GREAT & Little Tew’s withdrawal from the Home Counties Premier League (HCPL) will result in the restructuring of local cricket divisions for this season.

The village club quit the ‘elite league’ for Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Berkshire last week after claiming to have lost more than ten first team players.

As a result, Dinton, relegated last season, have accepted an invitation to remain in Division 2 of the HCPL for 2019.

The Bucks side were set to play in Division 1 of the Cherwell League this summer, with fixture lists already issued to all clubs.

But the decision to keep them in the HCPL will now have ramifications for every division.

The Cherwell League issued a statement to clubs confirming a restructuring process has now started.

It reads: “After close and very cooperative discussions between the committees of the HCPL and the CL, it was decided that HCPL would invite Dinton to remain in Division 2.

“This decision is fully supported by the CL and Dinton have accepted the invitation.

“The upshot of this is that the Cherwell League is now reduced to 100 teams exactly, with 9 in Division 1 and 11 in Division 10.

“As such, we have decided this is a good opportunity to restructure the divisions to ensure that all players in the Cherwell League have the opportunity to play every week.

“This means that there will be a few changes to the previously published league structure and that the fixtures will have to be done again from scratch.

“It is anticipated that we will have the new fixture list out by the end of next week.”

It added: “We appreciate this may cause problems for some of you with regard to publishing fixture cards, booking grounds etc and we will try to support clubs who are affected as best we can.

“But we felt this was by far the most elegant solution to the situation we found ourselves in.”