This season we journey to the cracked pitches of Pakistan to determine the best National team. Can Australia defend their crown? Can England get revenge for their loss? Can India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka or New Zealand capture their first National World Cup?

Good luck to all teams and their supporters!

The new format is based loosely on the real life ICC World Cricket League.
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r />Structure

Teams would be arranged into three divisions of six teams. Within each division teams would play a home and away match against each of the other teams, similar to what happens now. At the end of the series, the top two teams in Divs 2 and 3 would promote and the bottom two teams in Divs 1 and 2 would relegate.

There would be three series contested in the two year NT period, which would mean that a team starting in Div 3 would be able to promote to Div 1 within the two year period if they were good enough. At the end of the two year period, the top 8 teams (all of DIv 1 and the top two teams in Div 2) would qualify for the World Cup, which would keep its current format (except that there would be no points carried forward).

This structure means that every match over the two year period is important in terms of qualifying for the World Cup. Teams also have multiple opportunities to qualify - for example a team starting in Div 3 can still qualify from the 2nd of the three series. Teams who earn or maintain a Div 1 position have a slightly easier path to qualify, but they still need to win enough matches to maintain their spot, as two teams will be relegated to Div 2 each series.

Another advantage is that over the two year period, most teams will be playing matches against other teams of roughly the same standard, which should provide a little more enjoyment for a greater number of teams.


Schedule

As suggested above, there would be three series played over the two year NT period. It would look something like this:

Season	Week	Current Structure	Proposed Structure
1	2	Elections	Elections
1	3
1	4	Qualifying Matches
1	5	Qualifying Matches	Series A Round 1
1	6
1	7	Qualifying Matches	Series A Round 2
1	8	Qualifying Matches	Series A Round 3
1	9
1	10	Qualifying Matches	Series A Round 4
1	11	Qualifying Matches	Series A Round 5
1	12
1	13	Qualifying Matches
1	14		Series B Round 1
1	15
1	16		Series B Round 2
2	1		Series B Round 3
2	2
2	3
2	4	Qualifying Matches	Series B Round 4
2	5	Qualifying Matches	Series B Round 5
2	6
2	7	Qualifying Matches	Series C Round 1
2	8	Qualifying Matches	Series C Round 2
2	9
2	10	Qualifying Matches	Series C Round 3
2	11	Qualifying Matches	Series C Round 4
2	12
2	13	Qualifying Matches	Series C Round 5
2	14
2	15
2	16	World Cup	World Cup
3	1	World Cup	World Cup

Over the two year period, each team would play 30 matches before the World Cup, compared to 28 matches in the current structure.

The new schedule has been designed to deliberately keep things as close as possible to the existing schedule, with a couple of minor changes:

• The first matches are in Week 5, rather than Week 4, allowing an extra week between the elections and the first match.
• The first match in Series B starts in Week 14, rather than Week 13 just to provide a small break between Series A and B and also to keep the five Series B matches a little closer together.
• The scheduling of Series B provides an additional challenge for the U19 managers, in terms of when to introduce the second season 19yos into the squad. The Season 1 19yos could play up to and including Series B Round 3 in Week 1, but they would have to be dropped after that game at the latest. (Using this week is consistent with the following season, where the just turned 20yos play the second week of the World Cup).

Implementation - U19

This will be implemented for U19 at the start of Season 17, with teams qualifying for the Season 18 U19 World Cup.

Even if the new nations are not immediately competitive, this structure allows them to compete at their own level anyway, and still gives them access to qualify for the World Cup from the word go.

The only modification that would be needed for the initial Series A would be that rather than have Div 2 and Div 3, we would allocate the teams into two groups of six teams, made up of the 10 new countries and the 7th and 8th placed teams from the Season 16 U19 World Cup. The top team from each group would promote to Div 1 for Series B, the second and third placed teams from each group would go into Div 2 for Series B and the bottom three from each group would go into Div 3 for Series B.


Implementation - NT

This will be implemented for National Teams at the start of Season 18, with teams qualifying for the Season 19 World Cup.

Again, it is likely that the new countries would not be competitive at first but as mentioned above, they are going to be largely playing amongst themselves anyway. The first batch of U19 players would graduate to the NT team in Season 19 as 20yos.

Please comment here

As has been mentioned in the past, Battrick is moving servers from their current home in Zurich, Switzerland to a new home in the UK. As part of this move, there will be a required downtime to enable the data to move to the new location.
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r />As this work is involving third parties, it may be subject to change at the last minute but here are the current plans and time-line:

Wednesday, August 18th 09:00 am BT time: The site will be closed. This is to allow the data to be moved to portable storage for transport to the new location. Obviously, while it is being transported, nothing can be allowed to update on the site or it will be lost once the transported data is brought back up.

During Wednesday day time the data will be copied on to the portable storage and at night, flown to the UK.

Thursday August 19: The data will be copied to the new servers and everything will be brought back up, all updates will be run and everything on the site will catch up to where it is meant to be. A bunch of tests will be run to ensure that everything is working correctly and once all is ok, the site will be back online and available again.

It is anticipated that all this is completed by around 16:00 BT time on Thursday.

If there are any delays or problems, please keep an eye on the Battrick twitter and Facebook accounts as information will be posted there to keep everyone up to date.

If you have a play-off scheduled for the Friday August 20th, it is highly recommended that you get your orders in early in case of problems. We do not anticipate there being any issues with the play-offs running on the Friday, but if necessary, they may be pushed back a day or two to accommodate the move. Additionally, it is not recommended that players are listed to sell during this time as they may receive lower than normal prices and these will not be adjusted.

Thank you all for your patience during this time and we all have our fingers crossed that it goes as seamlessly as possible.

As previously mentioned, as we are reliant on third parties for some of this happening, it is possible that the move may be pushed out to a later date. We will keep you all informed regarding this if and when it occurs.

Update: The Badgers played extremely well and in a tense finish, they narrowly lost by 6 runs against a higher skilled team.
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(Left to right): Scuff, Tensor, uptowndan, MOD-Davis88, jonny68, BT-Jargon, spidermonkey, lilt88, cricketer36, cricketer8, davidcato, Kalessin.

Thanks to official photographer bentimmo, a selection of photos from the day are available.

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This time they’re looking for players to don the whites in the city of the dreamy spires. If you live near, around or can get to Oxford on Sunday 11th of July, the Badgers are playing a 40 over game and would welcome anyone. If you want to play some cricket while meeting fellow Battrickers, or just come along and watch while sampling the now legendary lemonlolly’s scrumptious cake then please contact cricketer36 or pop over to the England sledging board and post in the RL Cricket Oxford thread.

We know that some of you like the idea of supporting Battrick by buying membership, but you aren't sure of the benefits. Maybe you joined a long while ago, and the free membership that we offer to all new users in their fifth week is just a distant memory. Perhaps new membership features have been introduced since you last had the opportunity to use them.
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r />If you can't see the features, then try logging out and back in again.

In order to allow non-members to see what they are missing, every season we offer a two day free membership trial. Non-members who log into Battrick on the Monday and Tuesday of Week 8 will find they now have access to all the goodies and benefits of being a full-time member. If you like it, then you can purchase membership to keep these features going, instead of having to wait for another whole season.

We equally want to say thank you to our existing supporting members, so each of them will automatically get an equivalent two days added to their membership at the time of the trial. These dates have been marked on the calendar.