As The Cricketer reported in March, the PCA used its annual pre-season meetings with individual counties to gauge players' thoughts around the domestic calendar
Data collected by the Professional Cricketers' Association has shown that the majority of male players in England and Wales feel the relentless congestion of the county schedule is unfit for purpose, unconducive to high performance and impacting both physical and mental wellbeing.
As The Cricketer reported in March, the PCA was using its annual pre-season meetings with individual counties to poll players on their thoughts around the calendar.
Eight-one per cent of those admitted that they felt concerned by the schedule's physical impact on them, while 62 per cent felt the same way with regards to its mental toll, where an unrelenting calendar doesn't allow for meaningful time away from the game.
Two-thirds agreed that the schedule was not aimed at high performance, while more than three-quarters acknowledged the safety issues around travel to and from matches, especially where late-night driving is concerned after T20 Blast fixtures.
James Harris is chair of the PCA (Alex Davidson/Getty Images)
The Cricketer has reported extensively on that issue through recent months, as part of a winterlong investigation around player views on the domestic schedule.
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Another of the issues explored within that work has been the need for greater time between matches, with players speaking out against the normalisation of T20 Blast matches on consecutive days. There are due to be 52 such instances in the 2024 competition, despite significant uproar at an end-of-season players' summit in 2023.
For that, 78 per cent of players called for a rest day between Blast matches, while more than 70 per cent called for a minimum of three days between County Championship games. Such a standard already exists in Australia for the Sheffield Shield.
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Those calls were backed up by the Men's Professional Cricket Injury and Illness Surveillance Report, the results of which – starkly pointing to characteristics of the schedule – were exclusively revealed by The Cricketer in February.
But while 66 per cent of players believe that too much cricket is packed into the county summer, there is also an underlying appreciation for the reasons that have always made the calendar a bone of contention, with several stakeholders needing to be satisfied and no perfect solution likely to be found that suits even the entire playing community, with so many priorities among the different kinds of player in today's game.
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