Leicestershire facing relegation after 27-point pitch penalty

Club sanctioned for breaching the ECB's pitch regulations for home fixture against Glamorgan

Leicestershire are considering appealing a 27-point deduction that would relegate them from Division One, after being found to have breached ECB pitch regulations during their County Championship victory over Glamorgan in August.

The penalty, handed out by the Cricket Discipline Panel, who upheld The Cricket Regulator's charge for a "poor" pitch at Grace Road, includes Leicestershire losing all 19 points earned in the win, along with an additional eight-point penalty and a £5,000 fine. A further eight-point deduction has been suspended for 12 months. They have 10 days to appeal the sanction.

The ruling comes midway through Leicestershire's penultimate match of the season against Hampshire, and sees them replace Hampshire at the bottom of the table.

The key factor identified by The Regulator was uneven bounce - reasons enough for a poor rating - caused by "moving cracks" with "localised collapses at the junction of cracks". The bounce was also affected by ball indentations formed early in the match and numerous large clumps of grass. Match referee Ian Ramage provided 43 examples of uneven bounce in his match log.

Leicestershire's formal response to the charge admitted the pitch was substandard. But the severity of the punishment is based on the fact "defects identified were foreseeable consequences of the preparation employed and should have reasonably been expected and mitigated by the LCCC professional grounds team".

The county had looked to replicate the surface with shaved ends that they had prepared against Yorkshire in June, which they won by an innings and 39 runs. For the Glamorgan fixture, 3mm of grass had been left at each end, with a greener middle of 16mm. The pitch chosen had been used for two T20 matches in the previous 10 weeks, and had been subject to two months of intense warm weather. As such, the soil was considerably drier, thus more prone to cracking, and harder than the Yorkshire surface.

In an interview with The Regulator, Leicestershire head grounds manager Callum Lewin admitted it was not the pitch he would have chosen to prepare, given those conditions. In light of his concerns about the moisture content, he ceded a conversation with director of cricket Claude Henderson and head coach Alfonso Thomas would have been a "very difficult one", as they had requested a repeat of the Yorkshire surface and have final say on pitch preparation. Lewin said he was also concerned with the higher-than-usual number of "really small" plates caused by the cracks, increasing the likelihood of irregular bounce.

Leicestershire had argued that an unscheduled Bollywood film shoot - believed to be for a forthcoming biopic of the former India captain Sourav Ganguly - had taken place at the ground four days before the Glamorgan fixture, thus preventing the pitch from being covered for eight hours in bright sunshine. However, this was dismissed as a mitigating factor as it was only one day.

The Regulator acknowledged Leicestershire would not have deliberately created a pitch to bounce so unevenly but stated "each of these factors presented foreseeable risks that should have informed part of the planning and preparation process".

In conclusion, the tribunal found that, while Leicestershire did not intend for the pitch to play unevenly, their approach to preparing it was unreasonable. "Accordingly, and for these reasons, LCCC have failed to discharge the burden upon them under Regulation 7.6 that it "sought, acting reasonably, to prepare the best quality pitch that it could for the match that was being staged".