Kevin Pietersen suggests a unique idea that can help England revive their Test cricket

England cricket is going through a massive lean patch. The team is doing well in limited-overs format but their form in Tests has been extremely poor. They are currently trailing 0-3 in Ashes after receiving hammering in the first three Tests. So what can help England revive their Test supremacy?

Well, former England cricketer Kevin Pietersen has suggested a unique idea that can help England recover from the dip. Pietersen feels the country's County System is not good enough to serve the current Test team, and opined that a franchise tournament like 'The Hundred' in red-ball cricket can do wonders for England. Pietersen said that a franchise Test tournament will allow the players to rub shoulders with some of the greats of the game, which will be a great learning experience for the young players.

“With the money elsewhere in the game, the (County) Championship in its current form is not fit to serve the Test team,” Pietersen wrote in a blog post on Betway.

“The best players don’t want to play in it, so young English players aren’t learning from other greats like I did. Batters are being dismissed by average bowlers on poor wickets and the whole thing is spiralling. In The Hundred, the ECB have actually produced a competition with some sort of value. It is the best against the best, marketed properly, and the audience engaged with it.”

“They got new people to the games and I can tell you that the players will have to improve markedly for featuring alongside other greats. It’s such a valuable experience,” Pietersen wrote in a blog post on Betway.

“They now need to introduce a similar franchise competition for red-ball cricket, whereby the best play against the best every single week. They would make money available to attract some of the best overseas players in the world and the top English players would benefit from playing alongside them. It would be a marketable, exciting competition, which would drive improvement in the standard and get people back through the gates for long-form cricket, ” he added.

Pietersen also feels that the pitches in the County are not challenging enough for the batters thus ECB have to prepare bowling friendly pitches so that the batters are always on their toes. "The pitches are monitored by the ECB so that we’re not seeing majorly bowler-friendly conditions like we do now. We have to have good pitches that reward and encourage strong batting techniques, batting for long periods of time, and that require skill from bowlers to take wickets.” Pietersen added that the county system can work as the “feeder system” where players are developed until they’re ready to step up,” he further said.