The England & Wales Cricket Board will "help fund the re-development of out-grounds at those counties whose main venues are taken over for 38 days each summer once English cricket’s new Twenty20 tournament gets under way" in '20, according to Simon Wilde of the LONDON TIMES. The ECB also set aside £2M ($2.5M) to "support the rapid development of a drop-in pitch at the London Stadium" for use at the World Cup in '19, which it estimates could net £18M-£20M ($22.6M-$25.1M), and subsequently in Twenty20s. The board recruited Mark Perham of FieldturfNZ, who is based at Eden Park, Auckland, to "assist in preparing a drop-in pitch, on site in Stratford, in time for it to be trialed next summer." Warwickshire could be one of those "most affected" if its Edgbaston HQ is chosen as one of the eight venues for the new tournament. Warwickshire CEO Neil Snowball said, "We would need to play pretty much all of our 50-overs matches away from Edgbaston. We would get paid a staging fee for hosting the new competition but we’ve made it clear to the ECB that if we invest in infra-structure at out-grounds we’d be looking for some separate funding." The use of the London Stadium, home to West Ham United, would "fit the ambition" of ECB CEO Tom Harrison for the new Twenty20 to become a "box office" event, but the development of drop-in pitches in the U.K. is "barely in its infancy and the board has left it late to prepare and test something in time for the World Cup" (LONDON TIMES, 4/2).
PLAYING POLITICS: In London, Nick Hoult opined the ECB used the "levers of power to their advantage" and over the course of the last two-and-a-half years the board has been singular with its policy to introduce a new Big Bash-style Twenty20 competition to "future-proof" the game. The ECB "refused to take no for an answer and built a case backed up with external research that was presented this week." It "bent the doubters" to its will. Many said that "it would never happen." Surely the "county turkeys would never put a cross in the box marked Christmas." English cricket’s "institutional inertia would never give." But Graves and Harrison "succeeded where others feared to tread." Ultimately "they won because they held all the aces and built an unstoppable momentum without many of the counties realising what had happened" (TELEGRAPH, 4/1).
