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The time has come to ditch Open Cricket completely and look to a new format.

Playing in the league over the past few weeks, seeing the quality of the pitches and the depleted squads that teams have had to put out just reinforced what I have been saying for years. We need to come up with a new formula.

My suggestion would be to truly make it a development league - four Under-23 squads, representing different regions, playing two-inning, two-day cricket.

That would lessen the burden on the senior players, give clubs the chance to get the pitches right and offer a genuine chance to develop our young players in the longer format.

You would only need two pitches - I would suggest St. David's and the National Stadium. The teams could play each other once and then have a finals day.

I'm sure you could get enough young players by combining the teams into zones and instead of trying to get 16 teams playing in April you would only need four.

You could then start the 50-over league and the junior leagues at the end of May.

Most of the clubs don't have enough players to use open cricket as a development tournament right now. Basically you have to play whoever is available.

A lot of the same guys play football and they need a break between the seasons.

You also need more than a couple of weeks to get a pitch ready.

If we're going to improve our cricket we need to improve our pitches. The wickets so far have been very poor and groundsmen need more time to get them ready.

St. David's are the defending champions in open cricket and we stand a good chance of getting to the semis again this time so I'm not saying this because we're not doing well at it.

It's impossible to develop players on bad pitches.

We played Somerset the other week and they showed up and played the first hour with eight guys. Teams are fielding all their senior players - guys who have retired from international cricket. How can that be good for development?

Chris Gayle

West Indies captain Chris Gayle caused some controversy this week by saying he's not too bothered about Test cricket compared with 20-20.

But he was only speaking his mind. That's the way cricket is going. I honestly feel Test cricket is the ultimate but there are Test players who can't play 20-20 and vice versa. Everything has its place and if you could earn $800,000 for playing 20-20 for six weeks compared with $60-70,000 for a year of Test cricket what would you do?[[In-content Ad]]

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