Tuesday 19 November 2019 15:47, UK
Rob Key says the ECB were right to punish Somerset for a "poor" pitch in their County Championship title-decider with Essex in September.
Somerset needed to win the match at Taunton to have a chance of overhauling Essex and produced a wicket that turned prodigiously from day one but the game was plagued by rain and ended in a draw.
The pitch may not have brought Somerset the result they were after but that did not stop the ECB giving them a 12-point deduction ahead of the start of the 2020 season, with a further 12-point penalty suspended for two years.
Key believes the verdict was necessary to try and improve the standard of wickets throughout county cricket and that other counties should see Somerset's punishment as a warning.
"Somerset have been pretty close to the line for a couple of years now with turning pitches but the one thing I would say is that the ECB had to do something about pitches in general in county cricket," he told Sky Sports News.
"Hopefully, this will be a shot across the bow to all counties really because the fact is that Sir Alastair Cook, England's greatest ever run-scorer, had 830 runs going into the last game and Essex won the championship.
"In the old days, you used to have players with 1,600 runs so the pitches, in general, haven't been good enough and I think it's right that the ECB have penalised Somerset but they shouldn't be the only ones going forward.
"It shouldn't just be spinning pitches, any of these pitches, if they're seaming around corners, should also be under pressure and be penalised."
Key also argued that a major role of County Championship cricket is to help produce players for the England Test side and that required better wickets across the country.
"Four-day cricket as a whole, one of the big remits is to produce batsmen and, well, cricketers for England and you're not going to do that if you're producing sub-standard wickets," the Sky Sports pundit added.
"It's no good for the game, for the national team and Test cricket, which is a lot of what four-day cricket is about.
"You don't want to go down a route where you let one county [produce a favourable pitch in a must-win game] and then lots of others counties do it.
"Now I'm not saying Somerset did it on purpose but generally you want a pitch that isn't doing what that one did when from ball one it was like a day-seven pitch!
"What you want is a good pitch that deteriorates throughout the game, not one that starts deteriorating on day one and then gets tougher and tougher. There was a lot of rain in that game but had that game gone the distance, it would have been over in a day and a half pretty much."
