Surrey will start their quest to win a fourth consecutive County Championship with a visit to Chelmsford to face Essex within the opening spherical of the 2025 season, which can start with all 18 counties in motion from April 4-7.
As anticipated, the construction of the summer time for males’s county cricket is essentially unchanged from 2024. The season opens with eight rounds of the Championship – now sponsored by Rothesay – adopted by the group stage of the Vitality Blast, which is damaged up by two blocks of Championship cricket in June and July, earlier than the Hundred and the Metro Financial institution One-Day Cup begin in August.
It can once more culminate in a packed September, which options the concluding three rounds of the Championship, males’s Blast Finals Day, the deciders of each One-Day Cups, and the Incapacity Premier League last.
With the ECB having spent a lot of the final 18 months targeted on producing a brand new County Partnership Settlement, main match allocations for 2025-2031, and the introduction of the brand new three-tiered girls’s county construction – in addition to the continuing Hundred fairness sale – Neil Snowball, ECB managing director of competitions and main occasions, stated work to reshape a males’s programme that has grown haphazardly since Covid-19 and the introduction of the Hundred had been put to at least one facet.
“All of that meant it did not really feel the fitting time to be endeavor a big take a look at the boys’s home competitions,” Snowball stated. “However as soon as we get to the opposite facet of the Hundred gross sales course of, we’ll clearly take a look at that once more. In order that’s why we’re sticking with the identical construction, with a number of tweaks, for 2025.”
“It is a huge second for the ladies’s skilled sport, for home cricket,” Beth Barrett-Wild, director of the ladies’s skilled sport, stated. “We have talked about how that is very a lot a begin of a brand new period for a way we’re presenting skilled cricket on this nation, with the boys and the ladies aligned alongside one another, and the way we’re actually utilizing this as a possibility to raise and embed the ladies’s groups, specifically, by these new county identities.”
The finals of the boys’s and girls’s One-Day Cup will likely be staged at Trent Bridge and the Utilita Bowl respectively, on consecutive days in September, as was the case final season.
There’ll once more be 4 rounds of the County Championship that includes Kookaburra balls, though these video games will likely be performed consecutively in June and July quite than the early levels of the season. Alan Fordham, head of home cricket operations – skilled sport, stated there had been “some fairly high-scoring video games” and the choice was taken to “transfer [using the Kookaburra] again into the center of the summer time the place we’d see a bit extra reverse swing and provides extra alternative to spin bowlers.”
The ECB may even proceed for an additional season with its experiment of permitting hybrid pitches for use within the County Championship, in addition to for white-ball matches.
Work to redraw the boys’s home schedule, taking a look at what Snowball referred to as the “goal and targets of every competitors”, is probably going start in earnest early subsequent yr, after the ECB has accomplished the Hundred gross sales course of. It can contain the counties, the Skilled Cricketers’ Affiliation, and the not too long ago established Skilled Recreation Committee, with the staging of the 2026 Girls’s T20 World Cup solely including to the logistical complexity.
Alan Gardner is a deputy editor at ESPNcricinfo. @alanroderick
