The County Championship looks increasingly likely to be cut from 14 matches to 12 per team from 2026 after another review of the domestic structure which is likely to illicit anger among some leaders.
The 2025 season begins on Friday but could be the last to feature 14 matches per team as a review is held into how to improve the domestic schedule, with Rob Andrew, the England and Wales Cricket Board’s managing director, saying all three county competitions “can be improved”.
The schedule was last cut from 16 to 14 matches ahead of the 2017 season, but there has been a looming threat in recent seasons that further reductions could come. Andrew promised this review would be more collaborative than the 2022 high-performance review, which was led by Sir Andrew Strauss following another Ashes debacle Down Under. The review recommended a radical reduction to 10 Championship matches and was thrown out by the county chairs, who require a two-thirds majority to enact any change.
Andrew believes there is more of an appetite for change among county leaders three years on, with the global landscape of the game changing rapidly and the Professional Cricketers’ Association regularly calling for a reduction in the overall volume of cricket.
ECB officials say there is little interest in reducing the Championship to 10 matches – the number played in Australia’s Sheffield Shield – but there is much discussion about dropping to 12. In addition, the 14 matches played in the Vitality Blast is in line for a cut to 12 – some will push for 10. Andrew said “there’s a feeling the Blast needs a refresh, to give it that renewed energy lost a little bit through the Hundred in recent years”. Meanwhile, it is understood that there is a desire to see a portion of the Metro Bank One-Day Cup played at the start of the season, not entirely under the Hundred.
“Nothing is on the table and nothing is off the table,” Andrew said. “It’s very different to what happened in the high-performance review. This is a county-led review. As the ECB we will work with our stakeholders, including the players. Everyone recognises the schedule is not perfect or optimal. The difficult thing is finding a solution.
“[Volume of cricket] is at the heart of the debate. The PCA have made clear how men’s players feel. We have heard from the directors of cricket. How can we provide an improved narrative for competitions, as well as performance? The high-performance review was very much focused on performance only, performance of the England team. We are looking at this is in a slightly different way.
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