Lucrative contract makes Stephen Harmison exception to new rule

There may be no happier professional cricketer in England at the moment than Stephen Harmison. The ink from his pen has barely dried on a four-year contract with Durham that will give him an annual income of £125,000 exclusive of bonuses.

It is not quite what he might have earned had he been regularly nodding them into the back of the net for his beloved Newcastle United, but it is still enviable recompense for doing what he enjoys. Nor, given his 111 wickets in the LV County Championship in the past two seasons, is it undeserved.

Most of the time Harmison enjoyed bowling fast for England, too, but unless and until the national selectors discover that in some conditions they cannot do without their sometimes distracted and wayward enforcer, he will enjoy his freedom from the hassle that goes with being an England player in the media spotlight.

Harmison is an exception to a brand new rule for English domestic cricket: it is much better to be a young pro than an old one. Matthew Hoggard, his former England partner, has plenty of suitors at present but Yorkshire’s decision not to offer him a new contract had much to do with new ECB regulations that are intended to put a brake on escalating salaries and to give more opportunities to young England-qualified players.

Not only will there be a £1.8 million salary cap for counties next year — to the relief of the chairmen who discussed wage bills with mutual concern at a meeting this week — but the incentive payments for playing young, home-bred players will surely concentrate the minds of some county coaches when it comes to marginal selections.

Extra payments from the ECB will be paid to counties for up to two players under 22 chosen for each game, up to five players under 26 and up to nine of any age who are England-qualified. Financially, therefore, the way for cash-strapped counties to get the most from the central pot will be to play two England-qualified players under 22, another three under 26 and four more in the Harmison/Hoggard (31/32) age bracket, leaving room for only two foreigners.

The proof of the pudding will be in the eating but it looks, too, as though county cricket will no longer be such a comfortable playground for disaffected South Africans. The ECB, with encouragement from the Professional Cricketers’ Association, has been gradually turning the screw on cricketers joining counties as Kolpak registrations. From next season only those Kolpak-registered players who have been with the same county for four years will be allowed back. To qualify otherwise they will need to have played recent international cricket. Dwayne Smith, of Sussex, for example, fulfils neither criterion.

Durham are going to do without the expensive Shivnarine Chanderpaul next season partly because Harmison has now come off his England contract and on to the county’s payroll. But Chanderpaul was one of few world stars playing here. Non-stop international cricket and the advent of the Indian Premier League mean that regular England players and the real stars of the international game no longer play in county cricket, let alone in the Second XI Championship, as West Indian fast bowlers once did when the rules were different and they had no Test cricket to play during the northern-hemisphere summer.

Official overseas players will be restricted next season to one per team in the championship and two in the extended Friends Provident Twenty20. Other non-Europeans will get work permits, however, only if they have played a Test in the past two years, or five in the past five. Alternatively, the cricketer must have played in at least 15 limited-overs internationals or have been centrally contracted by his home country and a member of the Test or international squad in the most recent season.

Stephen Hornsby, the specialist sports lawyer, said of the new work-permit regulations that there would be some restriction of supply but that wealthier counties will continue to have the pick of the market. Hornsby is not alone in thinking that six counties should be culled from the first-class list if the money is to be better spent. More realistically, expanding salaries for a few will lead to smaller county staffs with a lower average age.

There were 28 overseas players in this year’s championship. Neville Scott’s research for The Wisden Cricketer magazine showed 79 other players who learnt their cricket abroad before the age of 16. Non-British players represented 31 per cent of individual championship appearances in 2009. Undoubtedly these changes are going to mean more inexperienced young English professionals getting regular chances in county cricket.

The thrust is in the right direction, but there is a caveat. If the young bloods are really good enough, fine, especially if they are the product of the county’s own academies. On the other hand, there is a serious danger that standards will drop if too many hardened and experienced professionals are frozen out of county cricket when they still have much to offer.