Victorian Premier Cricket: Warren Ayres goes into bat for the red ball

Officials have put up the idea of splitting the competition into three groups of six teams for the 2021-22 season.

Carlton champion Evan Gulbis gives the white ball some tap.

Victorian Premier Cricket officials will meet club coaches online tomorrow as they try to plan a start to the season around Covid.

Men’s and women’s coaches will be asked how much time they would need to have their players ready for Round 1, as well as discuss the prospect of playing red-ball matches for the men’s section.

The 2020-21 Premier Cricket season began with a round of women’s matches on November 22 last year and clubs are hopeful of getting this season away on November 13-14 or November 20-21.

But much depends on Victoria’s vaccination rates and the easing of travel restrictions to allow players to get to club training.

Red or white, there a few balls up in the air.

“We have a meeting with all the coaches tomorrow night to get a feel for what they’re thinking, and following those discussions we’ll come up with what the start date may be and how the season will look,’’ CV competitions manager Darren Anderson said this morning.

He said the coaches were best placed to answer the question of what type of preparation players needed before the first game.

Warren Ayres has fingers crossed there will be scope for red-ball matches in 2021-22.

An option to split the 18 men’s teams into three groups of six has been presented to the clubs.

Under that scenario, the teams would play each other once in both the one-day and two-day formats in 15 weeks of home-and-away cricket.

The top two teams in each pool would then progress to a three-week finals series, with the top three ranked on wins and percentages.

The groups would be based on clubs’ finishing positions in the 2020-21 season.

Prahran, Melbourne, St Kilda, Ringwood, Richmond and Kingston Hawthorn would make up one group; Dandenong, Carlton, Melbourne University, Footscray, Casey South Melbourne and Frankston Peninsula another; and Geelong, Fitzroy-Doncaster, Northcote, Essendon, Casey South Melbourne and Greenvale Kangaroos the third group.

Anderson said there was an appetite for red-ball cricket in 2021-22.

All of last season’s matches were one-dayers.

Dandenong coach Warren Ayres said this morning he hoped red balls could feature in the season.

“We need to play some red-ball to give the bowlers the opportunity to swing the ball for longer and keep them in the game for a longer period of time,’’ he said.

“In an ideal world we’d all like to play some two-day cricket, but given the reduced number of weeks we have to play, who knows if we can fit it in.

“If we can get one or two or three in, that would be great.’’

Ayres said he would have no problem with the red ball being used in some one-dayers.

He said it would change the way matches were played, probably lowering team totals, but also bring more players into the action.

“I think it would make life more difficult for the batsmen, but it would also show us who can bat against a swinging and seaming ball,’’ Ayres said.

“We don’t have to have batsmen scoring up to 300 in a one-dayer every week. Games can be just as competitive with smaller scores.’’