Two teams will be demoted from the Premier Division this season as the Bermuda Cricket Board tries to improve the game on the Island.

With too many lopsided victories in 2014, the BCB wants to reduce the top flight to six teams in 2016, with an eight-team First Division.

The move is just one of several changes the governing body is preparing to make this season, with the Lindo’s Twenty20 scheduled to be played at the beginning of the year, rather than the end, while there are doubts about what shape, if any, the Belco Cup will take.

“All the decisions we make have to be about benefiting cricket and moving [the national team] forward,” Nyon Steede, the BCB vice-president, said. “If it means upsetting some people, then sometimes you have to do that in order to get to where you need to be.”

The board hopes to start the season at the beginning of April, however the Bermuda Football Association’s decision to push its season until the second week of that month could hold things up. It is also hoped that the postponed Lindo’s T20 final from last year, between Southampton Rangers and Willow Cuts, will be the first game on the schedule.

Where that leaves the Belco Cup is still to be determined, although there were complaints about the expanded nature of the 2014 competition, which had teams compete for a trophy that has been contested traditionally between the sides that finish in the top four of the Premier Division.

“We haven’t really discussed the Belco Cup,” Steede said. “It’s that balancing act between the sponsor wanting to do a bigger tournament and what’s in the best interests of cricket. Sometimes you have to make those difficult decisions, if the sponsor wants to go one way, and it’s not in the best interests of cricket and we say no, then you run the risk of possibly losing sponsorship.”

That desire to improve the game, and have the Island’s “top cricketers playing more competitive cricket” will drive much of what the BCB do over the next couple of months when it comes to scheduling.

The Board also hope to resurrect an elite competition above the Premier Division, recognising that the gap between a weak domestic game and international cricket is as big as it ever was.

David Moore, the former Bermuda coach, tried something similar several years ago, but to little effect. A combination of player apathy and too few good players on the Island killed the four-team competition before it really had a chance to take root.

The Board want to solve those problems by cutting it down to two teams, who would play a best of three series and a Twenty20 match, and giving the players a financial incentive to be involved. On the other side, any player who wants to be involved, and is chosen, will have to make themselves available for the national team.

Domestically, the Board plan on there being fewer meaningless fixtures too, with the side that finishes fifth in the Premier Division this season facing a promotion/relegation play-off against the side that finishes second in the First Division.

With the focus on giving players the ability to play more games, the six-week waiting period that was installed for late transfers has been dropped, although players who move in the second late transfer window, between the start of the season and Cup Match, will have to played three games or fewer for their first club that season.