In this month's edition of Cricketer magazine the editor Simon Hughes makes the case for the City T20 competition which it seems almost certainly will be part of the English domestic season from 2020. Hughes believes that it is imperative that cricket in this country attracts a new audience particularly drawn from young children and women. He argues that a city based competition with a generous sprinkling of overseas players but minus England's test players, 'well-marketed and staged....minimising laddishness in decent venues will attract women and families and rejuvenate the game. The gains will be much greater than the losses of a few thousand disgruntled county fans.'
It was this last sentence that caused me to take to twitter a couple of weeks ago in a state of dudgeon identifying myself as one of the few and from September when my subscription expires, a former reader of the magazine. With help from Tony and similarly disgruntled persons quite a storm was stirred up which even provoked a response from the editor and several from Huw Turbevill, one of the magazine's contributors. If by fans Simon Hughes means members then their numbers are difficult to calculate but between fifty and sixty thousand seems a reasonable estimate, a sizeable number to lose and a challenging number to replace with a new audience.
From 2020 we will have two T20 competitions and as I mentioned in a recent posting the skeleton structure for that season shows that there could be as long as three months without any championship cricket, in other words even more so than at the present the four day game will be confined to April, May and September with high summer and the school holidays set aside for white ball cricket. Can the county championship, the breeding ground for test cricketers, survive this treatment? Until this year we had a nicely balanced competition with an even number of teams in each of the two divisions and everybody played everybody else home and away, but the number of matches has been reduced, eighteen teams have been divided into divisions of eight and ten and we see less and less of our best players.
In spite of these changes and what some see as a sentence of death for a competition dating back to the late nineteenth century the championship in 2017 seems reluctant to leave the stage and has taken on an cloak of unpredictability in both divisions which has produced an unfamiliar look to the tables and some exciting finishes. In Division 1 where promoted clubs have found it difficult to survive, undefeated Essex, last year's Division Two winners, head the pack with three wins under their belt including one earlier this week over Surrey. The struggling Bears go to Chelmsford on Monday and the following week Middlesex visit, two matches for which one assumes Alastair Cook will be available, but after which he is not likely to wear the Seaxes until September 19th. Just three points behind Essex are Yorkshire who on Monday squeezed home by Christmas Eve three runs at Taunton in a finish that I was privileged to hear broadcast on line. Yorkshire go to Lord's next week where the winless champions find themselves well off the pace, 44 points behind Essex and in sixth place. At Old Trafford, Lancashire, currently fourth, entertain Hampshire whose influx of South Africans has helped them mock their reprieved status and who are only 4 points behind Yorkshire.
In Division Two undefeated Notts are setting a cracking pace and will fancy their chances when Leicestershire, spared from bottom place only by Durham's points deduction, visit Trent Bridge. Second Kent meet third Worcestershire at New Road, each with a game in hand on Notts. And adding to the spice of unpredictability, Northants are fourth with four wins chalked up but without a game next week. Bottom of the heap and still in the negative zone are Durham but in each of their last three matches a first win has been possible at the start of the final over of the final day, two of these have gone against them, Northants winning with a ball to spare, Glamorgan with three, and the third drawn when the last Kent pair could not be separated. The return match with Glamorgan starts at The Riverside on Monday as do the other five matches and the following week the even numbers of teams in each division allows all eighteen to be in action and with test players available. Springtime in The Rockies!
Finally I have touched briefly on the impact the loss of Alastair Cook on test duties might have on Essex's prospects of holding on to their lead and of course there are other England certainties like Broad and Anderson who will also be missing championship games from the beginning of July, but who will open with Cook? To find Hameed in the Division 1 batting averages you have to scroll to 75th for 174 runs at 19.33 and Jennings, who cashed in when Hameed was injured during the winter, lies 36th in Division Two averaging a whisker under 40. Skipper Root will I think be reluctant to step up. Names you might like to consider over your Friday evening sharpener include Stoneman, Robson and Westley and let's not forget Jason Roy for clearly leaving him out of a winning side on Wednesday was a mistake.
No comments:
Post a Comment