Excitement at the dawning of a new season is an ever-present feature of domestic cricket. But that doesn’t mean the season itself stays the same.
A number of changes have been introduced for 2026, including altering the schedule to accommodate for structural changes to competitions, all while cramming four different formats into the summer.
With two weeks to go until the new season gets underway, here are four key changes that have been made to domestic cricket in England and Wales for 2026.
Extended September Championship fixtures
While the County Championship format is unchanged this year - 14 matches per county, two divisions, two teams promoted and two relegated, despite attempts to introduce changes - the scheduling is notably different. The Championship will kick off with a block of six rounds running from April 3 to May 18. There’s two rounds in June, before a taxing final run of six rounds between August 20 and September 27. That closing block - six rounds in just over five weeks - is significantly more demanding than the three-round September finish counties faced in 2025.
This has been driven partly by the rescheduling of the T20 Blast. In 2025, the Blast was interwoven with the Championship throughout the summer, but Finals Day not until September. In 2026, the Blast will take place entirely before The Hundred, with T20 Blast Finals Day on July 18. The Hundred will then run between July 21 and August 16. After the eighth round finishes on June 22, there will be almost two full months of peak summer without any Championship cricket. When it returns in August, counties will be playing for up to 24 out of 39 days.
Daryl Mitchell, chief exec of the Professional Cricketers' Association, has raised concerns about that final stretch, warning of “mental and physical dangers” and pointed out that some counties face 12 days of Championship cricket in barely a fortnight, with lengthy travel between fixtures. “I already fear this section of the season,” Mitchell said when the schedule was announced.
Structural and scheduling changes to the men's T20 Blast
The men’s T20 Blast will undergo its biggest shake‑up in more than a decade in 2026, after counties approved structural and scheduling reforms aimed at easing player workloads and clarifying the domestic calendar.
From next summer, the group stage will be cut from 14 to 12 matches per county, ending the long‑running format of two groups of nine teams. Instead, the 18 clubs will be split into three geographically based pools - North, Central and South. Each side will play the other five teams in its group home and away, plus one extra home and one extra away fixture against opponents from outside the group.
The competition will also move into a tighter window, running as a single block from May 26 to Finals Day on July 18, and finishing before the start of The Hundred. The long mid‑season pause between the end of the group stage and the knockouts will disappear, with quarter‑finals following directly on from the group stages and Finals Day brought forward, having been held on September 13 last year.
Tier One women's competition expanded
Yorkshire has joined the ECB's women's Tier 1 structure from 2026, expanding it from eight to nine counties. Yorkshire were originally due to join the top tier in 2027, alongside Glamorgan, but the ECB decided in May 2024 to elevate them a year early.
While the number of total matches each team plays across the Tier One T20 Blast and Tier One One-Day Cup will remain the same, the split across the two competitions has been slightly altered. Each Tier One team will play 12 T20 Blast group matches (down from 14 last year) and 16 One Day Cup matches (up from 14). Tier Two group-stage matches across both competitions will be reduced from 17 to 16, with each team set to play each other once in each competition.
There have also been changes to the structure of T20 Finals Day in both the Tier One and Two competition. Which will now include two semi-finals and a final rather than an eliminator and a final, while the Tier Two competition will have a three-team Finals Day. The Tier Two competition will also move to a single group rather than the North and South groups in 2025.
Kookaburra ball scrapped
The Kookaburra ball’s divisive stint in the County Championship has come to an end, after counties voted to abandon the trial and return exclusively to the Dukes ball from 2026.
Introduced by the ECB for the 2023 season after Andrew Strauss’s high‑performance review, the Australian‑made Kookaburra was initially used in two rounds before its role was expanded to four of the 14 Championship fixtures in both 2024 and 2025. The idea was to better prepare English bowlers and batters for overseas conditions, particularly Ashes tours, by exposing them to the less responsive Kookaburra ball which is used by seven of the Test playing countries.
However, the experiment quickly became a lightning rod for criticism within the county game, with Alec Stewart calling it “the worst idea ever.” Coaches and bowlers complained that the Kookaburra went soft too quickly, moved little off the seam and tilted the balance heavily in favour of batting, leading to attritional, high‑scoring draws. Surrey’s 820-9 declared against Durham at the Oval last year was somewhat emblematic of this, while the use of the Kookaburra in the first two rounds of the 2024 season ended with 17 draws from 18 matches.
It was confirmed in November last year that all 14 rounds of the 2026 Championship will again be played with the Dukes ball.
Follow Wisden for all cricket updates, including live scores, match stats, quizzes and more. Stay up to date with the latest cricket news, player updates, team standings, match highlights, video analysis and live match odds.
