The game's shorter forms will be the stars of the show in the first half of the upcoming Tamworth cricket season, while a venerable performer has bowed out.
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Advice from Cricket NSW regarding COVID-19 means the one-day and Twenty20 competitions will be concluded before Christmas, with the two-day comp starting in early January, said Tamworth cricket boss Ben Middlebrook.
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In a not unexpected blow, the War Veterans Cup has been abandoned due to a lack of interest from teams.
There is normally a mixture of all three formats before Christmas, with the Twenty20 and two-day finals played after the Christmas break.
On August 19, Cricket NSW "encouraged" all community competitions to "prioritise" the playing of one-day cricket this season "to allow the commencement and completion of games within a single day".
"This will avoid potential 'no results' or issues with player availability or substitutions if community sport is disrupted during the season due to COVID-19," it said.
Middlebrook said the season's revised schedule "all fitted in". However, that would not have been the case had the Country Music Festival gone ahead, he said, as the competition normally paused for two weeks in January while the festival was staged. (It was abandoned because of the pandemic.)
"I think this year, with COVID, is gonna be a bit different, so we'll see how we go," he said.
The season will commence on October 17 - a week later than normal due to clubs being affected, player wise, by soccer's ongoing presence at the time. Northern Inland Football's final series kicks off on October 17.
Middlebrook cannot recall the cricket and soccer seasons colliding before.
He said the one-day and Twenty20 finals were on November 20 and December 20, respectively, while the two-day final was on March 27-28.
In his capacity as Northern Inland Cricket Council president, Middlebrook said that outside of Tamworth and Narrabri there was an unwillingness to play War Veterans Cup games this season.
"So we've put it on pause for a year, we will work out what we can do, and go from there," he said.
The rep focus this season, he continued, will be on the Connolly Cup - "where we have a lot of interest from small towns" and the tournament has been "working successfully" .
