No 54, Jun 16 - The Grumbler's County Cricket Newsletter
🟠 Yorkshire & former players charged 🟢 Willey returns to Northants ⚫️ Moeen, Sibley to move? 🔴 Chesterfield of dreams? 🔵 YouTube stream hacks 🟣 Why great Tests are art 🟤 All my cricket podcasts
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Suddenly, everything feels a little better. England win a hard-fought Test in front of a packed house by playing positive cricket then the latest round of the Championship enjoys a clutch of tight finishes and somehow all seems good in the world. (Trent Bridge even sold 1,300 tickets to Friday’s Blast game to those who enjoyed free tickets on the final day.)
For me, this warm glow of sporting satisfaction is only created by depth and context. I enjoy T20 cricket and the big-hitting the shortest format commands. I have seen hundreds of games live or in-person but 99 per cent of those bashes over the boundary have been forgotten. Yet I’ll probably remember Joe Root ramping Tim Southee for six until my dying day.
Put simply, England’s victory means more because it is a meandering story layered with nuance and subtlety. On Days One and Two there seemed very little chance of a victory. Little moments and mini-dramas built the story - Mitchell and Blundell’s stand, Pope answering his critics, Leach not answering his, the sublime Joe Root, the Southee run out, even Potts telling his team-mates that massive six had fallen into a pint of beer. Then came Bairstow. England ground it out, stuck it out and beat a side whose own doggedness in the past few years has turned them into World Test champions. This New Zealand team are one of cricket’s greatest over-achievers. And they have done it without being dickheads. Something you feel is almost impossible in elite sport these days.
To win on the pitch, the psychological recipe seems to be aggression, challenge everything, have an edge and bend every rule to breaking point. New Zealand have bucked that trend. If they went in for this type of thing they might even call it their ‘brand’.
Off the pitch, it is the marketers who ruin everything as usual. The focus is on the shorter, faster, brighter and younger. I like seeing sixes so the assumption is that I want more of them, all the time, in every game. But the biff, bang, wallop of the Blast is merely an entertaining diversion. Just like those thrill-a-minute, adrenaline-pumped movies such as Mission Impossible and the Fast and the Furious. Such popcorn is fine but if the hero is constantly clinging to a cliff edge or endlessly shooting their way out of impossible situations then you become numb to the danger and oblivious to their peril. Plot development, meaningful stories and three-dimensional characters make you care. These require time and space to develop. Often it is so slow and subtle, a gesture here and expression there, that you might need to watch the movie again to fully appreciate the filmmaker’s art.
There is no auteur in sporting contests. The story is organic and uncontrolled, albeit laws and regulations can be tweaked to make serendipity that bit more likely. But, after five days of plot development, when the story arc comes to a satisfying conclusion in the final session of the final day, the result is both memorable and meaningful.
At its greatest, sport is art.
Player News
David Willey to return to Northamptonshire at the end of 2022 season (Cricinfo)
This is a surprise but, at the same time, excellent news. As the article suggests, Northants are an unfashionable county and, with so many players out of contract, fans might have been fearing an exodus not celebrating a major addition. Vasconcelos was made captain this year but is coveted by a number of counties including Somerset while Josh Cobb’s short-form skills are exceptional.
Willey's quotes suggest an emotional pull to Wantage Road. I do not doubt that. But I would speculate that Yorkshire may need to cut the wage bill along with many other costs very soon.
His Instagram post, below, suggested the county have “prioritised restoring their reputation”. Yorkshire deny this but then they would, wouldn’t they?
That is why I was staggered to read their interest in Moeen Ali.
This story seems much more plausible…
Warwickshire make moves to sign Moeen Ali and Saqib Mahmood (and Ed Barnard) (Cricketer)
This piece adds that Dom Sibley has turned down a new contract and has been subject to an approach from another county. I feel sure he'll return to Surrey, but they are not the ones who have been in contact.
No return to Gloucestershire this season for Naseem Shah (Cricketer)
Visa delays scupper plans for Mujeeb Ur Rahman to join Middlesex (Cricketer)
Boo and double boo.
Counties make short-term signings to cope with demands of schedule (Cricinfo)
Nathan Sowter to leave Middlesex CCC at the end of the season (Cricket World)
Worcestershire's Ben Cox takes break from cricket to address mental health (Cricketer)
Perhaps we can thank Marcus Trescothick but cricket seems to be ahead of the other sports in treating mental health issues the same as physical ones. There’s a problem affecting your game so you step out, get well again and come back. Football, for example, is not as open as this and the flak that Emma Raducanu got after the nature of her Wimbledon exit last year was unkind and unfair. I suspect the knives will be out again in a week or so if she fails in the early rounds
But she was not mentally weak when she won the US Open, was she?
News, Views and Interviews
Wisden’s team of the T20 Blast so far (Wisden)
Counties threaten to ban fans after spike in drunken disorder (Times) ($)
The junk food of cricket? (Morning Star)
The Morning Star? The most socialist thing in cricket are the drafts in the IPL and you-know-what. They are pure Marx -"from each according to their ability to each according to their need". But I suspect that is not something that Kevin Pietersen, a big fan of both events, would go along with.
Meanwhile, here are some of my favourite reports from the Championship games this week
Craig Overton felled by twin brother as Somerset batting lands in a heap (Cricinfo)
Toby Pettman, Mark Watt underline value of opportunity that the county game affords (Cricinfo)
Chesterfield left dreaming of glories as Derbyshire down high-flying Middlesex (Cricinfo)
Paul Edwards was clearly inspired by Chesterfield. His report was simply marvellous, you do not read paragraphs like this in reports on other sports.
"While you are eating your cobs and drinking your coffee, you can look again at the sweet chestnut and the sycamores and marvel at the trees' fellowship and think of the consolation offered by conifers that stay green when the rest of their world is grey and the cricket ground is sleeping."
County cricket offers more runs for your money (Guardian)
County cricket: Green shoots of progress as runs aplenty in Spring (SW Londoner)
Can cricket clubs be better at attracting more spectators? (Cricket Yorkshire)
This is about club cricket, mainly in Yorkshire, but it smacks of the general loss of community in UK society. We recently had a street party for the Jubilee. I met the people from about a dozen houses in my crescent for the very first time... 10 years after moving in.
Matt Parkinson hasn’t forgotten his year with Staffordshire (Express & Star)
Rossouw: I would like to play for SA again (SACricket Mag)
Hadlee, Fleming, Adams … Notts know just how good New Zealanders are (Guardian)
English cricket’s best bowlers aren’t too aged after all (The Economist) ($)
From National Counties to first-class cricket with help from an umpire (East Lothian Courier)
ECB charge Yorkshire and seven individuals following investigation (Cricketer)
There are some big names on this list. Many of those have previously denied or played down their actions. As for Yorkshire, I have been waiting all year for them to be charged. There may well be perfectly valid reasons for the delay and, on all sides, due process must be followed.
However, the tardiness of all this may bring sporting integrity into question or, at the very least, muddy the waters. In mid-season, a committee might be able to predict a points deduction that would assure or avoid relegation. I am not suggesting it introduces bias, it is more about unneccessary and unconcious influence.
But overall, this Yorkshire business is just getting messier and messier. If, as expected, the county pleads guilty then that expedites the process somewhat.
And, of course, the ECB should be throwing the book at themselves for their own failures in this sorry tale.
But, knowing them, they’d probably miss.
Sport Notebook: Pressure on YouTube to stop county cricket streams being hijacked (Times) ($)
These interruptions are soooooo annoying. It happened at the end of an Essex game in the Blast last week. Inevitably, the motivation is money. The report explains “India-based operators of another YouTube stream, which was re-streaming their coverage illicitly, made the bogus complaint to draw in more viewers and then charge them to watch.”
Then again, the bastions of the game are hardly showing the way when it comes to greed (The MCC are facing questions from members over their failure to repay over £3m in furlough money, despite holding £36.5m in the bank and charging up to £160 for Test tickets... with the club paying back just £402k (Daily Mail))
However, if the counties want to monetise their streams then they need to ask You Tube to close a loophole that allows any complainant to shut down a live event, whether the claim is legitimate or not.
When you have to pay, it is a service and you will complain if the provider fails to deliver.
This is an issue for @Robelinda2, who runs the greatest cricket YouTube channel.
I did a Sports Content Strategy podcast with him where we discussed the issue in depth.
While we are on the subject, here are the other podcasts I have produced on cricket over the last five years. They might be of interest. These all link to my website but you can find Sports Content Strategy on all major podcast platforms.
bit.ly/MrRCWestonFox Data analytics at Leicestershire CCC
http://bit.ly/MrRCGupta Kolkata Knight Riders content strategy
http://bit.ly/MrRCMillard The business of the Barmy Army
http://bit.ly/MrRCWeston The European Cricket League
http://bit.ly/MrRCGuerilla The story of Guerilla Cricket
http://bit.ly/MrRCWarren Somerset CCC’s digital content
http://b.link/MrRCDunmore Starting up Major League Cricket
http://bit.ly/MrRCMoody The world’s No1 cricket YouTuber
http://bit.ly/MrRCAkhtar Sarim Akhtar - being a cricket meme
This was a good one, so here’s the Spotify link.
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