Can England’s Bazball blueprint filter down into domestic cricket?

F ire up the mowers and download the weather apps, the County Championship returns on Thursday and we are about to discover whether the world’s oldest and most storied first-class competition will adopt Bazball.

Over the winter, the 18 first-class counties pushed back on a proposed long-term cut to 10 matches and have remained at 14, but this is not to say things stay the same. For a start, the number of points for a draw has been dropped from eight down to five in a bid to encourage a touch more adventure.

And in January at a meeting of county head coaches, Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum outlined the broader principles of England’s new-found attacking brio in Test cricket in the hope it will filter down into the domestic game. The question now is how this manifests itself.

Peter Moores seemed a pretty good person to ask. Three times a title winner – this summer is the 20th anniversary of his first at Sussex – the former England coach’s Nottinghamshire team are back in Division One proper after finding themselves on the wrong side of the pandemic reset. Notts finished third overall in 2021 – the summer of conferences – but had to battle back to the top flight when 2022 started from 2019’s final positions.

According to the statistician James McCaghrey, they have scored at 3.51 an over over the past two seasons – second by a whisker to Glamorgan (3.57) – with 3.28 the overall run-rate for the County Championship since 2017. Will England, going at 4.7 in Test cricket over the past 12 months and chalking up 10 wins from 12, see other county teams up the ante? “I think you will find that, individually, players will try their own version of it,” Moores said.

“When you first come into the game, through the pathway, England