FOLLOWING their comfortable victory over neighbours Eagley in the final of the Dixon Air Conditioning Twenty20 last week, Egerton will represent the Bolton League for the second consecutive season in the area finals.

Last year they defeated Norden from the Central Lancashire League before losing to Northern from the Liverpool Competition.

As the Central Lancashire League has already withdrawn from this year’s area finals, they will take place on a Liverpool Competition ground on Sunday August 2.

Egerton will be joined by clubs from the host league and the Northern League, and as there are only three teams, each club will play the other two once on a round-robin basis, with the competition decided on run rate if each team wins one match.

The winners of the area final are then only one more game away from the national semis and final which are played on a county ground in September and televised live on Sky TV.

Since the Bolton League became one of the very few non-Premier leagues to be allowed to enter the competition in 2012, our local matches have been on a straight knockout basis.

With the expansion of the League in 2016 it is likely that we will follow the example of other leagues in the county and play the matches on a regional group basis of five or six teams, guaranteeing clubs a minimum of four games.

The top two in each group will progress to the quarter-finals.

In the later rounds of the competition nationally overseas players are not allowed to take part, and the Bolton League have followed this rule for the past four years on the grounds that one of our teams could be knocked out of the competition on the back of an exceptional one-off performance from a professional in an otherwise poor side.

As the professionals’ performances are likely to even themselves out over the course of four or more matches it is likely that they would be allowed to take part in the Bolton League competition from 2016, and we will be looking into the options of playing the matches in coloured kit or coloured tops, with a pink cricket ball.

It had been suggested that matches should be played on Sunday afternoons, with the first-team Twenty20 match followed by a game between teams from the same clubs comprising a mixture of juniors and second-team players.

That would extend the afternoon from one game of 40 overs, which are completed in less than three hours.

While this is still a possibility, I have been speaking to representatives from the West Lancashire League who play Sunday afternoon cricket – with Blackrod, Daisy Hill and Golborne entering third teams against clubs such as Burscough and New Longton – and from the Bolton Cosmopolitan League who play more locally on midweek evenings.

In recent years the amount of under-18s cricket in the Bolton League has been decreasing and clubs have been looking for opportunities to play a third senior team on Sunday afternoons.

Greenmount and Farnworth Social Circle have played Sunday afternoon cricket in the North Manchester League for a number of years, taking the opportunity to develop some of their more promising juniors in adult cricket, and more recently they have been joined by Westhoughton and Eagley. However opportunities to join the North Manchester League have been limited, and as their clubs have joined the Greater Manchester League more of the cricket may be played on a Saturday.

From 2017, when the Bolton League becomes 24 clubs the Twenty20 competition can be based on four groups of six clubs. Clubs would then take it in turn to host two matches against different opponents on a Sunday afternoon with one match starting at around 1.30pm and the second around 5pm.

Within the Bolton League this has already been tried out on a Bank Holiday Monday, and given good weather should be a success financially for clubs.