No 135, Aug 29: The Grumbler's County Cricket Newsletter
🟢 County Championship previews 🔴 Notts, Surrey, Somerset, Northants signings 🟣 Pics of Lancs new ground 🟤 Teflon Tom returns 🔵 Yorks takeover bid from IPL team 🟠 Derbyshire win after 1,800 days
While the race for the County Championship title seems almost run, there is real tension building over the second relegation spot from the top flight and both promotion places from Division Two.
Championship games are coming thick and fast now. It is so much more exciting than either of the Test series this summer. Perhaps we are starting to see this reflected in ticket sales. Given that despite all the shiny new toys it is this old form of cricket that still bankrolls the English game, for now at least, this can only be bad news
Still, enjoy the Tests this week and enjoy the final few weeks of the season.
PS Congrats on Derbyshire for doing this…
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County Championship - previews
Click on a different team for a different preview
Division One
Essex vs Worcestershire
Lancashire vs Hampshire
Nottinghamshire vs Surrey
Somerset vs Durham
Warwickshire vs Kent
Division Two
Glamorgan vs Leicestershire
Gloucestershire vs Northamptonshire
Sussex vs Derbyshire
Yorkshire vs Middlesex
County Championship 2024 Round 11 Preview: Who Will Win In Each Division
Kookaburra ball returns for next two County Championship rounds | The Cricketer
County Championship: Derbyshire beat Glamorgan for first County Ground win in 1,803 days | BBC Sport
Worcestershire Red Ball Festival of Cricket a success | Worcester News
A Right Royal Romp [Scarborough reflections] | David Pendleton
Could Essex and Hampshire cop ECB punishment for trading bonus point-denying declarations? | Wisden
Players - signings, contracts etc
Kyle Verreynne: Nottinghamshire sign South Africa international | BBC Sport
Dom Leech to join Northamptonshire CCC | Yorkshire County Cricket Club
Somerset bowler Alfie Ogborne to join Kent for final games | Somerset County Gazette
Virdi joins Worcestershire on loan | Kia Oval
Ian Holland joins Leicestershire Permanently | Hampshire CCC
Miles Hammond signs one-year extension at Gloucestershire | Gloucestershire Cricket
Eddie Byrom: Glamorgan opening bat out for the season with leg injury - BBC Sport
Jos Buttler - England captain eyes Blast QF injury comeback | ESPNcricinfo
News, Views and Interviews
England call up 6ft 7in Josh Hull after Mark Wood limps out of Sri Lanka series | The Guardian
I found the debate sparked by this selection quite fascinating.
We know that success in the Championship does not align closely with the requirements for modern international cricket. However, for me, it is an overstatement to say they are mutually exclusive. Or at least, they do not have to be.
For a start the debate is normally centred on bowlers, that is only half the team. And, in the main, a good player is a good player.
Underperformers at county level, like Hull and Zak Crawley, dominate this conversation. It is a good angle for discussion. But most of the England team would be the top contributors in the county game given the chance. And it is nothing new to see players with excellent county numbers incongruent with the demands of the international sphere. Funnily enough, I would put Rob Key into this category.
Josh Hull may have only made a handful of appearances for Leicestershire and has poor numbers. Therefore, it raises eyebrows for some to see him selected above, say, Sam Cook. However, we know Hull is bigger and quicker but, more importantly, a left-hander who can swing the ball. Every team prizes the latter qualities and we know this England set up targets the former.
Yet Hull or Cook or anyone else are only on England’s radar because of the county system. The Leicestershire bowler’s few first-team appearances are part of a journey that started years before. The production of any player is based on a decade of decisions made by gatekeepers and coaches in the county pathway.
I am not saying these do not need reform and re-aligning. For me, the outstanding, cost-effective success of SACA’s last-chance saloon is far more of an indictment of their abilities than Hull’s inclusion.
I have always thought it is a weak, short-term argument to defend the County Championship solely by saying ‘they produce players for the England Test side’. The competition must have value as a sporting event otherwise, as we find now, it gets pushed and pulled around to the point of meaninglessness. When you have pink balls, Kookaburras, the flattest of flat tracks, different bonus points incentives year-on-year, dictated selections and late pull-outs you start to undermine your own broad-based institution of cricketing education. Especially when term time only exists in the months not conducive to learning. Or spectating for that matter.
And when, as has happened in recent years, the Test game becomes less valuable then the Championship’s reason for existing all but disappears.
It has been argued that ten teams could fulfil the talent creation function for the England set-up across all formats. Then again, recent, much-hyped talent spots Rehan Ahmed and Shoaib Bashir both moved from Test-hosting counties to ‘smaller’ ones before getting their England calls. If little old Leicestershire are the first against the wall when the franchise revolution bites then where do the Hulls and Ahmeds of the future come from?
It is a long hard road to re-inject the domestic game with any value. It has only ever had that sporadically and the ECB would argue you-know-what is their version of achieving that.
But they have used a hand grenade when they only needed a chisel.
And, most importantly, a broad-based agreement over what the game is actually for.
Derbyshire Cricket - Peakfan's blog: So what next for Derbyshire?
Former Shark heads for the Paralympics | Sussex Cricket
Cricket's part in Oasis going supersonic | The Cricketer
Guigsy, the original bassist, is reportedly more into cricket than music.
Yorkshire in £50m takeover bid from IPL side Sunrisers Hyderabad as Rajasthan Royals talks stall
NFL Private Equity Vote to Allow Passive Minority Investments | Sportico
As we knew, Yorkshire are open to takeover offers. They will need to demutualise first, which may be a high hurdle to leap. So stories of being skint followed by big money offers will help to facilitate that.
More widely, the timeline for sales of franchises in you-know-what has been supposedly delayed until the first quarter of 2025. But potential investors caught games last month and the ECB will be having initial conversations in the coming weeks.
Reportedly the interested parties are IPL teams and private equity. They can purchase 49 per cent but I have always assumed they will want a hefty chunk of the remaining 51 to gain a controlling interest and enact their plans.
Otherwise, they may feel as if they are buying a very expensive season ticket.
Just this week, the NFL loosened their rules over private equity ownership to 10 per cent. Even the poorer and less popular US sports limited it to 30 per cent.
Obviously, there is a major difference here. NFL make big money. The least profitable team scooped $73m profit last year while the Dallas Cowboys cleared $0.5bn.
US sports is a different beast with franchises, drafts controlling the supply of players, salary caps and the security of no relegation.
It is all designed for the owners to retain control. This is something the ECB are selling.
County Championship: Why outgrounds are first-class cricket’s future | Times
The pitch curator's job is a different ball game these days | ESPNcricinfo
Club cricketer faces 137 balls for 0 in drawn match - BBC Sport
English village stakes claim to be the real ‘cradle of cricket’ | FT
Think catch, not save: inside the art of boundary fielding | Cricket Monthly
Test cricket's flawed and farcical ball-changing system needs fixing | Telegraph
This needs fixing in county cricket too.
I am tired of captains persistently pushing umpires to change an ageing ball when they are not getting wickets then, all of a sudden, they go ‘bang-bang’.
It is a system that is gamed by every captain and badly abused by a couple I have seen in Division One over the past few seasons.
Limits are required.
World players’ union wants reform in ‘broken, unsustainable’ cricket calendar | The Guardian
ICC could introduce dedicated fund to reinforce Test cricket outside Big Three | ESPNcricinfo
Teflon Tom Harrison helping to fix cricket? Really? His tenure at the ECB helped break the English game, leaving it to others to try and put it back together again
Then again cricket continues to reward failure with new roles.
Giles Clarke let Allen Stanford park his helicopter at Lords in 2008. Four years earlier he had led the ECB’s push to put English cricket behind Sky’s paywall. He was also part of the ICC carve-up that ensured the big three - England, Australia and India - would get more of the spoils at the expense of small nations, as detailed in the movie Death of a Gentleman.
(See the intro about the lack of competitiveness of Sri Lanka and the West Indies this summer. And this story ICC plans multimillion-pound boost for Test cricket via dedicated cash fund | The Guardian. )
Also, this happened…
On 25 September 2007, Clarke was elected Chairman of the ECB
and re-elected in 2009
and re-elected again in March 2012 for a further three years
April 2015, Clarke was nominated as the inaugural President of the ECB, with the primary role of representing the ECB at the ICC
Clarke was appointed a CBE in the 2012 New Year’s Honours for "services to cricket”.
As a subsequent chair of the ECB, Colin Graves was a driving force behind you-know-what. Here’s a backgrounder on how that was handled. He was chair of Yorkshire between 2012 and 2015, part of the period for which the club was later sanctioned for bringing cricket into disrepute and failing to act over allegations of racism.
He is back as chair at Yorkshire, and has come under fire by a local MP over plans to demutualise. Something he had previously said he would not do. (He has also stated he will not profit from the sale).
The MCC’s much-heralded Cricket Connects event this summer, a conference designed to shape the future, was the same old privileged faces talking about the same old things. Here are details. There are precious few new voices here but I am sure the food was great.
Remember Harrison left with his bonus not long after the ECB had made redundant 62 staff and just after signing a TV deal that tied the hands of the incoming regime to his pet tournament.
I am not trying to paint a picture of cartoon baddies, promoted by accident, thick as mince and motivated by malevolence. Even Harrison can point to success in the television deal and the ECB’s Covid response.
But, from a distance of decades, you have to look at the leadership of cricket in England as ineffective, money-orientated and drawn from a perilously narrow section of society.
This is a major reason why so many people have given up on the game.
The H*ndred is glorious anti-cricket | The Spectator
Take out the word “glorious” and you’re spot-on.
Gloucestershire appoints new Chair and Elected Member to Executive Board | Gloucestershire Cricket
Why Olympic Qualifiers Are Needed For Cricket Ahead Of Los Angeles 2028 | Forbes
Aerial view shows new Lancashire Cricket site at Farington progress | Blog Preston
Laura Charles-Price appointed Head of Talent Pathways | News | Gloucestershire Cricket
“Upon taking up her new role, Laura will become the first and only female in County Cricket to hold a joint Heads of Talent Pathways position and will lead the Club’s strategy for ensuring young cricketers, both boys and girls, have a clear and effective route to becoming professional athletes.”
And finally….
The story of this newsletter
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