I wonder who to blame? Players association for arguing such a soft draw in the middle of summer? Or NZC being NZC. Blackcaps playing far more cricket currently, and no one is able to put pressure on because they are playing 20 overs of cricket a week.
Its just NZC being NZC. Working within some constraints of limited finance but somehow this is the solution. Yet the solution doesn't really work around the constraints in the most efficient way.
They've reduced the plunket shield to 8 rounds due to operational cost savings.
The PCA pushed against this.
The stretched smash has expanded in time (but not games) to fill the missing 2 weeks.
The Ford Trophy was extended back up to 10 rounds as a partial recompense. Plus there were 2 NZA series. Plus provincial contracts increased from 15 players to 16.
But the NZA series occurred concurrently with both Ford Trophy and Plunket Shield despite there being 2 weeks freed up within the calendar.
On the costs: So an extra 6 people got contracts, an extra 15 or so got match payments for 5 weeks or so due to fixture clashes of the A tours and domestics.
On the schedule: in a world cup year the Ford Trophy is 8 months pre tournament instead of about 4 months. Our A level players have not got any extra cricket, despite space for it, they've just got some better cricket. But they could have all of the better cricket as well as part of the more cricket.
So in summary they've ended up with this awful schedule for a reasonably explainable reason. But they could have done much better with a bit of application, attention to detail.
