That's at the absolute top end £19 million, spread around 18 teams - a big chunk of which goes to the top 5. No where near enough to sustain CC as it currently is, I love county cricket but that doesn't mean it can carry on unchanged forever.
But would you (speaking hypothetically, as the ECB, the idiots who run English cricket) annoy a preexisting permanent fanbase/cricket attendees to that particular number and to that particular economic equation? A new franchise will not have a single fan before starting out. It will begin tabula rasa.
I'm not really convinced it does annoy a pre-existing fanbase. Not sure that members as a whole are that taken with T20 as it is.
Nobody is advocating a static championship though! Straw man argument. As I said, the county championship has forever been in flux since 1890 and has never quite settled down to a 'ideal format'. I do not understand what you are getting at here?
I completely disagree. The best place to produce test cricketers is in county cricket, not Twenty20 nor even one-dayers. We could have used more of those 'grinders' you talk about in India! Look at a superb cricketer Australia have produced recently, Matt Renshaw. Look at Hameed and Jennings who plied the majority of their cricket in the county championship before their test debuts; those were two of the only batsmen for England to emerge from India with any respect. You need those sort of players for test cricket with the correct defensive skills, not Warner types chucking their wicket away.
Pietersen is a joke. He constantly slagged off test cricket after being axed from England only to say the Stokes/Mills IPL deals are ''damaging to'' - lo and behold - ''test cricket''. He slagged off county cricketers (from memory, ''mugs only receiving 17,000 per year'') only to join Surrey when he was trying to get back into England. He slagged the Blast off, yet has just joined Surrey's Twenty20 side for this upcoming Blast, turning down the Caribbean league. He just pulls these statements out of his arse.
I know there is the Colin Graves financing 20 odd million debt hypocrisy but in the Tykes' defense, their players (Bairstow I recall) were some of the first to commiserate Durham; it was not difficult to read between the lines that they found Durham's punishment harsh. Do not forget that Yorkshire have also had their own personal battles with the ECB hierarchy, namely slaphead Strauss's decision to not release Bairstow for the championship decider against Strauss's former club. I cannot then gloat or wish for another northern powerhouse to be penalised by the ECB - it is the ECB who are the genuine 'scum' in English cricket, not the counties.
You can draw a few examples, but the reason we have so many similar types of players (an absolute legion of right arm, 82-85 MPH seamers for example) is because they are forced to play way to much cricket. To bowl with express pace or develop dynamic skills you need to be able to do it in shorter sharper bursts.
Colin Graves is the absolute head honcho (chairman) although it was Tom Harrison (chief executive ) I believe who drew up Durham's penalties (Harrison, having had a well earned rest from punishing Durham, has just recently grown fond of 4-day tests by the way!). Former-chairman Giles Clarke, after completely buggering cricket up the arse - with such ventures as, the Stanford Twenty20 fiasco (helicopter and wads of cash), Cook ''comes from the right sort of family'' comment and the big three carve up of international cricket - resigned as chairman but promptly created a new ECB role (president) and nominated himself as its first holder! That is why he is still swanning around the ICC corridors of power. Andrew ''white ball'' Strauss oversees the demise of red ball cricket in the guise of 'director of England cricket'. Those are the Four Horseman who are determined to destroy English cricket: Giles, Colin, Tommy and Andy.
Absolute rubbish. County cricket produced Larwood, Frank Tyson, Snow, Willis, (early) Botham, Harmison, Flintoff and Simon Jones after all! More recently we have seen Mark Wood. If there is a dearth in English pacemen it is not the championship's fault - quite the reverse I would argue.
I read an article somewhere and it theorised that cricketers are actually playing less today (contrary to current opinion). There was certainly less test/one-day cricket but far more championship cricket. If they played 28 three-day matches to our current 14 four-dayers, you arrive at the figure of 84 days of championship cricket to our 56 - assuming full play. There was probably more limited overs matches also as there were three List A competitions in operation from 1972 (i.e. the Gillette Cup, the Sunday League and the Benson & Hedges Cup). Since 2010 there have only been two limited overs competitions, a List A and the Twenty20.
Bayliss by his own admission has never seen a game of county cricket in his life, and seems to have lengthy sojourns in Oz for some peculiar reason. I agree with Mason Crane. Having an English spinner gaining vital match practice on Australian first-class wickets ahead of an away Ashes seems infinitely more important than this North v South thingy, which is being billed as a dress rehearsal for a competition which will not happen until 2019. More of Strauss's ''white ball madness'' I fear. The Australians do not let many Poms play Shield cricket. I think you have to go back to Vic Marks or Botham even in the late '80s. Grab that opportunity when it arises I say - especially for a youngster!
Yeah but the West Indies pacemen of the 70s and 80s were, gasp, not as fast as most bowlers who are around today.
