Yorkshire director of cricket Martyn Moxon said there was an "absolute will" among England's county teams to safeguard the domestic game amid fears over encroachment by the Indian Premier League and other franchise Twenty20 competitions
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Yorkshire director of cricket Martyn Moxon said there was an "absolute will" among England's county teams to safeguard the domestic game amid fears over encroachment by the Indian Premier League and other franchise Twenty20 competitions. Of England's 18 first-class counties, only Essex were unable to send a representative to a meeting of directors of cricket and coaches at Edgbaston on Tuesday. The new season in the first-class County Championship, the four-day format that is the bedrock of the English professional game, starts on Friday. Yorkshire are one of several counties whose plans have been disrupted by late call-ups to the lucrative IPL, with England duo Liam Plunkett and David Willey now both on their way to India.
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Meanwhile the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) come under fire recently for compensating some Test-match grounds in the years they are not staging such matches, raising fears of a split between those eight counties and the other 10 less well-off teams. But former Yorkshire and England batsman Moxon was keen to present a united front after Tuesday's meeting. "It was really good and because of the sensitivity of all the issues, we won't make any public statements until we feed back to our chief executives and the ECB about what we've come up with," he told Britain's Press Association news agency. "Everyone present stressed that what we discussed was for the good of the game as a whole. It was about how do we protect it, how do we make it better so that people want to play and watch it.
It was about the game as a whole and not about localised agendas. "The topics discussed were County Championship laws and County Championship cricket. Everyone present felt that it was still important that all 18 counties must be protected within that framework." Moxon added: "We looked at Twenty20 tournaments around the world and the impact they have on the counties and players -- the IPL and the new (English) T20 competition for 2020. "The ECB were aware of the meeting. They're very keen to get our views, so we'll feed it back to them and then we'll decide how we take it forward from there. "Everybody knows the game is at an important stage. Important decisions have to be made over the next year or so, but at the meeting there was an absolute will to make sure we get those decisions right for the benefit of the game."
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