Losing T20s Would Be Catastrophic!

Tim Wigmore suggests recent comments from England coach Trevor Bayliss shows the game needs major changes

- Tim Wigmore

Cricket’s schedule is a mess. There is too much cricket that means too little. Players are burned out. Fans are too often left short-changed, watching teams whose best players are knackered or injured. It is time for change.

None of this is remotely controversial or outlandish; nothing more, indeed, than a statement of what has been very obvious for half a decade or more. All of this led to Trevor Bayliss’s suggestion that Twenty20 internationals should be virtually scrapped, restricted to the World T20 and the months preceding it.

Suggestions to rectify cricket’s bloated schedule are welcome. It is just that Bayliss’ prescription would not make things better; rather, it would make them much much worse – and actually exacerbate the problems it is intended to solve.

What would happen if there were no T20Is outside of the months before a World T20? National governing bodies would be able to generate less cash – not such a problem for Australia, England and India, perhaps, but a rather different matter beyond the sport’s economic big three.

With less cash, it would be even harder for other countries to be able to pay their players a competitive wage, and stop the flow of cricketers choosing domestic T20 leagues over international cricket. That means that more countries would go the same way of the West Indies, and have their talent pool hollowed out by crude market forces.