The schedule of NCCU inter-county team matches is now complete and Bryan Bainbridge has submitted its nominations for the ECF County Championships as follows:

Section	1st Nominee	2nd Nominee
Open	Northumberland	Greater Manchester
Under 2050	Yorkshire	Northumberland
Under 1850	Yorkshire	Greater Manchester
Under 1650	Yorkshire	Greater Manchester
Under 1450	Yorkshire	Greater Manchester

Detailed results on which these nominations are based can be found collated here and on linked section pages.

Traditionally, the first nominee meets another Union’s second nominee in the initial round of the corresponding ECF competition, and, as a correlate, the second nominee would expect to meet another Union’s first nominee, thus providing a sort of seeding system which was probably encapsulated in the rules in the past, though recent ECF practice has seemingly not followed this principle.

This is of course the first time in living memory that neither Yorkshire nor Lancashire has qualified in the Open section. To be fair, that has long been due to usually only two counties entering the NCCU Open competition, meaning qualification was thence automatic.

Yorkshire received the option of entering the ECF Minor Counties’ Competition. These days this is an average-rating team competition - specifically for teams of players with an average rating of 2050. In the past, the Minor Counties’ Competition was not rating/grading-limited and was open to counties who (in simple terms) had not in recent times won anything significant at ECF level. This competition might attract better/more entries if the name were changed to reflect the modern format. On this occasion Yorkshire declined the offer to declare itself to be a “minor” county!!

Congratulations are due to the captains for pulling things together so successfully. This season, there were at least three teams in each section, so the two-team automatic qualification route did not exist this season, and of course, however strong the player pool might be, the captaincy job involves a lot of hard work.