We will give this system three years

We will give this system three years.”Derek Pringle, page 28. The top eight counties in next year’s Championship will qualify for a Super Cup the year after, when this country plays host to the 1999 World Cup. The format of the Super Cup will be 50 overs and will, in effect, be the Benson and Hedges Cup from the quarter-final stages. The bold talk of radical changes resulted in a radical status quo.

The County Championship, which most had agreed needed beefing up to help produce more competitive cricketers, is to stay the same.
A meeting between the England and Wales Cricket Board and the First Class Forum, which comprises the 18 first-class counties and the MCC, voted 12-7 in favour of maintaining the all-play-all structure which has existed for more than 100 years.The incentives to make it more competitive are financial. David Llewellyn reports

The ashes of cricket’s revolution were swept under the carpet at Lord’s yesterday. For now, they will just be hoping they are allowed to play on and defend it with some honour.. The first-class counties and the MCC have decided against making changes to the way the County Championship operates. Yesterday they rejected a plan to create two divisions, but accepted a similar scheme for a National League of 50-over matches on Sundays.

Eventually, when the players came out of the police station to be taken to the local prosecuting magistrate, it was through a rear exit to avoid the fearsome sight of six journalists and two photographers.Just around the corner from the Bar Le Toulzac itself, in the Rue de Paris, the Heineken Cup sits proudly in the window of the club shop Whether Brive will win it again this year is hard to say. “We have very little crime in Brive and consequently there are very few policemen. They will have had no experience of this kind of thing.”Covert proceedings were taking place at the local gendarmerie all day. Having made no arrests the previous evening, they started off yesterday with a dawn raid on the Pontypridd team’s hotel, taking five players away for questioning.Information was sketchy, and the police were reluctant to talk to any foreign media. They were like animals.”Brive, a sleepy town of 50,000 people, 150 miles north-east of Toulouse, is famous only by association with the French president Jacques Chirac, who was born 20 miles away, and now for its rugby.A local taxi driver explained that he had heard of the trouble and was not surprised the police had been unable to deal with it. “When they first arrived I sensed trouble but Phil John [a Ponty player] bought me a drink and for 10 minutes it was OK.

But then there was a flare-up between McIntosh and [Philippe] Carbonneau and all hell broke loose It was pandemonium. The police arrived but they couldn’t do anything.”One of the Welsh players tried to intervene, but if two or three of the Brive players hadn’t stepped in to protect the injured ones, someone could have got killed.”I’ve never seen anything like it, except on television and at the cinema.” Outside, the fighting had spilled over on to the small terrace and there was a long trail of blood.Lionel Mallier, sent off along with Pontypridd’s Dale McIntosh during Sunday’s ill-tempered European Cup match, admitted he was fighting again with McIntosh in the bar. Broken chairs and broken glass still littered the floor, and as we walked through towards a table at the back of the room Bruno pointed towards a spot on the wall where blood stains were clearly visible.
Bruno, a former Brive player, opened the bar less than six months ago, and it is there that the town’s rugby players now go for a drink after a match. Bruno may be an unfortunate name given the nature of the proceedings, but he insisted that he, for one, was not throwing any punches.”I was behind the bar protecting my head so I didn’t see everything,” he said, “but they were throwing chairs and tables. Adam Szreter visits the bar in Brive where sporting passions erupted into violence

Marty Bruno, the joint owner of the Bar Le Toulzac in Brive town centre, was surveying the damage the morning after the night before. Greg Rusedski, having reached the semi-finals of the Samsung Open at Bournemouth last week, officially moved to No 10 in the ATP world rankings yesterday to erase Roger Taylor’s 24-year-old British record.

Taylor achieved the No 11 spot in September, 1973, so Rusedski, beaten in the US Open final in New York eight days ago, is the first British player to achieve a top 10 ranking since they began in 1973.. A brawl in a French town has left the rugby world shocked by the actions of the players involved. The decision was made in the wake of two Jerusalem bombings, one of which, on 30 July, killed 17 people and injured 170. Both teams have 11 points, the top three qualify for France 98.. Morocco has decided not to send a team to Israel for a Davis Cup tie later this month for security reasons. Jamaica moved above the United States into second place in the final stage of the Concacaf qualifying tournament, trailing the leaders Mexico on goal difference.