Leicestershire’s season has been thrown into deeper uncertainty after the county received a 27-point deduction for a breach of England and Wales Cricket Board pitch regulations at Uptonsteel Grace Road. The sanction, imposed during Leicestershire’s next-to-last match of the season, leaves the club bottom of Division One and means relegation to Division Two will be confirmed if they fail to beat Hampshire in their current home game.
The Cricket Discipline Panel upheld a charge brought by the Cricket Regulator over the surface used for Leicestershire’s County Championship match against Glamorgan between the 20th and 23rd of August. The match referee, Ian Ramage, rated the pitch as ‘poor’.
Under new England and Wales Cricket Board regulations this season, a side found guilty of preparing a substandard pitch loses the points it gained from the match, alongside any direct disciplinary penalty. Leicestershire have therefore forfeited all 19 points collected in their victory over Glamorgan, while the panel imposed an additional eight-point deduction. The club was also fined £5,000.
A further eight-point deduction has been suspended until the end of the 2027 season. Leicestershire have 10 days to appeal the sanction.
The ruling concerns a surface whose problems developed during the four-day match. Ramage recorded 43 instances of uneven bounce. The defects identified included moving cracks that produced localised collapses where cracks met, ball indentations that appeared early in the game, and numerous large clumps of grass on the pitch.
The Cricket Regulator concluded that these defects were foreseeable results of the preparation method used at Grace Road. It said Leicestershire’s professional grounds team should reasonably have anticipated and reduced those risks.
At the tribunal hearing, Leicestershire accepted that the pitch was substandard while denying the charge. The club said it had sought to produce the best-quality surface it could for the match.
The tribunal found that Leicestershire had not intended to produce uneven bounce. It nevertheless ruled that the club’s approach to preparing the pitch was unreasonable.
This was Leicestershire’s first substandard pitch rating in the past two years. The immediate sporting cost is severe: the combined loss of 19 match points and the eight-point penalty has dropped the club to the foot of Division One, with the Hampshire match now central to its prospects of remaining in the division.
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