While England have been going through a poor form in the longer format, a first-class competition like the Hundred can help the team to ‘return to its former glories’ in Tests, believes ex-captain Kevin Pietersen.
Pietersen, who won the Ashes in 2005, 2009, 2010-11, and 2013, has said that the County Championship has lost its glory now and is “not fit to serve the Test team” in its current form as well.
“With the money elsewhere in the game, the (County) Championship in its current form is not fit to serve the Test team,” Pietersen wrote in a blog post on Betway.
“The best players don’t want to play in it, so young English players aren’t learning from other greats like I did. Batters are being dismissed by average bowlers on poor wickets and the whole thing is spiralling,” he added.
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Kevin Pietersen also praised the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) for its franchise-based 100-ball cricket league – The Hundred.
“In The Hundred, the ECB have actually produced a competition with some sort of value. It is the best against the best, marketed properly, and the audience engaged with it. They got new people to the games and I can tell you that the players will have improved markedly for featuring alongside other greats. It’s such a valuable experience,” he continued.
“There is no point blaming Joe Root for what’s happened in Australia” – Kevin Pietersen
Meanwhile, he also asked the board to come up with a similar tournament for the Test format as well, stating that the England players would get the benefit of rubbing shoulders with top overseas players as well.
“They now need to introduce a similar franchise competition for red-ball cricket, whereby the best play against the best every single week. They would make money available to attract some of the best overseas players in the world and the top English players would benefit from playing alongside them,” he again shared.
“It would be a marketable, exciting competition, which would drive improvement in the standard and get people back through the gates for long-form cricket The pitches are monitored by the ECB so that we’re not seeing majorly bowler-friendly conditions like we do now. We have to have good pitches that reward and encourage strong batting techniques, batting for long periods of time, and that require skill from bowlers to take wickets.” Pietersen claimed.
“I can promise you that the current England team and lots of the best youngsters in the system still see Test cricket, in particular Ashes cricket, as the pinnacle. But the world’s best players are involved in the IPL, the PSL, the Big Bash, The Hundred, and so on, so it’s no good denying them the chance to make their millions anymore, as I was back in the day,” Kevin Pietersen explained.
“We need to produce lucrative, high-quality, interesting competitions that reward and improve the best players. This could be one,” he wrote. “There is no point blaming Joe Root for what’s happened in Australia. He’s the only class batter in that team and has been tasked with leading an under-prepared, low-quality team into an Ashes series. It was a hopeless task.”
“Things aren’t going to change by plucking the next batter from county cricket and sticking him up to open the batting. It’s failed too many times now. This franchise competition would be a fantastic opportunity to improve the standard of red-ball cricket, make domestic cricket interesting to the masses again and It is the only way for the ECB to show that they value Test cricket and value the paying customer,” Kevin Pietersen signed off.
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