Leicestershire Face 27‑Point Deduction Threat That Could Relegate Them

Leicestershire are considering appealing a 27‑point deduction that would relegate them from Division One after being found to have breached ECB pitch regulations during their County Championship victory over Glamorgan in August. The Cricket Discipline Panel upheld The Cricket Regulator’s charge that the Grace Road pitch was “poor”, stripping the team of all 19 points earned in the win and adding an eight‑point penalty plus a £5,000 fine. An additional eight‑point penalty is suspended for 12 months. They have ten days to lodge an appeal.

The ruling arrived midway through Leicestershire’s penultimate match of the season against Hampshire, dropping the Foxes to the bottom of the table ahead of the final fixture. The Regulator identified uneven bounce caused by moving cracks, localised collapses at crack junctions, ball indentations and large clumps of grass as the reasons for the poor rating.

Leicestershire’s formal response accepted that the pitch was substandard. However, the severity of the sanction reflects the fact that the defects were foreseeable consequences of the preparation employed and should have been mitigated by the LCCC grounds team. The county had attempted to replicate the surface used against Yorkshire, leaving 3 mm of grass at each end and a 16 mm green centre. The pitch had been used for two T20 matches in the preceding ten weeks and exposed to two months of intense warm weather, making the soil drier and more prone to cracking. Head grounds manager Callum Lewin acknowledged it was not his preferred surface and voiced concerns about the small plates created by the cracks, which increased irregular bounce. He also noted that director of cricket Claude Henderson and head coach Alfonso Thomas, who have final authority, had insisted on repeating the Yorkshire surface. Lewin added that a Bollywood film shoot four days before the match prevented covering the pitch for eight hours in bright sun, but this was dismissed as a mitigating factor.

In an interview with The Regulator, Lewin said he would have found a conversation with Henderson and Thomas “very difficult” because they had requested a repeat of the Yorkshire surface and have final say on pitch preparation. The Regulator concluded that while Leicestershire did not intend to produce an uneven pitch, their preparation approach was unreasonable and failed to meet Regulation 7.6’s requirement to “seek, acting reasonably, to prepare the best quality pitch”. Consequently, the tribunal imposed the heavy penalty.

Source link