92 is a rather nice number of top flight teams to have - just the same as English football.Mike Truran wrote:
92 teams provisionally entered so far, with maybe more to come (vs 81 teams last season).
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.