It was a coincidence that the MCC scheduled its winter 1918 committee meeting on 12 November, though if pressed Lord Hawke might have professed it presentiment and canny planning. Either way, on the very first day after the armistice, the MCC’s ordinary committee got together to get on with the business of organising the next domestic schedule. They had a lot to talk about. Through four years of war, there had been no county cricket at all. Now it was back, no one seemed to agree exactly what it should be. Opinion was split. On the one side were the reactionaries, on the other, the reformists.
Which is a row that seems to have been around as long as the game itself. The old joke is that the English invented cricket to give themselves some conception of eternity, but really they did it so they’d have something to bicker about during it. There’s always talk that something must be done. And occasionally something actually is, something more than the constant tinkering and tampering with schedules and formats that means no two seasons ever seem to be quite alike, something significant, like the launch of the Sunday league or the T20 trophy.
In 1919, the Bolsheviks wanted to enlarge the stumps, extend the overs, and expand the playing hours, to cover the pitches, cut the matches, shrink the bats, reduce the playing days, and limit the number of professional players. Someone even suggested they ban all the left-handed batsmen, just to save the minutes wasted changing the field over. A century before Twenty20, the Observer argued the MCC should organise three-hour county matches, because “the normal attendances on the county cricket grounds would be doubled after the tea interval if spectators were assured 90 minutes of healthy hitting”.
The MCC did what any good English institution would in such circumstances, and set up yet another committee to investigate. It was a stormy winter, with much frothing, seething and spluttering. At the national papers, over-worked letters editors must have consoled themselves with dreams of what they might buy with all the overtime they were earning. Eventually, the pronouncement came down that all matches would now last two days rather than three, and that playing hours would be stretched till 7.30pm, “to give workers an opportunity of seeing more of the game”. Everything else would remain the same, except for tea, which, in the most drastic step yet, would now be taken on the field “to save time”.
So 1919 was one of the great revolutionary seasons in the history of English cricket. And now, 100 years later, we’re about to have another. Two, in fact, back-to-back. This time, the outbreak of reformist zeal is an overdue attempt to blow the game out the doldrums its been in for the last decade, when participation has dropped, and public enthusiasm dwindled. The remedies the ECB has come up with now are even more radical than the MCC’s 1919 plan to speed up the tea break.
Between this April and September 2020, there will be a World Cup and the Ashes, as well as an overhaul of the county championship, and the launch of a new format, The Hundred. There can’t have been a run of summers quite like it.
The ECB has been building towards these two seasons for the last four years. It’s restructured the central contract system to make sure limited-overs players were earning as much, or more, as Test match specialists, and encouraged players to prioritise the IPL. They hired Trevor Bayliss, because, as their old director of cricket Andrew Strauss said over and again back then, he was such a good limited-overs coach. And it’s stuck with him since, even while the Test team stalled, because the ODI side was playing better than ever.
The county championship, meanwhile, was stripped of its star players and shunted away from high summer so that everyone could play limited-overs cricket when the sun was out. Next year, it will change again. The 50-over competition is crammed into May, the T20 Blast final jammed into late September, and the championship split into chunks and spread out around the out-grounds to make room for the World Cup. The ECB at least had a good argument for doing all this, even if it wasn’t one everyone liked. The tournament is, as CEO Tom Harrison has said, a “once-in-a-generation” opportunity. Whisper it, but it feels like the ECB is well set to take advantage of it.
Then there’s The Hundred. This has so far infuriated millions of people who like cricket, but, we’re told, will appeal to the many more millions who don’t, yet, but might if only it didn’t resemble cricket so much. The ECB has blown through £65m in cash reserves in the last two years, and the cost of launching the new competition has ballooned to more than £40m. This is why it’s also had to make so many cuts. And cuts mean compromises, mainly to its development programmes. The overseas placement scheme’s been scrapped and so has its specialist pace and spin bowling projects.
In 1919, by the way, the new dawn of English cricket turned out to last just half a season. That August, the MCC scrapped the new two-day format and by 1920, everything was back as it had been in 1914. A century later, these latest changes won’t be so easily undone. The ECB has staked almost everything on England making a run to the final of a home World Cup in 2019, and the newly enthused public falling in love with The Hundred in 2020. Right now, the first proposition looks a better bet than the second, but the ECB can’t really afford to be wrong about either.
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