Lancashire will have to negotiate the rest of the Vitality Blast group stage without Liam Livingstone after the all-rounder tore a hamstring during Saturday’s win over Derbyshire. The injury arrived less than 24 hours after victory at Northampton, leaving interim head coach Steven Croft deeply unimpressed with how little time the squad had to recover.
The team coach did not reach Manchester until 3.30 am on Saturday because of heavy traffic on the M1. By 3 pm the same afternoon the players were back on the field. Livingstone felt his hamstring midway through the match and walked off. A few overs later Saqib Mahmood followed him, also feeling discomfort.
“They’re some of the world’s best players out there… It feels pretty stupid and silly, and is putting the players at risk. We saw two players walk off the field through injury,” Croft told LancsTV.
On Livingstone’s situation he added: “It might have gone at any time, but getting minimal sleep and such a quick turnaround to play elite sport is a tough one… I probably wouldn’t say it’s all down to the schedule – it might be – but it’s not helped one bit for that player who’s walked off, and looks like it might be a bit of a lengthy time on the sidelines.”
Livingstone is expected to miss at least four matches, effectively ruling him out of the group phase. Mahmood’s strain is still being assessed.
“It is something that seriously needs to be looked at… We’re aware that we’ve got four competitions in the country, so you can’t really extend the season any more. That is the county grind, as people say… You feel like if something doesn’t happen, we’re not going to get the best players on the park,” Croft said.
The Professional Cricketers’ Association has long pushed to reduce back-to-back fixtures, yet most Blast games still run from Thursday to Sunday. A comprehensive overhaul for 2026 looks unlikely, though modest tweaks are on the table. Counties are poised to revert to three groups of six in next year’s Blast, cutting the number of matches per side from 14 to 12 and moving Finals Day to July. Splitting the competition to accommodate the Hundred would therefore be avoided.
Discussions around the County Championship remain fluid. Proposals range from trimming the schedule to 12 four-day games to retaining the present 14. Somerset and Surrey have already nailed their colours to the 14-match mast, favouring an eight-team Division One and an enlarged ten-team Division Two.
“There is so much potential for the competition to grow its fanbase,” Surrey’s chair, Oli Slipper, and chief executive, Steve Elworthy, said in a joint statement. “The red-ball game needs all the counties to get behind it, to prioritise it and to promote it. It is a unique and historic sporting competition, and we should embrace it for the benefit of the wh”
That unfinished sentence, like the fixture list itself, rather sums up the current mood: plenty of ideas, not quite enough time.
