Game is on a sticky wicket

DAWID MALAN has called for a preservation order on county cricket – a crown jewel of English summers increasingly marginalised.

- BY MIKE WALTERS

The eight franchises in The Hundred, a form of the game played by no other nation, were sold for a staggering £975million earlier this year, affording the 18 first-class counties unprecedented financial security.

But wealth alone will not feed the conveyor belt from four-day cricket watered by the Themos and Shorak brigade to the Test arena when the Rothesay County Championship begins on Friday - April 4 being the earliest start to a first-class season in history.

And Malan, the only England player apart from Jos Buttler to score a century in Tests, Twenty20 and one-day internationals, said: “County cricket is your breeding ground, it’s where your players come from and it needs to be protected.”