The Skilled Cricketers Affiliation (PCA) stay at loggerheads with the ECB over the lads’s T20 Blast’s schedule. The union, which represents all skilled gamers in England and Wales, has reiterated considerations about participant welfare after solely a small discount within the variety of back-to-back matchdays within the schedule for 2025 unveiled by the ECB on Thursday.
The ECB heralded a discount by “virtually a 3rd” within the variety of back-to-back fixtures (down from 55 in 2024 to 37 in 2025) within the males’s Blast in a press launch on Thursday. Neil Snowball, the ECB’s managing director of competitions and main occasions, stated the discount confirmed that they “have listened to the gamers” after “constructive conversations with the PCA”.
However whereas the PCA are “inspired” by the adjustments, they consider they don’t go far sufficient. “There stays a big variety of fixtures on successive days which suggests little enchancment in comparison with the 2023 schedule,” a spokesperson informed ESPNcricinfo. “There may be much more work wanted to satisfy participant welfare wants.”
The counties typically choose to play a majority of their Blast fixtures between Thursday and Sunday, citing a useful influence on ticket gross sales. However gamers have turn out to be more and more vocal within the final 18 months in regards to the drawbacks of that mannequin, with back-to-back video games heightening the danger of harm and diminishing the standard of cricket performed.
The ECB’s revamp of home ladies’s cricket for 2025 will see the eight Tier One ladies’s groups compete within the Girls’s T20 Blast and the ten Tier Two groups in a second tier. Each county will host at the least one males’s and ladies’s joint-matchday, with a complete of 52 double-headers resulting from be staged throughout 20 totally different venues.
Snowball stated that the Blast can be “greater and higher” in 2025, whereas Beth Barrett-Wild, the director of the ladies’s skilled recreation, stated the joint announcement of fixtures marked “the start of a brand new period” for English cricket: “It is one of many clearest demonstrations up to now of our aligned ‘one recreation’ strategy to the supply of males’s and ladies’s home cricket transferring forwards.”
The primary ladies’s Blast Finals Day will happen at The Oval on July 27 whereas the lads’s knockout levels will proceed to be staged in September, six weeks after the conclusion of the group stage. England’s finest white-ball gamers will once more miss males’s Finals Day, which is about for September 13 and clashes with a T20I collection towards South Africa.
The remainder of the lads’s county fixtures can be launched by the ECB on Tuesday morning, with no change within the quantity of County Championship and One-Day Cup matches. Fixtures for the Hundred are prone to be launched early subsequent 12 months, with the match staged in its regular August window.
Key T20 Blast fixtures 2025:
Might 29 – June 1 – ‘Blast Off’ weekend (opening fixtures)
July 18 – ‘Friday Finale’ (closing group-stage matches)
July 26 – Girls’s Tier 2 Finals Day (Northampton)
July 27 – Girls’s Tier 1 Finals Day (The Oval)
September 3-6 – Males’s Quarter-Finals
September 13 – Males’s Finals Day (Edgbaston)
Matt Curler is an assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo. @mroller98
