Re-inventing the wheel

Glamour, fireworks, razzmatazz, cheerleaders…all these things and more were in evidence yesterday, and that was just in Lalit Modi’s garden shed.  Meanwhile, in a galaxy somewhat closer to home, the ECB’s Clydesdale Bank 40 got underway with more of a soggy puff in comparison to the IPL’s bang.

Last year the ECB decided that the irrelevant-to-cricket-anywhere-else, two-division Pro40 simply had to go to make room for more Twenty20.  This year, we somehow find a situation where Sussex are defending their Pro40 title in a brand new competition with a different name, sponsors and format, and that was supposed to be only 20 overs per side.

Only at the ECB could they invent something completely new only for it to turn out exactly the same as the thing they were trying to replace.

Mr. Jobs, I have a product idea to pitch to you. I think you’re going to love it.

Great, John, let’s hear it.

Well, it’s a phone.  But not just any phone.  It takes pictures, plays music, connects to the internet, plays games and can have custom applications, or “apps” as I like to call them, loaded in…

Errm…John?

…that users can buy from an online store. And, best of all, it has a touch screen.  It doesn’t even need buttons!! Mr. Jobs, I give you the “myPhone”.

John, you’re fired.

But of course, Giles and chums won’t get fired.  The ECB doesn’t like doing that sort of thing. What they prefer to do instead is, every year, tear up the structure of English domestic cricket and then put it back together again so it looks virtually the same, but with tiny, barely noticeable differences.

English cricket has become like one of those Lego vehicles that you lost the instructions to. No matter how hard you try, it always ends up with an important piece in the wrong place.

Every now and then, just to shake things up a bit, the ECB might bring back some of the things they got rid of a few years ago.

This year will be no different.  Last years changes didn’t end up solving the problem of too much cricket that didn’t leave enough time for the best counties to play in the Champions League (who knew Barcelona had a cricket team?) because, well, nothing much has changed.

Ok, so there isn’t a 50-over competition this year, but nobody will notice if it’s missing.  It’s not like they play 50-over internationals now is it?  We’ll stuff some extra matches into the T20, no-one will know the difference.

None of this is to say that the CB-40 won’t be terribly good fun, but the ECB’s decision-making-process that led to it has been a complete fudge from start to finish.

It has been said (by me, for starters) that this could be the most important decision to be made for English cricket since the decision to switch the county championship to two divisions.  So here are my predictions for the decisions to be made by the ECB for 2011:

  • Rule out introduction of 3rd division in County Championship after lots of coughing and throat-clearing heard from Lord’s and the Oval.
  • Rule out introduction of conference system for County Championship after lots of use of the word “Americanised”.
  • Agree on suspiciously new County Championship.  Two divisions of 9 teams to play 16 matches.
  • Window reserved in September for Champions League participants, and announced one week after BCCI switch the Champions League to August.
  • Expand the Twenty20 competition to a “spherical-robin” format.
  • Oh, and we’d better have a 50-over competition back in, county members keep thinking they’ve gone senile.

Naturally, the time it takes to sort all of this lot out will require a Jolly Good Lunch™ once a week for the entire summer.

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