AS LORD MACLAURIN ponders a new structure for English cricket, the possibility of a Championship of two divisions is a real one. It might be wiser first to try greater differentials in ECB payouts –£lm for the winners, say, down to £250,000 for the 18th county – to see if a financial incentive can increase the intensity of our domestic game. Nevertheless, sooner or later, two divisions will have to be seriously considered.

Splitting the 18 first-class counties into two divisions by putting the top nine of one season into the upper, and the bottom nine into the lower, is not the only way to reconstitute the Championship. John Emburey was recently offered an ingenious proposal by one enthusiast: to take the sides which finish first, third, fifth, seventh and so on in each season, and put them into one division, and the sides finishing in even-number places in another of equal status. This would avoid the stigma, and dire economic consequences, which would attend the fall into a lower division.

And dire they would be. Peter Edwards, the Essex representative elected to the full Board of the England management committee, likens an upper division of nine counties to the top clubs in football's Premier League. The wealthier will get wealthier and stronger. Loamshire, stuck in the lower divisions for seasons on end, will see its best players lured into transferring to an upper-division county, its young cricketers poached, and its membership fall as home matches will offer fixtures only against the similarly weak. And of course that is the appeal, or at any rate the rationale, for the proponents of two divisions, like Ian Botham: the weak will go the wall, leaving the fitter to survive.

But even then, if two divisions – an upper and lower – are introduced, there are difficult details. Will each county play the eight others once per season in the Championship? If so, the intensity of the competition would undoubtedly be increased; and fine, too, if the players are able on other weekends to participate in the premier club league which each county should have, thus strengthening the grass roots. But could counties afford to pay the same salaries for such a reduced workload, however improved the quality?

Supposing, again, that the counties play each other twice: that would be 16 matches, only one fewer than at present, and presumably the slight reduction in quantity would be more than offset by the greater intensity. The demands therefore would be even greater than now. And if you are going to play so much, why not play all the counties once, for variety, instead of half of them twice? We have to say, like the Irishman to the lost motorist: `I wouldn't start from here.' If only we didn't have our Victorian inheritance of so many first-class counties, who grew up before the national team was invented – the other way round to sports in most countries. Why is the structure of English cricket not better organised, a neat pyramid taking the promising cricketer to the top, not a higgledy-piggledy accretion of growths? What is not widely known is that the Victorians did come within a hair's breadth – or at least a couple of follicles – of bequeathing us a system which, if we had grown up with it, might just have struck us as ideal.

The immortal W. G. Grace: `Obviously you wanted to meet Gloucestershire if he was playing, but probably not if he wasn't'

  MCC DID NOT oversee county cricket from the dawn of time until 1968 and the emergence of the TCCB. During the second half of the 1880s the counties formed their own County Cricket Council. It was Lord Harris's idea, and he became the Council's founder. In a subsequent letter he set out his reason for wanting to change the present system: `The meeting of secretaries to fix the dates of matches is an unmanageable body, governed by no rules: discussion in it can be confined to no recognised channel; the gentlemen attending are delegated to it by their counties for no purpose other than the fixing of match dates, and it is not infrequently presided over by the secretary of the MCC, who represents no county.'

County cricket then, in other words, was inchoate. And the most pressing question was the classification of counties, of which ones should be regarded as first-class. No official definition existed. Each county drew up its fixtures as it felt like, and had done for decades. By immemorial custom the Nottinghamshire secretary would write to arrange home and away matches (or `home and home' as they were called then) with Yorkshire, Lancashire, Surrey and Middlesex, and one or two others that he thought suitable: obviously you wanted to meet Gloucestershire if W. G. Grace was playing, but probably not if he wasn't. If a county had an energetic executive, say Somerset, and they succeeded in arranging matches with the big boys, they de facto became first-class: while Cambridgeshire, who were once a big boy, did not and fell away. But without official definition there was a grey area, and no recognised method of graduating to the highest status. About the only thing that was agreed in the Championship was the points system: losses to be deducted from wins, and drawn matches to be ignored, but this too depended on how many matches you played, and against whom.

Other pressing concerns were qualification, which followed from classification (if a cricketer did not play for the county of his birth, whom should he be allowed to represent?); throwing, which needed a strong and organised body to stamp it out; and umpiring. Each first-class county (whoever they were) nominated a couple of old pros to stand in matches in which that county was not involved, and that was about all that was expected of them. Mr Perkins, secretary of MCC, remarked that if umpires had to pass a written examination, `there would be no umpire at all. There were very few umpires who had got the laws of cricket at their fingers' ends'. Yes, a County Cricket Council was required, not just the benign observance of MCC.

And so it was that in the summer of 1890 the County Cricket Council came up with a structure for English domestic cricket. At Kennington Oval, on August 11, the delegates of 12 counties (including WG) met for less than two hours and made their proposal. Let us conjecture that the simplicity of the scheme accounted for the meeting's brevity. It was that the counties should be constituted in three divisions, with effect from the 1891 season, as follows:

First Class

Gloucestershire

Kent

Lancashire

Middlesex

Nottinghamshire

Surrey

Sussex

Yorkshire

This was a fair reflection of the realities of the day. It was WG who had put Gloucestershire on the map: without him they could hardly claim to be among the elite, but his move to London County was not yet on the horizon. If Sussex may look a trifle incongruous now, it was one of the traditional homes of cricket: and the same may be said of Nottinghamshire.

Second Class

Cheshire

Derbyshire

Essex

Hampshire

Leicestershire

Somersetshire

Staffordshire

Warwickshire

The surprise is not so much the two minor counties being placed so high: after all, they have traditionally been as well-resourced as any minor county and, especially in Staffordshire's case, have produced as many first-class cricketers as some first-class counties; it is Warwickshire being placed so low. Edgbaston was not to be a Test ground until 1902. But this made for an important element in the whole dynamic. Warwickshire, outside the elite, were the most strident voice in trying to break into it, railing against the difficulty – the impossibility – of arranging sufficient fixtures with the big boys to be eligible to contest the Championship. Then, as now, Warwickshire had the most radical voice in county affairs.

Third Class

Devonshire

Durham

Glamorganshire

Hertfordshire

Lincolnshire

Norfolk

Northamptonshire

Northumberland

Again, this third division was a reflection of a reality that was to last a long time. The counties in this group which are now first-class were the last three to be promoted. Durham, if one can judge the echoes of this debate aright, were second only to Warwickshire in their ambition and in their indignation about the exclusivity of the big boys. According to the weekly periodical Cricket of Dec 27, 1890, the Durham delegate RH Mallett `pointed out year after year in connection with his own county that they could make no headway because they could get no fixtures'.

Founding father: Lord Harris started the County Cricket Council in the late 1880s, but it did not survive for long after he left for India to become Governor of Bombay

So why was this radical scheme not implemented? Partly, it seems, because the rules were too complicated. There was to be promotion and relegation, but not of a straightforward kind. At one subsequent meeting it was proposed that the bottom county of the first class should play the top county of the second class in home and away matches in late August or September: interestingly, these were referred to as `test' games. Then, at a later meeting, Warwickshire proposed that there should be one playoff match on a neutral ground. Fine so far, but then the complications set in.

Take Rule 4: `That in 1892 the lowest county in the first class and the highest in the second class play each other home and home matches, these constituting a series which shall be termed the qualifying series. The same arrangement to apply to the lowest of the second class and the highest of the third class.' Rule 5: `That if a county be by these means reduced in class it shall for the following season be considered the highest in the class to which it has descended, and shall follow the course of procedure set forth in 4.' That is some of the simpler verbiage. Further on it becomes so obscure that Warwickshire's delegate, Mr W Ansell, came up with the conclusion that the first promotion would not take place until 1893, and the second until 1897, and the third not till 1901; and nobody was recorded as having disagreed with that interpretation.

Then Mr Ansell suggested there be promotion from the second class to first, but not relegation from the first, so as not to disturb the big boys. Leicesteshire proposed there might be 12 first-class counties in all. This would have diluted the scheme, and the intensity of the competition; but other, minor counties could have filled the vacancies lower down.

What brought about deadlock was, principally, the counties' refusal to be dictated to and to be told whom to play. In the first class each county had to play home and home matches against all the other counties save one, and that was too much like threatening control from the center. AJ Webbe `protested against the adoption of any scheme which would interfere with the freedom of clubs. Middlesex would never consent to any proposal which would force any county to play another', according to Cricket. `Mr Oates stated that though Notts happened to be playing the other seven counties known as first-class, he could not consent to any programme or particular match.'

 AND THAT, effectively, or ineffectively, was it. The County Cricket Council had agreed to the introduction of this scheme that divided the counties into three divisions, in general recognition of their playing strengths, but could not implement it. The counties themselves insisted on maintaining their traditional rights – a refrain which may yet be heard.

 Webbe of intrigue: at the County Cricket Council's meeting in December 1890, A. J. Webbe of Middlesex suggested that the Council be suspended – and it was, for ever

So deadlocked indeed was the Council when it met to vote on these proposals in December 1890 that the meeting had a most extraordinary outcome. As an amendment Mr Webbe moved that the Council should be suspended sine die, and this was seconded by Mr Oates. Seven counties voted in favour, and seven against, and the casting vote was left to the chairman, Mr Ellison of Yorkshire, who gave it in favour of suspension. The result was the Council was disbanded and never met again. Said Cricket: `This utterly unexpected result fairly took those present by surprise, and they dispersed hurriedly – a most undignified ending to what we are compelled to describe as a most unbusiness-like meeting.'

 Lord Harris had gone to India, you know, to be Governor of Bombay: and without its founder the Council seems to have lacked the will to survive. Parochial interests were too strong and MCC resumed its role as an umbrella. Again the secretaries met at Lord's to draw up their fixtures for the following season: slowly system of classification evolved during the 1890s, and 15 counties, including Warwickshire, were recognised as first-class by the turn of the century. But the Championship may have been too welcoming to lesser shires, too inclusive, ever to be as competitive as, say, the Sheffield Shield. Only a handful of counties had a chance of winning the title in any season from then until overseas registration was allowed in 1968.

And had the three-division Championship been introduced, how would it have fared? The first division should have been pretty vibrant, perhaps as similar as could be to Australia's domestic set-up. The second division might have become semi-professional by now, yet possibly first-class as well for statistical purposes, like the Bowl competition in South Africa when Transvaal`B' used to play Griqualand West; and the third class would have been as the minor counties are.

So near. Shame, really.

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