Graphic: County cricket's haves and have-nots

More money will be offered for recreational cricket and for promising young county players to play overseas in winter in a five-year plan approved by the ECB board.

Each county will get an extra sum in excess of £10,000 every winter to send young players to clubs or academies overseas to gain experience and there will be more money for amateur clubs to develop facilities.

The plan was presented to county chairmen in Loughborough yesterday, but it has not satisfied lesser-income clubs such as Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Northamptonshire, who believe that they have been unfairly treated since two-division cricket started in 2000. Dramatic evidence of the difference between the haves and the have-nots was provided in a paper circulated yesterday by Neil Davidson, the Leicestershire chairman, after an analysis of the income of all 18 first-class counties.

It shows that most of the playing success since 2000 has gone to seven of the eight counties who have staged Tests or internationals, plus Sussex, whose fortunes were boosted by a private legacy. Hampshire, whose ground stages international cricket, and Kent, who sold a famous painting by Chevalier Taylor to raise funds, are included among the “higher-income” counties in the analysis.

Speaking to The Times, Davidson called for salary caps and the scrap-ping of two divisions as the only means of altering the consequences of the disproportionate profits made by clubs with grounds staging international cricket. “We have to find solutions to the unfairness,” he said. “No county below seven in the ‘money list’ has won the championship in the period 2000 to 2007. In the previous decade the championship was won by a lower-income county seven times.”

Davidson, who is viewed as a maverick by the ECB, has a strong point. In 2007 there was a near-perfect correlation between championship division and income. All but one county in the first division came from the nine clubs with the highest income the previous year, according to ECB figures. The two anomalies, Nottinghamshire and Worcestershire, were promoted and relegated respectively.

In eight of the ten occurrences of a lower-income county being promoted to the first division since 2000, that county have been relegated immediately. Only Middlesex lasted more than two seasons (2003-06). Moreover, none of the lower-income counties have played in the Chelten-ham & Gloucester/Friends Provident Trophy final since 2004.

“All the recent ECB policy decisions have worked to the detriment of the lower-income group,” Davidson said. “The aggregate total income reported for all counties rose by £24.2 million between 2000 and 2006, but only £6.6 million of that flowed to the lower-income group. Almost half of it [£11.4 million] went to the six TMGs [Test-match grounds]. Their staging agreements are cloaked in secrecy and the rest of us have had a raw deal.”

Davidson added that splitting the county championship into two divisions had created an aspiration that the more affluent counties have been able to exploit. “Players’ agents aren’t daft, they know the higher rewards are in the first division because that is where the upper-income group of counties play their cricket,” he said.

Central contracts have exacerbated the problem, he said. “It’s not just the 12 centrally contracted players who are absent from the domestic game for much of the season, it’s also the fringe Test players and those in one-day squads,” he said. “There are also fewer good-quality ‘cast-offs’ coming out of the larger counties because they need to keep them. So the only way to maintain the quality of the county championship is by introducing players from overseas.”

Davidson’s gripe holds less water, given that Sussex have won the championship three times in five years without a large ground. “It’s testimony to their organisation and ingenuity,” he said. “But would they have been able to compete last year without being able to afford Mushtaq’s 90 wickets at 25.66 or Naved’s 50 wickets at 29.08 or Goodwin’s 1,214 runs at 55.18, not to mention their quality England-qualified cricketers?”

Performance-related fee payments are designed to encourage counties to nurture talent for England by “taxing” counties £25,000 for every additional nonqualified cricketer above two that they choose to play across the season. “Counties like Leicestershire are disadvantaged by this,” Davidson said. “If we try to play by the rules with nine England-qualified cricketers, we cannot afford the better-quality players. Play more than two not-qualifieds and we get whacked disproportionately.

“All this has been done in the name of the England team, but what’s been achieved on that front? We’ve been through one of our periodic high points, but we are now back in a trough, a familiar pattern. We won’t have a consistently good England team until we create our own equivalent of the Australian systemic approach from grass roots upwards.”