LONDON: Former England captain Alastair Cook feels it would be better to go without a season of county cricket instead of curtailing the competition due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic-forced postponement.
The county season was to start on April 12 but the England and Wales Cricket Board ruled that no cricket wouldbe possible before May 28 in view of the pandemic, that has thrown the world into disarray. The postponement means that the first seven rounds of the competition have already been lost.
"In this year, over the next six months, the bigger picture is the most important. Whatever happens, if we do play any sort of cricket which hopefully we will, what I hope is that they don't try and have a six-game County Championship or something like that," Cook told 'BBC Radio 5 Live'.
Cook, who was part of the Essex team that won the title in 2017 and 2019, said he would prefer to have a full season next year instead of a truncated one this year. "I would rather have one or two full tournaments, because if you do then play that tournament or two tournaments, it is so much more rewarding to win it," he reasoned.
"If there is not time for a meaningful County Championship, say (you can only play) three or four games, there is probably not much sense us having it," he added. Earlier, Essex's chief executive Derek Bowden had said that "there is an opportunity to be creative with the schedule".
"Let's look at regional four-day cricket, maybe four or five regional competitions with round-robin four-day cricket. Essex could play Kent, Middlesex and Surrey, while Yorkshire could play Lancashire, Durham and one other team, maybe Nottinghamshire," he told Sky Sports.