‘Bold and ambitious’ – hopes are high for County Championship revamp

County cricket is no stranger to rumours of its imminent reorganisation. There lives in every top honcho a desire to tinker with the settings, like a 1970s teenager idly flicking from turgid western to Songs of Praise on a Sunday afternoon.

Sometimes these changes are genuinely huge – the switch to two divisions in 2000, the expansion from nine counties to 14 in 1895, the admission of Durham in 1998, the switch to four-day cricket in 1993; sometimes less so, like the move to 10 teams in the first division, eight in the second, which comes into place on Thursday with the start of the season.

And to accompany that – travelling in the well-marked footsteps of Bob Willis, Michael Parkinson and Michael Atherton’s Cricket reform group, and ECB’s own 2007 Schofield report, among others – comes yet another review. This one is commissioned by the interim ECB director of cricket, Andrew Strauss, whose attitude to the 18-team championship falls somewhere between fond frustration and amused antipathy.

Strauss, who hopes the review, authorised after England’s disastrous Ashes tour, will be “bold and ambitious” has stressed that it is a high-performance system review, not a domestic structure review, but it is hard to see how you can do one without the other. The report aims to conclude by the end of September this year, with any changes in place for the start of the 2023 season.

“Bold” is a word to cause prickling anxiety among many four-day cricket supporters who are only just being handed back their two-divisional Championship, after the Covid years of the regional Bob Willis Trophy.

The Hundred has already introduced eight city-based teams – two in London, and one each in Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, Southampton, Cardiff and