National team competitions

[PeterFarr]

This arises from points about 4NCL and county chess made in the ECF nominations thread, but as its a long way off that topic, I thought a new thread might be better.

92 teams provisionally entered so far, with maybe more to come (vs 81 teams last season).

92 is a rather nice number of top flight teams to have - just the same as English football.

The success of 4NCL and the decline of the County Championships and also the National Club competitions seem inextricably linked. It prompts the thought of whether the ECF shouldn't give up entirely on their competitions and just endorse 4NCL as the national league - obviously with some classic British compromise to acknowledge the "4N" bit.

While I've always liked county chess, I don't see that just tinkering with grade limits, board order rules, or number of boards in a team will ever do anything to check it's decline and eventual demise; while as for the National Club, its been a travesty for many years.

One idea would be to scrap the County championships and the National Club and have, say, a 12 a-side competition with round robin regional qualifiers broadly based on current Unions (or not), then moving to a knock-out stage for last 8 or 16 (something a bit like football's European champions league structure, but with single rounds rather than home and away legs). You would have an Open and 3-4 other grading-limited sections. While the natural thing might be to base teams around existing counties, I wouldn't actually enforce any particular eligibility restrictions other than grade limit where appropriate and of course ECF membership as compulsory ( ). So effectively, 4NCL teams could also enter if they wanted to as well as "Counties" or indeed anybody else; as now, the competition could be scheduled to avoid 4NCL clashes.

The point of this is to provide a national team tournament, complementary to the 4NCL, that could appeal to current county players (because its a single round on a Saturday, not tying up a whole weekend) but hopefully losing some of the issues around relative strength of counties which are in-built in the current structure, and therefore also appealing to a wider base. Also, being relaxed about eligibility means that Welsh and Scottish teams can participate if they want to.

Maybe the ECF could contract out the running of a national team knock-out tournament to 4NCL, who would probably run it better. Of course the 4NCL team might not want to take it on, but I fear that it would be very difficult for the ECF to effect the radical change required to make it happen; not because of the Board, who seem as good a bunch as we have had for some time, but because of the naturally sclerotic structure of the organization.

[Andrew Zigmond]

One of the few areas the 4NCL hasn't branched into (yet) are competitions for lower graded players. Remove the ECF competitions and you would deny the lower echelons one of their few opportunities to play in a prestige event. Granted, there seems to have been decline in the lower sections as well and this can't be attributed to the 4NCL but this is where the ECF might find the seeds of their recovery.

With regard to the National Club Championships the event isn't quite moribund yet but it will get harder to revive with every year that passes. I've made the following suggestion before but I'll repeat it. How about devolving the competitions to the County Unions (the NCCU have their own section anyway) with each Union providing a winning team in each section to go through to the final - this is similar to how the County Championships works. My next suggestion would be for each union to take it in turn to host the final on a date communicated in advance - the ECF would meet all expenses and the union would just find a suitable venue.

[PeterFarr]

As far as the 'lower echelons' are concerned, my suggested competition, which is meant to be a sort of hybrid clubs/counties event, could have as many graded sections as needed.

The idea of regional champions has some appeal; having a 2-stage approach means that teams have a short-term prize to aim at, with a bigger carrot to follow (rather than just one more remote goal), which might encourage more entries. But I might question whether the Union level is right for this - Unions are rather lop-sided in terms of the size of their population base. Also I'm not wild about the idea of allowing differently structured qualifying rounds (which would be implied by a devolution to Unions I think). From a practical point of view it might be a good option though.

The problem with having venues alternating between regions is the travel involved for just a one-day final. Boring though it may be, I'd tend to still favour the traditional option of Leicestershire (I'm not saying Leics. itself is boring).