What English cricket can learn from Game of Thrones

England is at once the most inventive and the most traditional of the cricket-playing nations. The country that invented overarm bowling, helmets and the professional limited-over tournament is also deeply protective of the sustenance to be gained from the sport’s rich past. The result is a tension that can all too often paralyse the ability of English cricket to exploit its own innovations. History both inspires and gets in the way.

What better current illustration of this than the failure of the ECB to propel Twenty20 cricket to the kind of box-office stratosphere that the IPL or the Big Bash have achieved? England hatched the goose, but the golden eggs have gone to India and Australia. The reason for this is as self-evident as it has – until now – appeared imponderable. Evidence conclusively suggests that the success of a T20 league depends upon a limited number of team franchises – which is why both the IPL and the Big Bash feature eight. In England, though, the County Championship boasts 18 clubs, all with their own deeply rooted identities, interests and loyalties – and these are not easily dissolved. What supporter of a proud and ancient club wants to see it retired in favour of some parvenu team, without romance, without record, without history?

Yet there is a solution ready to hand – and it derives, ironically enough, from England’s distant past. Old though counties may be, they are not the oldest focus of team loyalties that the English have had. Some time around AD 900, eight centuries before the first ever county match was played, a Syrian traveller to Rome recorded an intriguing detail about England: that it boasted “seven kingdoms”. A historian from Lincoln, writing in the early-12th century, provided more detail, explaining that when the English first arrived in Britain after the withdrawal of the Romans, “they conquered the land, and established seven kings.” Vanished though the realms of Northumbria and Mercia, of the East Angles and West Saxons, of Essex, and Sussex, and Kent may be, the memory of them has not entirely faded. Partly this is because, despite their absorption a millennium and more ago into the United Kingdom of England, they remain to this day a focus for local loyalties; and partly it is because, over the past few years, they have provided the inspiration for a global TV phenomenon.

Game of Thrones, with its murderous power struggles and internecine civil wars, may not appear an obvious source of inspiration for cricket administrators to follow. Nevertheless, the sheer popularity of the show should serve to remind them just how thrilling the spectacle of ancient realms engaged in no-holds-barred combat can be. Westeros, the fictional continent at the heart of HBO’s epic tale, was once, like early medieval England, a heptarchy: a land of seven kingdoms. The ECB, if they are looking for a franchise system that would enable them to give people a sense both of the contemporary and of the past, of show-business swagger and of regional identity, of boldness and of integrity, are staring it in the face.

Admittedly, the resurrection of the Heptarchy in the first-class grounds of England would need to be tinkered with at the edges if it were to be made to work. Howls of protest from other clubs would doubtless greet any proposal that Kent, Sussex and Essex – simply because they had belonged to the original Heptarchy – should be allowed to play in the new T20 tournament under their own banners. Fortunately, though, historians of early medieval England need not fret too much. The borders of the Heptarchy were forever changing. No definitive list of the kingdoms that constituted it was published until many centuries after it had evolved into England. There is plenty of scope for being inventive with the lineaments of heptarchical cricket.

That said, the four greatest realms of the Heptarchy select themselves. Wessex, the only English kingdom to withstand the onslaught of the Vikings, had already, by the time of Alfred the Great, come to stretch from Somerset to Kent; and so it should once again. Looking eastwards, the kings of East Anglia, whose gold and ships were buried in the great mounds of Sutton Hoo, claimed the overlordship of both Essex and London – garnering for the East Anglians the splendid prizes of Chelmsford, The Oval and Lord’s. Mercia, the great kingdom which at its largest extent covered all the Midlands, and Northumbria, which spanned the whole of the North from the Humber to Edinburgh, are likewise shoo-ins for heptarchical cricket. These are all teams that anyone would relish cheering on.

Nevertheless, there are complications. In 886, in the reign of Alfred the Great, Mercia was formally divided by treaty into rival spheres of influence: the western half, which retained its ancient name, came under Alfred’s sway, and ended up being ruled by his heroic daughter, Aethelflaed; the eastern half remained under Viking rule. Separated from Mercia, the region came to be known as the Five Boroughs, after its main towns: Derby, Leicester, Lincoln, Nottingham and Stamford. Only in 917 – thanks to the efforts of Aethelflaed and her brother, Edward – was it finally brought back under English rule, and made safe for cricket. Home to Trent Bridge, Grace Road and the Racecourse Ground, the Five Boroughs richly deserve to play heptarchical T20.

So too, on the western side of the Pennines, does the realm of Rheged. Truth be told, no one is entirely sure where precisely this near-legendary, Welsh-speaking kingdom was; but we do know that it was somewhere in the region of Lancashire and Cumbria, and that the Northumbrian hold on it was always precarious. “They drank mead, gold and sweet, ensnaring.” No better description of the bars at Old Trafford could possibly be imagined. Nor, of course, was Rheged the only Welsh-speaking realm to contest with the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms the mastery of Britain: there was Wales itself. “Terrible will be the wailing before the rush of warriors,” sang one Welsh bard, looking to inspire a warband as it set out across Offa’s Dyke into Mercia. So in a similar vein, no doubt, will the Welsh fans cheer on their bowling attack on a bouncy track at Edgbaston.

Wessex. Mercia. East Anglia. Northumbria. Rheged. Wales. The Five Boroughs. As in the age of the Heptarchy, so now, these can be names to play with, names to light up song. Let India have the glitz of the IPL, and Australia the swagger of the Big Bash – English T20 has history on its side.

Wessex

Emblem: Golden wyvern
Battle cry: “They split the shield-wall, they hew battle shields”
Counties: Kent, Hampshire, Somerset, Gloucestershire, Sussex
Royal burh: Rosebowl

East Anglia

Emblem: Wolf
Battle cry: “It’s a good season when the wolf gives food to the raven”
Counties: Essex, Middlesex, Surrey
Royal burh: Lord’s

Mercia

Emblem: Seahorse from the Staffordshire Hoard
Battle cry: “Great evils are best met with courage”
Counties: Worcestershire, Warwickshire, Northamptonshire
Royal burh: Edgbaston

Five Boroughs

Emblem:Raven
Battle cry: “Think of glory, show great courage, keep watch against the foe”
Counties: Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Derbyshire
Royal burh: Trent Bridge

Northumbria

Emblem: Eagle-headed angel
Battle cry: “Unfurl the sails, and let God steer us where He will”
Counties: Yorkshire, Durham
Royal burh: Headingley

Rheged

Emblem:Horned man
Battle cry: “Of the bravest stock, you are the best that is, that has been and will be”
Counties/countries: Lancashire, Scotland
Royal burh: Old Trafford

Wales

Emblem: Red dragon
Battle cry: “Fierce attacking, and Saxons will fall as food for wild beasts”
Counties/countries: Glamorgan, Ireland
Royal burh: The Swalec