County cricket players fume over ‘unsustainable’ schedule

English cricket’s players union has accused schedulers of “disregarding player welfare” and called for overhaul of the “unsustainable” domestic structure in 2025.

On Thursday, the England and Wales Cricket Board announced the schedule for the 2024 county season, which sees the volume of cricket (14 first-class, 14 Twenty20 and 10 50-over matches, plus knockouts) remain the same as 2023. The schedule for the Hundred will be announced in the new year.

In 2022, Andrew Strauss’s “high-performance review” recommended a reduction in the volume of domestic cricket, but was thrown out by the counties. The Professional Cricketers’ Association has now called on the counties and ECB to go back to the drawing board, in a bid to better balance commercial and player welfare imperatives by reducing the volume of cricket next year.

Glamorgan bowler James Harris, the PCA chairman, reported “dissatisfaction at the structure” among players, and said the schedule must “evolve”.

Rob Lynch, the PCA chief executive, said: “On a day that is full of excitement and anticipation, the announcement of the 2024 fixtures is a reminder that the men’s domestic calendar in England and Wales is unsustainable and is in need of reform for the interests of current and future professional cricketers and therefore the future of our game.

“We are aware the ECB acknowledges the schedule is not ideal and following recent game-wide conversations, we understand the game has an ambition to look seriously at the 2025 fixture list. We have heard this commitment in the past and the professional game has not delivered. Collectively, we need to act to advance player welfare to future-proof our sport and the PCA wishes to fully collaborate with the ECB and game to make this a reality.”

Of particular concern is the schedule for the Vitality Blast, which features teams regularly playing on successive days – an outlier among T20 leagues globally. The Blast is almost entirely played on Thursday to Sunday in 2024, to enable fans to attend, but players and directors of cricket worry back-to-back matches puts a strain on players that is not conducive to high performance, especially when travel is factored in. In last year’s Blast North Group (which ranges geographically from Worcester to Durham), teams playing matches on successive days lost the second match 71.4 per cent of the time.

Sam Cook, the outstanding Essex seamer and PCA representative, said: “My biggest issue is the welfare of players and support staff being disregarded, particularly with regards to travel throughout high-intensity periods of T20 cricket.

“This has been repeatedly stressed in numerous PCA summits and despite this, the schedule still provides the same problems by not focusing on player welfare.

“In addition, the expectation to perform despite inadequate recovery time across formats concerns me greatly. This has an enormous impact on both performance and increases the risk of injury. As players, we want to give supporters the highest standards possible and in turn create an even better product for the ECB and the game.”

Meanwhile, the ECB confirmed, as reported by Telegraph Sport, that there would be four rounds of County Championship action played with the Kookaburra ball in 2024, and that a draw would rise in value from five to eight points.

It is unclear when the Kookaburra – which replaces the British-made Dukes ball – will be used, but the ECB expects two rounds to be near the start of the season, and two towards the end. Last year’s two-round Kookaburra trial saw spin bowl 10 per cent more overs, from 23 to 33 per cent. Ostensibly, the use of the Kookaburra ball is designed to nullify medium pacers, and better prepare English bowlers for overseas conditions, particularly in Australia.

The ECB also revealed that counties are permitted to use hybrid pitches in the County Championship for the first time, in a one-year trial. Hybrid pitches are turf pitches that contain stitched plastic fibres to bind them together, and have been used in white-ball county matches for some years to alleviate pressure on busy squares (because they can be reused several times). They have not been used in four-day cricket until now because they do not deteriorate, but research has shown that normal pitches are not deteriorating hugely on day three and four anyway, so the ECB is keen to conduct the hybrid pitch trial.

The men’s season begins on April 5 with a block of eight rounds of County Championship cricket played from Friday to Monday. The season finishes on Sept 29, the same day the international season concludes.