David Morgan will propose a reduction in the amount of championship cricket when he presents his review of the first-class game to the England and Wales Cricket Board at Lord's on Wednesday. The review is likely to conclude that the four-day game should be trimmed to provide more time for rest and preparation and Twenty20 should run throughout much of the summer.
England's poor World Cup record is also likely to persuade Morgan to recommend that the CB40 must be abandoned in favour of a 50-over competition that will best serve England's needs. Hope also springs eternal that there willeven be reference to how the ECB, by virtue of an overloaded international programme intended to prop up the county game financially, is in reality suffocating it with kindness.
Morgan, a former chairman of the ECB, was still writing his final report 24 hours before the meeting, agonising over how to accommodate widely conflicting views. History is against him. The Schofield report was widely implemented more than four years ago and has been credited with improving the fortunes of the England team but its calls for a reduction in the amount of first-class cricket were ignored.
Morgan's task is to give a sense of direction to a first-class game that is lost in a never ending struggle between nostalgia and modernisation, balancing the contemplation of the championship with the instant appeal of Twenty20, and the need to provide a remedy for an overblown fixture list that entirely lacks narrative.
Research would surely show that the majority of cricket fans heard to exclaim "I don't know what day of the week it is" had just been looking at the county scores.
The findings will be delivered with the county game under severe financial pressure. It is staying afloat thanks to an inordinate number of international matches – six Test and 13 one-day games are scheduled in 2012 – and unsustainable losses have been commonplace among nearly every county since the economic downturn began.
Predictions that one or two of the weaker counties could go bankrupt have yet to come true. Many counties confide that such an outcome would solve their problems at a stroke but as one chief executive said: "It would need a county to perform spectacularly poorly to go bankrupt when it is getting a £1.5m handout from the ECB."
Dave Brooks, Sussex's chief executive, knows from personal experience the extent of Morgan's challenge. He sat on the Domestic Structure Review Group, chaired by the ECB's chief executive, David Collier, 18 months ago, but its proposals were shelved. The shelves must be groaning by now; it would be much easier to buy a Kindle.
"You can recommend what you like but it still has to be passed," he said. "David has an impossible task to get unanimity. Everybody has a different view. The most he can hope for is some form of consensus. We all recognise there is too much cricket. Our group recommended a reduction in championship cricket 18 months ago.
"If we went down to 14 games it would have minimal financial impact and yet it would save nine days – eight playing days and a travel day for the away match. But it was not overly popular and it wasn't adopted."
Morgan has been thorough. He has spoken to cricketers, coaches, administrators past and present, spectators (not just members) and the media. "I will propose a number of remedies," he says. He is a pragmatist and his instinct will not be for radical overhaul but for compromise. The board will send it out for further feedback before moving to a vote in January.
In his excellent study, A Last English Summer, Duncan Hamilton reminds us that county cricket's battle for survival has been a long one. "Cricket always seems to be on the brink of radicalism of one sort or another in an effort to make it relevant," he writes. "As far back as 1971 John Arlott wrote: 'It may be true that English cricket as we know it is dying.' [Then] the fixture list was stable and ordered, like a good filing system – now matches are scattered everywhere as if picked up and carried by a gale."
Morgan has heard two common solutions for the championship. The first envisages a cut to 14 matches in a First Division of eight counties. The lower section of 10 counties would be split into two notional regional groups, playing others twice but some once. For some that removes the competition's validity.
There is also a more extreme solution — to reduce the championship from 16 to 10 four-day games. In this scenario, a Premier League of only six counties would be supported by two regional divisions of six. The logic for that is that "nobody wants to be in the third division". But neither does anybody want to contemplate a solution where only six counties play in the top section.
The second challenge is Twenty20. Richard Gould, Surrey's chief executive, speaks for the majority when he says: "We need a timetable for the benefit of all supporters."
Morgan is likely to accommodate that by allowing each county to request a set time for its T20 home games. Surrey prefer Thursday, Somerset Friday or Sunday. To achieve a more recognisable format, the tournament would have to extend over three months. It is hard to see how Morgan could ignore the logic.
Jamie Clifford, Kent's chief executive, said: "There is no doubt that T20 is our best opportunity to generate cash. The short form of the game subsidises the long one. We need a coherent approach to fixture planning. The alternative is to put our heads in the sand."
The debate will be meaningless if the ECB does not allow county games breathing spaces – key times of the season when the England side take time out and allow a major county occasion to take precedence. It is a source of anger that ECB promises that England players would be available for large chunks of T20 have never materialised. "If the golden goose is not dead," Middlesex's annual report said, "she is definitely ailing."
The sight of England players dashing from a floodlit ODI in Cardiff close to midnight to play in the CB40 domestic final at Lord's the following morning should never be repeated if the county game is to retain its self-respect but in a strange way it reminded us that England players still recognise the county game as worth preserving.
