THE 2019 season is a fresh start on and off the pitch for all at the Emirates Riverside, as the cricket club is being rebranded.

Following the appointment and installation of a new hierarchy, the team will now be known as Durham Cricket.

The club is to have a new identity across all formats of the game.

The original blue and yellow colours will form the basis of the new designs, with the County Championship kits sporting the shield, which has been altered to make it more like the original shield used to represent the county.

With the club now encompassing teams at all levels across the North-East, the new Durham Cricket name will be adopted across the board.

Chief executive Tim Bostock explained: “It’s a bit of a fresh start. The old scrolls and heraldic shields that a lot of counties have got are disappearing. Surrey is now Surrey Cricket and similar with Lancashire, Kent, Middlesex. It’s just a lot cleaner and tidier.

“We thought that at the same time as shaking things up from a playing, coaching and leadership perspective, is it times to shake things up in that respect without losing our badge, we’ve just made it sharper.

“Durham County Cricket CLub and the Cricket Board are merging and we want one Durham Cricket.’’

He added: “It gives us an opportunity to do something with kit, the Lions rather than the Jets for our one-day team. We’ve got a lion and a lioness mascot, not two fighter pilots, so that didn’t work for me. We’d got a red kit for Twenty20, so our training kit’s different and that’s more expense again, so we’ve gone to yellow and blue (limited-overs) shirts and one training kit.’’

Durham are in the last year of their Grays Nicholls contract, so plans are being made to make the club shop bigger and turn it into a real sporting retail store.

The changes have been made at little cost, with no outside agency or consultants involved in the rebranding.

Bostock added: “We just sat in a meeting one day and said, ‘Let’s sex it up a little bit.’ It’s making a statement.

“We didn’t get any brand consultants in because we don’t need to. You can waste a lot of money on that so we did a few iterations, got some members involved and they said, ‘That looks really good, let’s do it.’’

He concluded: “Durham Cricket will cover everything from five-year-olds playing All Stars cricket, through all the clubs in the league, the stuff that the County Board do to the first team, it’s one Durham Cricket, everybody knows what they’re talking about.’’