Don’t tamper with the NCU Challenge Cup, winning it is best part of local game

The only interruptions to the tournament came during the First and Second World Wars, with no winners between either 1915 and 1918 and then between 1940 and 1945.

However, could that long run be broken in the summer of 2020?

Whether and how to stage the Challenge Cup this year is forming a key part of the ongoing discussions between the NCU and its clubs, with opinion still divided on the best course of action to take.

On these pages last week, I stressed that the overriding priority of administrators and clubs should be the return of cricket this summer, in whatever form it takes.

Many of them continue to work feverishly behind the scenes in anticipation of a restart in July, but with the length of the season going to be drastically curtailed, how to balance giving clubs sufficient cricket with preserving the sanctity of the various competitions is a delicate balancing act.

There has always been something very special about the Challenge Cup, and when it moved from a two-day showpiece final to a 50-over one-day final in 2007 and then later away from what many regarded as its spiritual home at Downpatrick’s Strangford Road, purists muttered their disapproval.

One of the possibilities this summer is for the Challenge Cup to become a 20-over competition for one season only, but that smacks of a step too far too me. Better surely that they leave the competition for a year and don’t devalue one of the last great bastions of local cricket. Imagine the anticipation in 2021 as clubs fight for the trophy for the first time in two years.

At the minute government is uneasy about allowing 50-over cricket at all, with the much shorter T20 its preferred option, but at the pace restrictions are being lifted in Northern Ireland (no new coronavirus cases were recorded here at all on Saturday), 50-over cricket should still be possible by August.

However, even if that is the case, it could be tricky to stage the Challenge Cup as a 50-over competition while not inadvertently limiting the amount of cricket that clubs can enjoy. If you allow the Challenge Cup, a knockout competition, to dominate the fixture calendar, that won’t be of much use to those who make an early exit and could be left wondering what they are going to do next. It is also vital that grassroots cricket isn’t ignored, cricket’s return shouldn’t just be about the top flight, emerging players in club’s second and third teams need game time too, and indeed youth cricket if possible. With a number of school grounds and playing fields likely to be unavailable, there will be real pressure on first team grounds to host a lot of cricket, not easy for club volunteers to deliver in terms of ground preparation.

The same argument should be applied to the Premier League. I don’t think the winners of a T20 league for instance, could be classed as Premier League champions. The obvious answer to me is to throw most of your eggs in an extended T20 Cup basket.

The North West Union has already mapped out its plan. There will be no league 50-over competition this summer, which to me seems sensible.

Instead, they are going all Twenty20. The idea is to have a regionalised competition of four groups of four, playing each other home and away in a round robin.

At the end of the group stage the top team in each group will go into the semi-finals of the ‘Senior Cup’. Yes, the hallowed two-day North West final, which has remained sacrosanct despite disapproval from Cricket Club, will be a T20 affair this summer if clubs reply in the positive by this Thursday.

Devaluing the competition has been a subject of discussion in the North West corridors of power, but on the other hand, it is understood that a couple of the more established teams who might have been tempted to give cricket a miss this summer have been tempted back to the fold by the lure of the Senior Cup.

The North West are shrewd operators when it comes to earning revenue from their showpieces, and if restrictions are lifted further in August and pavilions become usable, expect two-innings T20 semi-finals and finals and big bar takings.

One person at a prominent Premier League club told me that their preferred option for this summer would be “friendship cricket”, with no trophies up for grabs.

But that smacks of defeatist to me. People want cricket back and they want it to be competitive, they want those heart-stopping finishes in the Saturday night gloom. But please, don’t devalue the league and Challenge Cup by making them Twenty20 competitions.

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