Paul Collingwood Q&A: Better times ahead for Durham, T20 cricket and the future of Tests

The Durham captain offers his thoughts on many of the major issues surrounding English cricket.

Durham captain Paul Collingwood believes a balancing act between the money on offer from Twenty20 tournaments must be balanced with county cricket for English cricket to thrive in the future. Philip Brown / Getty ImagesShow less

Paul Collingwood scored 9,934 runs for England and took 144 wickets before calling time on his international career in 2011. The Durham captain is in Dubai for the Emirates Twenty20 where he spoke about the financial issues that have plighted the county side and the future of county cricket.

Moving forward, how can the counties avoid situations like the one Durham faced last summer?

Thankfully Durham are back in a really stable financial position. From our point of view, from the players point of view, we have no involvement whatsoever on how the club moves forward. So we rely on the chairman, we rely on the chief executives to get the club into strong positions.

With the involvement of [recently appointed chairman] Ian Botham, we are very stable and probably in one of the best financial positions that we have been since the start. Hopefully, this wouldn’t happen again.

In the end, county cricket is a great way of developing international cricketers and the ECB really need to appreciate and understand the heights that county cricket go to to develop international cricketers. Hopefully the amount that the ECB pay in the future is more than they do at the moment to help counties out during the season because it’s obviously an expensive business.

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England have been a bit late in planning one, but a Twenty20 league similar to the Big Bash or the Indian Premier League could be really helpful to the counties on the financial side.

Financially, yes, it’s going to be very lucrative for the counties. Even the counties that aren’t involved in the actual T20 tournaments, in terms of the grounds selection and all that kind of stuff, they are going to be paid hopefully and that’s going to take a lot of pressure off the counties. It’s the way that T20 cricket in England needs to go and hopefully it will all start in 2020. I think it is.

We have a T20 league at the moment [Twenty20 Blast], but it’s 18 counties. We’ve had very successful finals days so Twenty20 obviously works in England, but condensing it will give it more quality and hopefully bring the crowds in to watch that quality.

Whatever makes it a better spectacle, we need to go with it and certainly the players will embrace that as well.

What about cutting down on overseas players? That would lessen the cost for the counties.

The thing is, you’ve still got to be successful as a county and that’s the balancing act that you’ve got to weigh up. Being successful as a county brings in sponsors, it brings in spectators, which in turn obviously brings in extra money. To bring in big players, sometimes it covers the cost if you bring in extra sponsors so it’s all a balancing act.

From Durham’s point of view, we haven’t been huge on bringing overseas players in because we’ve always been tight on the budgets, but we’ve had success on the pitch so something’s hasn’t really added up there. Thankfully, now we are in a position to be able to get overseas players.

On the other side, when you get good quality cricketers into the dressing room, good overseas cricketers, they pass on their experience to the youngsters as well. So there’s a lot of positives about bringing overseas players into the side. It’s something that has always happened in county cricket and I’m sure it will continue to happen in the future.

There was time a time when the County Championships were the place to be for top international cricketers. Now, it is the Twenty20 leagues. Do you think county cricket is losing its sheen?

Professional sportsmen only have a small window to utilise their skills and to setup their families for the rest of their lives, make as much money over a short period of time. You are not going to be a professional sportsman for probably over 10 or 15 years, so you’ve got to utilise the skills that you do have and these T20 leagues that are being set up around the world are very lucrative for these players.

You cannot blame the players for going to these tournaments and playing these tournaments. What the authorities have got to be careful about is bridging that gap between Test cricket and Twenty20 leagues, and still having the money for the players to play international cricket. Because simply, international cricket will be way behind T20 cricket in the future if they don’t bridge that gap.

What about Test cricket? Do you see Twenty20 as a threat to the longest format of the game, like some pundits do?

If you ask all the players, youngsters coming up in the game, what they want to play and who they want to play for, I still believe 95 per cent of them will say they want to play Test cricket for England. They want to get the Three Lions on the shirt and represent their home country.

The only threat is unfortunately there’s not many people watching Test cricket. Television companies still want to show it, but you see the crowds are actually turned off from Test cricket, apart from England. I mean England still get really well supported, whether it’s home or away. The crowds that turn up are absolutely exceptional.

So what can be done to bring the fans back to Test cricket?

We’ve just got to keep Test cricket alive. Test cricket has been through a lot — 120 years of its existence. It’s been through probably a lot more threats than what we are seeing at the moment, and it survived. It survived because, to me, it’s the greatest game that you can play. Test cricket literally tests you to the limit — mentally, physically, tactically, technically. It pushes you to the limit and that to me is the most exciting part of Test cricket.

To play an international series is as good as playing in any other form of the game. Hopefully we can continue to have that kind of attitude towards Test cricket and players, and somehow find a way to bring back the spectators to come in and enjoy Test cricket again and get that real traditional feel of spectators as well.

What about 50-over cricket and England. Not so long ago, we were lamenting the state of English limited overs cricket, but now they look a completely different side. You are part of the coaching team, what has changed?

I think if you see with the players that are involved, there’s a lot of power in the side, a lot of athleticism and also the way that we have approached it is very free. I think they have realised that if they are going to win world tournaments, then you got to be ahead of the game.

I think with our batting line-up that we have, there’s not many sides are going to be looking forward to bowling against England because of that power.

So there’s a lot of real positives. I think Eoin Morgan has done a great job in directing the team forward and obviously Trevor Bayliss as head coach has allowed that. I think our white ball skills are very high at the moment and we could do something special over the next two years.

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