Lancashire county team’s CEO lauds BCCI’s move to prioritise domestic tournaments

Hyderabad: English county cricket team Lancashire’s CEO has lauded the Board of Control for Cricket for India’s (BCCI) direction asking players to play domestic cricket regularly. Lancashire CEO Daniel Gidney termed the BCCI’s act of prioritising domestic cricket over lucrative and glitzy leagues as ‘fantastic prioritising’.

Gidney accused player agents of luring players and facilitating the players’ advent into franchise leagues at the expense of traditional red-ball tournaments, county championship games in this case.

He felt the whole England cricket ecosystem must find a way to prioritise and help the English county championship.

The BCCI, in a landmark move, mandated all international players, except for seniors like Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli and Jasprit Bumrah, to play in domestic tournaments like the Ranji Trophy, the Duleep Trophy etc as and when they are not playing international cricket.

The BCCI secretary Jay Shah even mandated all BCCI-contracted India players to play domestic cricket or face any consequences.

Many international players, including KL Rahul, Shreyas Iyer, Rishabh Pant, Ruturaj Gaikwad, Shubman Gill etc, played domestic cricket, more recently the Duleep Trophy game, before the India vs Bangladesh series.

Gidney, one of England’s longest-serving CEO, said BCCI had done a fantastic job on prioritising red-ball cricket. “Imagine a governing body (BCCI) actually saying that out loud. That was fantastic prioritising,” Gidney told the ‘'The Guardian’ on the sidelines of a county match between Lancashire and Somerset at Old Trafford.

The Lancashire CEO opined that player agents are the main threat to the future of the English County Championship. “We need to have more of an open conversation. Coaches get blamed, administrators get blamed, but if you want to blame anybody, blame agents. I think the game as a whole needs to come together to find a way to support the championship. England players don't have to play in the championship, agents don't care about the championship,” he added.

Gidney hoped that an increased monetary benefit in domestic competitions could play a major role in the revival of red-ball cricket. “More prize money would help and I think we need to find a way of paying four or five players a lot more money. Instead of GBP 80,000-90,000 being the top domestic salary, we need to find a way of paying GBP 200k and saying part of that deal is that you don’t play franchise cricket,” he concluded.