What's happening?

I'd an e mail the other night suggesting I must spend "hours" doing this blog each evening. Actually no, it is less than 15 minutes most nights. It's amazing what you can write with a 40-minute morning and evening commute, when you'd otherwise be watching people snore, sniff and dribble coffee, though not necessarily at the same time. With my MP3 player full of favourite tunes and on, I can e mail myself and simply copy and paste later. Much easier than when I'd a thirty-minute drive.

Anyway, I was pleased to see the county reject the plans for the new-look County game and suggest retaining the status quo (how long can that band go on for…?) As I wrote the other night, I would personally prefer a knock out one day competition in there somewhere and would happily sacrifice some 20-over cricket (unless we stay good at it!) but the rest is pretty much OK.

Reducing four-day cricket would hardly help our Test match preparations, while the return of forty-over cricket, for me, is ideal. It is a game that is long enough to allow people to play properly, without the cat and mouse session of play that often takes place in the fifty-over game. Looking at it logically, playing twelve 40-over games instead of their fifty-over equivalent saves 120 overs of diving around per season.

The county registered their concerns over the scheduling of matches without going into specifics, but for me there are too many weekends with little or no cricket. It might also be better to have specific months set aside for the different competitions. What the powers that be neglected in their suggestions was that reducing the amount of cricket must logically have an impact on membership fees. No county could realistically charge more, or even the same, if they were to lose 20-30 days of cricket, a natural consequence if we moved to three divisions and reduced half a dozen fixtures. Suggestions of bringing in more first-class sides were so ill-considered as to be laughable. Where would their money come from, given the game cannot finance all of the international-ground heavy clubs at present?

Jim Cumbes of Lancashire is in all the broadsheets this morning, bemoaning the state of their finances and suggesting that a Test ground-hosting county could go to the wall in the near future. Like most cricket fans, this saddens me, but when he constantly goes on about salvation in the form of a city-based franchise T20 I'm a little lost. If Lancashire became Manchester, does he think that fans from outlying towns and cities would support them? The same goes with Leeds, or Birmingham or any of the others. Old rivalries die hard, especially those fuelled by decades of football enmity. I can't see Sheffield, Bradford, Huddersfield, Liverpool, Rochdale and Wigan people throwing their support behind their big-city neighbours.

I don't know how long the tabled plans took, nor for that matter how much the work cost, but I reckon I could have come up with more viable options inside a week.

For that matter, possibly over a couple of beers with my mates down the pub, after a game…think of the money they'd have saved.