First Class to be ‘defined’ by 2023
Sri Lanka’s Major Club tournament will be reduced to 15 teams by the end of the 2023 domestic cricket season as a new cricket structure sees the demotion of 11 teams to the Governors Trophy during the next three seasons.
Under this plan that was approved by the Sri Lanka Cricket (SLC) membership at a virtual Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM) on Saturday, all 26 first class clubs will play in two groups of 13 teams each. All 26 clubs will have equal status as opposed to previous years where they played in two different Tiers – Tier A comprising 14 clubs and Tier B with 12 clubs.
The leaders of the two groups will qualify to play in a 4-day final. Accordingly, four bottom ranked teams (two each from each group) will be regelated to the Governor’s Trophy during the first two seasons but only three teams will be demoted in the 2023 cricket season. At the end of the 2023 cricket season, the two bottom ranked teams will automatically be relegated to the Governors Trophy while a play off between the second two teams in the bottom of each group will lead to the losing team being relegated to the Governors Trophy.
Thus, only 15 clubs will remain in the league from 2024 crickets season onwards. Similarly, a one-day and T20 tournament will be played on a round-robin basis with the top-seeded club in each group qualifying for the semi-finals.
Following the completion of the Major League Inter-Club, the top performers in the tournament will be picked by the national selection committee to form five teams that will play in a National Super League Tournament–which will be the country’s premier first class tournament.
The clustering of clubs will be done according to historical performances in previous leagues, geographical placements and infrastructure facilities available.
The top five clubs which are equipped with necessary facilities and have the capacity to host the clustered team and players are expected to be appointed as CoE governing clubs taking into consideration the infrastructure, the period of clubs existence, number of national players produced and accountability and credentials. The clubs clustered to the CoE will remain unchanged for three years.
The league tournament will be a four-day affair where matches will be played on a home-and-away basis with the leader of the points table declared National Super League champions. Interestingly, they have proposed to play all these matches only at international venues. Similarly, they have proposed a 50-over tournament where the matches will be played on a home-and-away basis while the first and second rank team at the league stage will play in a final to decide the National Super League Limited Over champions.
The new structure was prepared by SLC’s Tournament Committee in consultation with the Cricket Advisory Committee headed by Aravinda de Silva.