The pavilion as a marker

Ah, yes, well - thank you darling (Mary's just brought me a cup of tea) - so it is highly likely that 2010 will bring the last season of county cricket as we know it. Around the counties an increasing number of CEOs (what is the collective noun for CEOs?) are throwing their weight behind proposals to dismantle the existing county championship. Many meetings, working parties, brain(I use the term in its loosest sense)storming sessions, subcommittee reports, panels, briefings and expenses-fuelled lunches lie ahead before anything is ratified but support is building for plans to split the championship into three conferences from 2011.

That would mean that each county plays no more than 12 championship matches in a season. This would allow greater scope for the Champions League, IPL and an ever-spiralling number of Twenty20s though attendance figures around the country (two chaffinches are on the birdfeeders) suggest that T20 popularity has already peaked so it is only a matter of time before that format is perceived as far too long and dreary so is ditched in favour of Ten10, then a few years later, Five5 and so on until, probably around 2025, English cricket's premier short format will be SuperDuperSnorbelSnuperOne1 whereby each team's innings consists of one ball (fielding restrictions apply) thus enabling entire tournaments to be fitted into a morning.

We all know how potentially momentous and dangerous this era is for county cricket but the hope has always existed that it will cling on to enough of its structure (a robin has arrived) to survive the likes of Giles Clarke and the sheep that surround and follow him (remember last year the counties, including Warwickshire, emphatically re-elected Clarke as ECB chairman: ie. it was their judgement that English cricket should be led by a man who judged that Allen Stanford was a groovy business partner). It appears that won't be the case though. The county championship, the core of English cricket and supplier of joy to millions for well over a century, is set to be reduced to a fragment among the plethora of shorter domestic games and meaningless, money-chasing, instantly-forgotten international one-dayers (starling, another chaffinch). The ECB and counties should be ashamed of the demise of the county championship. While they publicise T20 to the skies (nothing at all wrong with that) they have let the championship wither on the vine. Like a newspaper publisher which identifies a paper it would like to shed, they have simply stopped backing it so that it starts to struggle and its audience dwindles to make its eventual termination appear justified (blackbird).

Perhaps there is a twist in the tale yet but forces are gathering more ominously than before against the current championship format. They have been thwarted before. This time, they scent success. Three divisions of six beckon. Or perhaps two of nine but still with only 12 matches (a dunnock's there, waiting for the blackbird to make way) so all the teams would not play each other twice. Outgrounds would just about disappear once and for all from those counties from which they have not disappeared already. (two goldfinches).

Just what county cricket needs, say the architects of these proposals. It's a flabby anachronism in desperate need of re-shaping and modernising. Well, if enough influential people feel that way, it will happen. Count me out. And, I suspect, count out an awful lot of the game's lifeblood - true cricket-lovers who attend only championship matches. Those people, I am certain, the powers-that-be in English cricket deem expendable and are quite happy to shed in pursuit of the bucks of a new generation. I'm not sure that new generation will prove quite so loyal.

In 2011 Edgbaston's handsome new pavilion will open. An impressive structure, it will tower, sparkling and handsome, over the ground and gradually become established and part of its fabric and do splendid service for decades before it, too, fades. And, as years pass, I wonder if it will come to be forever regarded as a marker in cricket history. Ah yes, the old Edgbaston pavilion - it was finished and opened in the year that county cricket and the county championship died.

(Two dunnocks).