There's this from the YEP in case anyone is unable to stop throwing up from all the hype that's accompanied the denouement of this years 4th format

https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/sport/cricket/the-hundred-makes-ditchwater-look-interesting-chris-waters-4272295
While regarding the rise in attendances and viewing figures at this year’s Hundred with consequent suspicion, amid a general propaganda machine that might have embarrassed Joseph Goebbels, there is also the question as to whether the Hundred is actually any good.

Also read a good comment by a fella on the Yorkshire CCC White Rose forum thought it was worth sharing encapsulates much of what I think has been wrong with the schedule and how to fix it. The fact that TV isn't covering the county formats any more ought to free the counties to arrange fixtures as they used to be arranged before Sky TV ruined comps like the Sunday League

County cricket needs to be bolder and stop compromising. At the moment it's allowing itself to become irrelevant.

Sky, the ecb, the central contracted players have no interest in county cricket so why should we throw away everything we have for their benefit?

The counties need to set out a traditional schedule which appeals to it's core audiance and go with that. To me the core audiance is the newly retired, children and club playing adults, who often have children interested in the game and are themselves children of people connected to the game. There remains a lot of people who actually want to watch red and white ball county cricket.

I'd unblock all competitions, play 16 county games and 16 t20s during the season. T20s on a Friday, cc starting Sundays. These would be pretty much fixed.

Players have always missed games due to other commitments, so what. Get on with it and go with what's available. Geoff missed a lot of Yorkshire games to play for England, games played with the stars missing isn't new, it's been happening for 100+ years. Don't worry about it.

If a player wants to go to a t20 league, let them go, play with what you have. If Jason Roy wants to spend part of his summer in the USA, good luck to him, play the next available. So many of us on here commented how much we enjoyed the 50 over game v Surrey at York, that should be our template going forward. Currently it's the tail wagging the dog!

At the moment we don't have meaningful comps. This will ultimately kill the county game. The cc restarts next week, and how many of us know whose top of the league or pushing for promotion? I've little idea. It's the 50 over semi finals today, I didn't know until this morning, that can't be right!

'The players won't like it... ' so what, play somewhere else. We'll actually find most aren't good enough for that and will stay.

At the moment every player, partly because they have an inflated opinion of themselves, believes county cricket is a stepping stone to something better. It might be, but county cricket should be bold enough to make sure it's something in its own right. Only if it believes in its self will it survive.

Mad - thanks for that - superb article. I would add one other bit to it. Players need to realise they are in the entertainment industry and as such should be playing when the public are able to pay to watch. That means cricket should be played at weekends, bank holidays and in the evenings,

So often there is no cricket being played on Saturday and Sunday and most bank holidays seem to be cricket free.

I just want to add that the SKY Hundred goings on remind me of the early 90s? when SKY tried to get the Rugby League authorities to merge clubs such as Widnes and Warrington as part of their efforts to get a Super League established on a bigger regional club basis. And the SKY plaudits such as Stevo praised the idea to the rafters.

Gladly it was all turned down, unlike cricket

Something to quiz Stuart about on Monday

Doesn't solve the issue of too many formats and absence of Championship cricket in July August and there's lots of assumptions in the piece too.

New Hundred format and private investment in English cricket move a step closer
ECB chiefs' preferred idea of expanding tournament to 18 teams will go down well with counties, but less so with investors and broadcasters

By Nick Hoult, Chief Cricket Correspondent and Will Macpherson, Cricket News Correspondent 8 September 2023 • 6:33pm

Changing the format of the Hundred and the possibility of private investment in English cricket moved a step closer on Friday when the England and Wales Cricket Board was given the green light to take new proposals to the counties.

Richard Gould, the ECB chief executive, and Richard Thompson, the chairman, will now meet with counties to discuss their two ideas: private investment in the eight Hundred teams eventually increasing it to 10; or replacing the competition with a pyramid tournament involving the 18 counties across two divisions, similar to the current Blast.

The second proposal, described by insiders as an ‘investible pyramid’, is preferred by Thompson and Gould and would see teams shared equally by private investors, the county and the ECB. They believe it will unite the game and end the division between the counties and the Hundred. However, it will face major opposition from the Test grounds who currently host franchises and mean ripping up the Hundred and starting again.

The other option, to sell the current eight Hundred teams to private investors, would copy similar franchise models around the world, and attract interest from India, Saudi Arabia and investors in the United States. A third option of just selling the entire tournament was turned down last year when private investors Bridgepoint offered £400 million for a 75 per cent stake, but could also still be a possibility.

Two days of ECB board meetings ended on Thursday with Gould and Thompson given permission to take their ideas to the next stage – a meeting of all counties is scheduled on October 4 – and then stakeholders such as Sky.

It comes on the back of the most successful Hundred competition since the tournament began three years ago with healthy crowds and broadcast figures.

The 18-team model will be popular with county supporters. The ECB and the county would own the teams with invites to private investors to buy in. The host county would manage ticket sales, marketing and managing the players, decentralising the competition from the ECB which currently controls all those factors in the Hundred.

But investors will be put off by promotion and relegation while broadcasters are cool on an 18-team tournament that involves a huge increase in fixtures and believe county brands are now totally irrelevant to younger audiences. A two thirds majority of the 18 counties will have to agree for any changes to be implemented.

The support of Sky will be crucial. Without their buy in, a new tournament will be hard to make work given the lack of competition in the UK broadcast market for cricket. The counties currently receive £1.3 million per year from the Hundred, funded by the Sky deal. Sky could ask for a refund if the competition is changed before 2028, when their deal runs out.

Selling the Hundred franchises, or the entire competition, to private investors is the only realistic way English cricket can compete with other leagues for talent and keep England players from the clutches of IPL teams. Also discussed at the board meeting were pay rises for the England men’s team with multi-year central contracts to be offered but no increase in match fees, which had been expected.

The offers will be put to the players over the weekend and early next week. Mark Wood this week told Telegraph Sport he could turn down an England central contract to cash in on T20 leagues. He is not the only player considering such a move

Yes, it will be very interesting to get the CEO's views on this. The suggestion is that the Test ground clubs won't like the 18 team proposal so it will be a real test of which way the Club will go.
Let's hope that any questions focus on the big issues rather than the price of beer in the Dollery.

What is in the best interests of the county championship?

Leave it at 8 cuckoo teams sticking out like a sore thumb failing year after year causing angst for the rest of the game.
Or...
Make it a proper 18 county-ish competition with jeopardy so it gets taken seriously all of a sudden

Either way I'd watch very little of it but what's best for the counties is what would interest me

Mark Wood btw is what? 36 now? so I wouldn't lose any sleep over him training down central contracts

The Cricketer reports that ECB Chief Executive Richard Gould: "wants to replace The Hundred with a new 39-team T20 tournament involving the grounds of all the first-class and National Counties.
The alternative for English cricket is an expanded Hundred, taking in new teams from Durham and Somerset.
It has not been determined if the new sides in Gould's model would be named after their counties or the towns or cities in which they are based. They would be part-owned by the ECB, and part by private investors. It is not certain how much stake the counties will have in them.
This tournament would not incorporate the Blast, which would also continue to run in English cricket's congested programme."

That makes sense to me up to a point.
I think the problem is, the counties will never abandoned the blast. You’d have to give them part ownership of their 18 teams. Which obviously isn’t something the ECB want to do.

But seems to me, what needs to happen is that the hundred and blast are amalgamated. 1 single short format competition. Think 39 teams but in 4 divisions is a great idea. Treat it like the football pyramid, you’d still have an elite league of 10 at the top. But the teams in it would be there by merit and performance. Teams always have something to play for, and it decongests the schedule.
Expands the playing pool as well, increases access to fans across the country, and you could shape it however you wanted to attract your target audience, matching women’s teams etc.

It's a nice idea to include the National Counties but the logistics would make it complicated. Most National Counties players are not full time professionals. I can't see them wanting to schlep from Cornwall to, say, Norfolk for one game of hit-and-giggle and then go to Northumberland the next week. You could regionalise it or else have some sort of week-long festival where they gather at Wormsley for a round robin. Quite how that would fit in with a pyramid, I'm not sure.
Is it just me or does anyone else think that if the ECB believe that the answer is to invent another competition then they are probably asking the wrong question?

The idea does seem fanciful but I like the vision of growing the game rather than shrinking it as happened when the 100 was thought up.

So long as the games are May to August and fall mostly at weekends which is when the National Counties currently play I don't see an issue with the logistics perhaps best if regionalised. Some of the NCs would require lots of help from the first class county grounds for a short duration while their own playing and spectator facilities are upgraded but I see no reason why for example Staffordshire couldn't play a game or two at Derby or Edgbaston as part of double headers with the host county. I'd quite like in twenty years time for the result of all this to be we've grown from 18 to 24 first class counties

ECB should remember the big business saying - KISS - Keep It Simple.Stupid. Scrap the Hundred and stick to CC, Blast and 50 Over Cup. Bring in all the National counties that want to take part and form a league structure for the Blast. If the leagues consist of 10 teams it would give 2 minors the opportunity to play against first class counties. I like the idea of double headers as outlined by Mad.

I think the idea behind outside investment is to allow more pro-players. Have some minor county players able to try to sign for a county. By being a professional for a year or 2. Plus funding travel etc.
Also from what I’ve heard, some of the theory behind it would be to allow counties to loan their younger players to minor counties. So the likes of Wylie or Simmons for the Bears could go play for someone like Staffordshire or Shropshire, in a competition that would theoretically be a higher standard than second XI T20’s.

Really seems to be potential here, but it’s can they work it out. Or is there just too much opposition from different stakeholders (ECB, Sky, Counties, potential investors), who all want different things and we know the counties are very much against trusting the ECB after the way the Hundred was essentially forced upon them.

I agree that getting the proposals agreed will be the major challenge for the ECB's Richard Gould. Using an analogy that his illustrious father would recognise, it is far from an open goal.

I didn't see this thread last week but I did read it in the news independently. I think there is possibly a bit too much detail in it to speculate on, but I think it's a binary decision being put forward:

Stick with franchises and 100 balls Vs return to T20 on county basis.

I've pretty much always found the argument on the 100 a bit misleading, surely the only difference that matters is smaller number of franchises or large number of counties. Naturally the ECB have messed it up a bit and the 100 rules / packaging make it less appealing to the existing followers of the game, but this is a minor bearing in mind the lengths of the game are similar.

I agree that the ECB have muddied the waters by introducing the slightly different format of The Hundred.
Whilst most people say that The Hundred has been reasonably successful in its third year, it has failed in the sense that no other country has picked up on it and T20 is still the go-to format everywhere.

What the ECB never realised was the trenchant support for certain territories in the UK when trying to convince us of this competition. Did they take into account that they would alienate certain Lancashire fans from supporting a side names 'Manchester'. There will be similar examples but it is ridiculous that there is not a single team to represent the West Country and if you consider the size of the crowds at Taunton in games when Somerset were already knocked out of the T20, what sort of crowds might they get if a WC Hundred side were introduced, full of Somerset/Glouc players. Perhaps if this competition had been introduces as a county competition, it might have meant a bit more to some but I get the feeling that trying to suddenly come up with new teams with 'City Names' put people off from the start in much the same way as the 'Birmingham Bears' change made some people throw their membership card at Colin Povey. I went with it on the basis that it was still Warwickshire but if we'd have bought in outsiders from other counties (It would never be allowed I know) I would never have started to watch it.