Changes afoot

Normally when news is announced on a Saturday, the one day when national cricket journalists attempt to spend time with their families, the person or body announcing it will be hoping that no one notices. Even Sunday journalists will usually have decided what they are writing about before Saturday, and it would have to be pretty stonking news to get much coverage. Which explains why an ECB press release yesterday announcing 17 changes to the domestic game next season got next to no attention in today's papers. And yet, reading through the press release when I got back from visiting my sister in Bath last night, there appears little that is not very good news for the game.

The biggie is the fact that the ECB has decided to abandon the system introduced in the Friends Provident Trophy last year of allowing players to challenge the decisions of umpires and refer them to the TV umpire. This was disliked by umpires, players and fans (Chris Adams, the first captain to dispute a decision under the scheme, apologised to the umpire before doing it) and none of the referrals resulted in a decision being reversed. This is good news, even if the ECB must explain the abandoning of the policy on unsuitable technology rather than simply that it is against the spirit of the game.

It is also a good policy, I think, to abandon the use of floodlights in the county championship. Players were finding it too hard to see the red ball under lights. But as a fan I want to see more cricket played, so perhaps there should have been guidance to umpires not to offer the light as readily as they have done (the farcical scenes against Sri Lanka in the Lord's Test this summer being a case in point when the England batsmen came off three times in hardly dangerous light). My view here is that if the batsmen are well set and having few difficulties playing the ball, they should be told to play on even if it is harder to see it.

Other changes include reducing the number of overs a day in the county championship to 96, but increasing the penalty for unbowled overs in the allotted time from a half-point to one full point per over, thus ensuring that bowlers and fielding captains don't dawdle. Also, the ECB has adopted the new rules used in international matches about replacing the white ball in a 50-over game after 34 overs and about the use of powerplays.

Guidelines to help umpires to judge wides in one-day games will be painted on the wicket; and ties in the Twenty20 group stage will be decided on the results between the tied counties rather than on most wins (a flaw that was shown up in the rain-affected competition this year).

There are other sensible proposals in the document that the ECB deserves praise for. It's a shame they don't trumpet them a bit more - as far as I can make out, the press release is not even on the ECB website yet!