Bell-Drummond had to retire hurt in a T20 Blast game against Essex, missing the entirety of July injured. Kent had played on seven of the ten days in the lead-up to the game on Friday, June 30, with Bell-Drummond heavily involved in that time. He had made a half-century and a century on consecutive days in the T20 Blast the previous week, before compiling a maiden first-class triple-century against Northants. Two days after that County Championship fixture, he was back playing again, and feared for his safety while batting under lights against Sussex Sharks’ Tymal Mills, one of the fastest bowlers in the country.
“It’s nuts, to be honest,” he told the Wisden Cricket Weekly podcast. “It does get dangerous. There were points last year where it was so dangerous. Part of the reason was because I got 300, that’s not a schedule thing, but I remember just being so tired at the end of that knock, and then coming here [to the St. Lawrence Ground] to play against Sussex, and I remember it was under lights, and I got injured that day because of the schedule, really. I remember Tymal Mills bowling and I was half awake, 5,000 in the crowd, and I just thought, ‘This isn’t right, I could get hit here’. Luckily, it was [just] my hamstring. But I genuinely didn’t feel right that whole day, because of lack of sleep, coming back late at night and just playing relentless cricket in the height of the summer. Hopefully something can be done.
“I think the bigger counties find it a lot easier just to rotate players. Kent, a smaller county, we play all forms so it’s a bit more tricky. But yeah, something does need to be done because the safety of players is at times a big, big issue. It’s making sure that players can give 100 per cent for the crowd, for the public as well. Because the last thing you want to see is a substandard game because players are tired.”
Even when making that triple-century, Bell-Drummond says he was feeling fatigued. “I was just cooked from the schedule,” he says of his mindset when waiting to bat on the first evening. “We’d just fielded all day, so I was thinking Compo, T, [Ben Compton and Tawanda Muyeye, Kent’s openers that day] please don’t get out. I need to go to bed.”
The schedule is a regular source of complaint and worry among county cricketers, with PCA chief executive Rob Lynch describing the calendar as “unsustainable” when released in 2024. The schedule features numerous instances of sides playing on back to back days, and even two occasions of teams playing on a Friday evening in one venue and then at Saturday lunchtime in another.
“My biggest issue is the welfare of players and support staff being disregarded, particularly with regards to travel throughout high-intensity periods of T20 cricket,” added Sam Cook, Essex seamer and PCA rep. “This has been repeatedly stressed in numerous PCA summits and despite this, the schedule still provides the same problems by not focusing on player welfare. In addition, the expectation to perform despite inadequate recovery time across formats concerns me greatly. This has an enormous impact on both performance and increases the risk of injury.”
Bell-Drummond echoed this, feeling that, while the opportunity is given for county cricketers to raise their concerns, other factors take precedence.
“We have PCA meetings, and they give us the mic to voice our opinions, but a lot of these decisions are made for different reasons,” he said. “Obviously, the people paying our wages, they want to see us playing when they want that. I get that. And also, the English summer is not the longest summer so there’s so much cricket to fit in. But it’s a difficult one.
“I completely get why the struggle is there. Because even at the PCA meetings, everyone has a different idea, and a lot of people think four-day cricket is the key and you need to be playing that in June, July. And then other people say you want the school kids to come in in the summer holidays. So I really get it. And I do like playing a lot of cricket. I’m a batter so I want to play as much as possible. I look at Australia and New Zealand’s domestic structures and a lot of their players, if you’re a red-ball player, you play like eight games a year. That’s nothing. So I completely get it. But going from a Friday night game to a Saturday midday game is not good.”
