A league meeting was held on Monday, February 3 where A-grade clubs voted to change the competition to exclusively feature one-day contests starting in the 2025-26 season.
The new format will also see game length increased to 50 overs per side, up from the current 45-over matches.
The move was made to make the competition more flexible in an effort to retain players and increase participation.
GMC Operations Manager James Stokes said two-day games have been a point of discussion within the league for several years.
“It's been a discussion topic for a long time, but it got a bit serious over the last two years,” he said.
“Last year (the discussion) got pushed a bit, and then we had a meeting with all the A-grade clubs on Monday night, and they decided that they wanted to go to 50-over one-day cricket so that's what we'll be trialling from next season on.”
The change will see the competition shortened by a week.
The current 2024-25 regular season is running over 19 weeks, featuring nine one-day and five two-day fixtures.
The new format will see 18 weeks of action, meaning a competition featuring the current nine teams (or ten as in 2023-24), would complete two full rounds of nine fixtures, all teams meeting twice, home and away, in the regular season.
The finals, currently held over both Saturday and Sunday on two consecutive weekends, will move to Saturday one-day contests, removing Sunday from the schedule.
Stokes said a challenging aspect of instituting two-day games was the balancing of the draw.
“It's always a compromised draw, and I've always, in my role, manufactured the draw based on the ladder, so the two-day games had more of the top teams playing each other,” he said.
“If (a top side’s) playing one of the bottom sides, and they get outrighted, that can actually change the course of the season in regards to the ladder.”
Two-day games have included the opportunity to earn extra competition points if a side can win over two innings across both days, and the league has implemented various scoring structures to represent the value of this accomplishment.
In 2023-24 teams would earn six competition points for a regular one-day or one-innings win, while an outright win was worth an additional four points.
This season the relative value of the outright win was decreased as scoring was rebalanced to 12 points for a one-day win and an additional six for taking the second innings.
An additional hurdle of two-day games centred on player availability.
Under the current rules, teams were only permitted to substitute two players between day one and two and there were additional restrictions regarding a substitute's ability to bat or bowl depending on who they were replacing and the game situation at stumps on day one.
GMC’s B- through D-grades already featured exclusively one-day fixtures.
The league has indicated some additional changes are in the works, to be announced once details are finalised.
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