Former captain Kevin Pietersen believes a first-class competition based on the Hundred can help the English Test team ‘return to its former glory’. Pietersen, who won the Ashes in 2005, 2009, 2010–11 and 2013, said the current County Championship had lost its luster and was “not fit to serve the Test team” in its current form.
“With no money elsewhere in the game, the (county) championship in its current form is not fit to serve a Test team,” Pietersen wrote in a blog post on Betway.
“The best players don’t want to play in it, so young English players are not learning from other greats like me. Average bowlers are getting batsmen out on bad wickets and everything is messed up.
The 41-year-old heaped praise on the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) for the professional franchise-based 100-ball cricket tournament – The Hundred.
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“At The Hundred, the ECB has really created a competition with some sort of value. It is the best against the best, is properly marketed, and engages with the audience. The guys met and I can tell you the players would have improved a lot to play with other great players. It’s such a valuable experience.”
He advised the board to come up with a similar tournament for the red-ball format, adding that English players would benefit from shoulder to shoulder with top foreign players.
“They now need to introduce a similar franchise competition to red-ball cricket, playing the best against the best every single week. They will provide the money to attract some of the best overseas players in the world and top English players will benefit from playing with them.
“It will be a marketable, exciting competition that will raise the standard and bring people back through the gates of cricket for a long time.”
He proposed an eight-team round-robin league where pitches encourage strong batting technique.
“The pitches are monitored by the ECB so that we are not seeing conditions favorable to the leading bowlers like now. We should have good pitches that reward and encourage strong batting techniques, bat longer, and that requires skill from the bowlers to take wickets.”
Pietersen said the county system can serve as a “feeder system” where players are developed until they are ready to make the move.
“I can promise you that many of the best youngsters in the current England team and system still see Test cricket, especially Ashes cricket, as their pinnacle.
“But the best players in the world are involved in IPL, PSL, Big Bash, The Hundred etc. So it’s not a good idea to give them a chance to make their millions now, as I was back in the day. We need attractive, high-quality, There is a need to create interesting competitions that reward and improve the best players. This can be one,” he wrote.
England are currently down 0-3 in the Ashes.
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“There is no point in blaming Joe Root for what happened in Australia. He is the only class batsman in that team and has been tasked with leading an under-prepared, low-quality team in the Ashes series. It was a frustrating task.
“Things are not going to change by taking the next batsman out of county cricket and sticking it to open the batting. It has failed many times even now.
“This franchise competition will be a great opportunity to improve the standard of red-ball cricket, to make domestic cricket interesting to the masses again and the only way for the ECB to show that they value Test cricket and get paid.” We value the customer.”
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