calendar warrants a day to itself. Holding three matches on finals day gives the weather too much sway and puts heavy demands on the endurance of not just players but spectators as well.
Counties could raise more money from playing separate semi-finals, while the sport deserves the kudos and publicity from a unique cup final day, played at the start of the football season.
Despite this huge potential, questions have arisen about whether the sport’s bosses want to see T20 fulfil it.
Initially, twenty-overs cricket was seen as a bit of a gimmick, to put more money into county coffers and pull in more attention. It has clearly succeeded on both measures.
But what is most important: money or development?
It deserves raising now because Sky have reportedly offered £40 million to the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) for a new English Premier League from 2017.
The suggestion is that Sky wants a competition involving eight city-based franchises to compete in a three-week tournament in July — fitting around and complementing the Indian, Australian, Caribbean and possibly the new Pakistani T20 tournaments.
Nothing final has been proposed but even the suggestion should make fans think about cricket’s future, and whether it should be dictated to by entities solely interested in extracting profit.
The catalyst is not the Indian Premier League — seen as a bit garish — but Australia’s Big Bash
League, which with its eight franchises is deemed a resounding success.
The first question for such a league is who the home sides would be.
The Test grounds would be obvious suitors — giving us Cardiff, Birmingham, Durham, Leeds, London, Manchester and Nottingham. The eighth could be Bristol or Southampton, both of which host international cricket. But wouldn’t London want two sides — one for Lord’s and the other for the Oval?
So, step one involves the immediate disenfranchisement of the majority of domestic cricket’s supporters.
But it gets worse: would fans of Yorkshire who reside in Sheffield or Hull support Leeds? Would Lancashire’s Liverpudlians follow Manchester?
The heart of the Midlands is ripped out with no representatives from the format’s most successful side Leicestershire, Derbyshire or this year’s beaten finalists Northants.
A brief history lesson indicates that “elite” sides have produced only four of the 13 winners of the annual competition (six if you include Hampshire). And only three of this year’s eight quarter-finalists came from sides with Test match grounds.
Merit would clearly not determine participation in the new league.
The next question has to be what gives way to make room for the three-week tournament?
The county championship could be reduced to 12 games, the international calendar curtailed or the 50-overs competition cut. One thought to appease the counties, and Sky’s revenues, is that the Friday night T20 competition would stay, so there would be two twenty-overs competitions.
A reduction in county cricket would damage what most players still see as the prestige competition. It would also certainly signal the final death-knell of cricket in out grounds such as Scarborough, which attracted 18,000 to watch Yorkshire play Middlesex last season.
It will be recalled that we once had a twenty-overs competition squeezed into a designated time slot, and that our most recent refit to regular Friday night cricket is due to declining attendances. Teams simply could not get fans to return for several games a week.
Meanwhile, the number of people going to matches has grown this year, some sides reporting by up to 20 per cent.
The Australian model has undoubtedly proved successful. Grounds are welcoming record crowds, with ever greater numbers of women and children going for the first time and attending regularly.
But Australia actually increased the number of teams — from six to eight. And the six cities that host matches (Sydney and Melbourne with two sides each) are home to three-fifths of the country’s population.
In England, an eight-team franchise would include less than a quarter of the population.
The Australian model extended the reach of cricket to more people. But in England it would reduce it.
Importantly, the Big Bash League is shown on free-to-air TV, netting a quarter of viewers. English cricket could not even dream of that, locked as it is behind Murdoch’s paywall.
A franchise system would leave most cricket fans with the television as their only means to follow live sport.
But maybe that’s the real aim.