Things To Come - Year 2020

Wasim Khan and his merry band of men of the catchily named Men’s Domestic Playing Programme group (MDDP), after just four meetings, have themselves a cunning plan for the structure of English domestic cricket for 2020 and onwards.

Championship: the two divisions will remain, the uneven split in divisional sizes will remain, the 14 match season will remain, but from 2020 Division One will have the ten counties (Divison Two  will have 8 ), with a seeding system to be explored to optimise fairness.

"While not significantly affecting the “best v best” principle in the top division, this change will provide an appropriate increase in security to Division One teams with a smaller percentage being relegated each season, and a correspondingly increased opportunity for Division Two teams as they will have a greater percentage chance of promotion."

You can understand those tweaks but what about the rest of the season?

The One Day Cup will be played during the "New Competition's" time slot - July/August. Counties will be split into two groups of 9, not necessarily North/South however - which was tried a few years back but things reverted back to playing the neighbours again. Already without the top English qualified talent (drafted to the new competition's franchises), this competition will be further downgraded by not allowing overseas players to participate in it from 2020 either. To confirm the downgrading again, each county will play away against a Minor County prior to the competion's start-proper.

"From 2020, a new round of 50-over fixtures will be played before the domestic one-day competition in mid-July, with each First-Class County visiting a Minor County."

Has this been done to win votes?

“We are very pleased that that there was unanimous support for a structure that will hopefully improve our domestic game and in turn the England teams." Wasim Khan

"The Vitality Blast will retain its current format, with the counties split into North and South Groups of nine teams each, and each team playing 14 fixtures – seven at home, and seven away. The top four will qualify for quarter-finals, with the four winners qualifying for Finals Day at Edgbaston."

So no change in the structure of the Blast competition; just its scheduling which I'd guess will be May/June/early July and Finals Day in October.

Next week I believe the MDDP will be meeting with Middle East leaders to sort out a few on-going issues in that region followed by a meeting with Dominic Raab and Michel Barnier to get some agreement there, before joining a working group tasked with squaring a circle and getting a square peg into a round hole, aka the Hundred.