List A/One Day International Cricket
So now we've gotten to the end of the initial part of the First Class season, and the first Test series of the summer has (hopefully) been a success. Time for the pyjamas to be donned, and we move onto some good old fashioned 50 overs a side cricket.
I'm going to be really controversial here, and run the domestic One Day competition as a mirror of the Champions Trophy. 2 groups of 4, each play each other once, top 2 in each group qualify for the semi finals. Whole thing should take about 2 weeks, and each team will only play 3-5 games. Doesn't seem like an awful lot, and seems absolutely daft when you look at England's ODI woes, but here's the justification. There's too many formats and too much cricket played. A lot of England's revenue is still driven by Test cricket, particularly the Ashes, hence the priority on having a good First Class competition to work as a breeding ground for Test cricket. And if domestic cricket is going to help pay its way, then we're going to need to basically look at what they've done with the Big Bash and try and replicate it in England. It's T20 that'll drive domestic revenue generation better than anything, which means that unfortunately, it's the List A format that in my opinion simply has to take a back seat. Although with the early season schedule, there is the option of running a One Day League alongside the Spring First Class Championship if people felt that we needed more domestic One Day cricket.
Having said that, I'd hope that pressurising the games a little bit with the format might help breed players with the right mentality to play tournament ODI cricket rather than the lazy 5 game series that get played all over the place. And speaking of tournaments, here's the other revolutionary step: we're scrapping bilateral ODI series. Instead, each summer's ODI event will be a quadrangular tournament, featuring England, the summer's two touring sides, and the European Associates on rotation. Each team will play each other twice during the group phase, and the top 2 will meet in the final at Lord's. This reduces England's ODI commitments per summer from 10 games to 6/7 depending on performance, which helps gives the players a bit of a breather, yet as the tournament will be 13 games long (granted, 6 of which will feature an associate nation), there's actually more cricket to sell as part of your rights deal, although I appreciate the presence of an associate nation will perhaps dilute the attractiveness of this somewhat.
Why this format? Like I said, it helps reduce England's schedule, hopefully having the games played in a tournament format might make the matches a little more memorable for the public (why are Tendulkar's twin tons against Australia in Sharjah remembered so fondly? Because they helped India win an ODI tournament, not just a series), and it also scratches the particular itch I've been banging on about recently which is giving the associates more cricket. 6 ODIs every summer against test nations (7 if they really upset the applecart), and a share in the TV rights deal. Of course, this relies on the ECB being a bit generous instead of looking out for number 1, but hey, a guy can dream.
