The Cricket Thread

[Paddingtonwolf]

Well then the north needs to work on player retention. I’m sure Somerset have lost players too. Overton springs to mind.

 

[Sniffer]

I’d be happy with the previous name retention.

 

[Tony Towner]

Birmingham has gone, its only Sky that still use it. Just Bears on anything from the club

 

[Sniffer]

It’s a shit schedule for the tournament. Great form in the group to get into the quarters? Ah well can you repeat it 2 months later?
The bears bottle it each year regardless anyway.

 

[Paddingtonwolf]

Well I wonder what clownshow causes that two month break?

The hundred is destroying county cricket

 

[Tredman]

Lack of money and spectators is destroying county cricket. The appetite for longer games is no longer there.

 

[Tony Towner]

That's not true when it comes to domestic T20. Crowds are still healthy, Edgbaston was ¾ full tonight. The issue is the ECB pushing it to the margins for political reasons

 

[Johnny75]

Lack of money and spectators is destroying county cricket. The appetite for longer games is no longer there.

Sticking it behind a paywall doesn't help and making county cricket only accessible to posh twats is reducing the pool of quality cricketers.

The sooner the posh twats are binned from leadership positions the better.

Personally I'd ban pay for tuition schemes and fund the counties properly. But that means a lot of stuffed blazer posh cunts have to die first.

 

[Paddingtonwolf]

fifty over county game used to get crowds. As a second XI competition it now does not.

4 day games were never hugely crowd driven but the best world players came over to play from the seventies onward. Now they don’t because the IPL is the money. However. The test team development is now non existent in the counties too.

So much of it is because the ECB took three vibrant competitions and fucked them all for one shit idea

 

[Johnny75]

fifty over county game used to get crowds. As a second XI competition it now does not.

4 day games were never hugely crowd driven but the best world players came over to play from the seventies onward. Now they don’t because the IPL is the money. However. The test team development is now non existent in the counties too.

So much of it is because the ECB took three vibrant competitions and fucked them all for one shit idea

This just isn't true on any level no matter how much you think it is.

The problem is far deeper.

 

[Tony Towner]

It's the reason the 50 over competition is a reserve competition now, the T20 has had it's knockout stages moved to the Autumn and we didn't play Test cricket last year or next in August. It's not why Championship cricket is struggling though, that's deeper and predates The Hundred by a good decade

 

[Paddingtonwolf]

Really?

I disagree profoundly

I watched Viv and Joel at Taunton. They played in 4 day. 59 and 60 over formats as T29 was yet to be born.

Sachin was at Yorks. Hadlee. Imran Wasim Warne. All played all available county formats.

After the birth of T20 the 60 over format died and was replaced by it.

All the counties still played all formats.

Now half the counties are disenfranchised from the only format the ECB cares about. 50 over is for second XI and the four day loses the best two months of conditions for one thing. The hundred

 

[Johnny75]

Really?

I disagree profoundly

I watched Viv and Joel at Taunton. They played in 4 day. 59 and 60 over formats as T29 was yet to be born.

Sachin was at Yorks. Hadlee. Imran Wasim Warne. All played all available county formats.

After the birth of T20 the 60 over format died and was replaced by it.

All the counties still played all formats.

Now half the counties are disenfranchised from the only format the ECB cares about. 50 over is for second XI and the four day loses the best two months of conditions for one thing. The hundred

I don't have much love for the 50 over format even though that's what I played through my whole cricket playing days.

I think the longer format will always be there and that won't change as that is the real money spinner but as @Tony Towner says the damage was done long before the T20 format was established. The posh twats, public school and cash for tuition has killed progress to the county system and only systematic change is the answer.

Having Strauss, Key and other assorted posh twats in charge is the death knell in the end for quality cricketers in this country.

 

[Deutsch Wolf]

Really?

I disagree profoundly

I watched Viv and Joel at Taunton. They played in 4 day. 59 and 60 over formats as T29 was yet to be born.

Sachin was at Yorks. Hadlee. Imran Wasim Warne. All played all available county formats.

After the birth of T20 the 60 over format died and was replaced by it.

All the counties still played all formats.

Now half the counties are disenfranchised from the only format the ECB cares about. 50 over is for second XI and the four day loses the best two months of conditions for one thing. The hundred

Wasim and Warne aside (and even Warne was pushing 20 years), you're going back way, way, way too far there for it to be relevant

Sachin at Yorkshire was nearly 35 years ago and other examples years before that

 

[Paddingtonwolf]

Maybe it actually is relevant but for a different reason. The IPL is the money tempter for the world stars and they don’t come to the county game now. Which is a shame as they could be a bit of a leveller between the county sides.

That genie is out of the bottle though.

We do need all the counties to be competitive with each other ideally across all formats.

Obviously that isn’t possible in one format as half aren’t allowed to play. And yet must give their players to it so they are weakened in the other formats too.

I really really hate franchise cricket.

 

[Deutsch Wolf]

All this massively pre-dates the IPL and worldwide franchising though (let alone The Hundred).

Looking at your list of names and when they last played county cricket:

Joel Garner - 1986
Viv Richards - 1993
Sachin Tendulkar - 1992
Richard Hadlee - 1987
Wasim Akram - 2003 (very briefly for Hampshire - realistically he's associated with Lancashire and finished with them in 1998)
Shane Warne - 2007

It's just a completely different era, you wouldn't expect players of comparable standard to come over here to play a full season of domestic cricket any more than you'd expect Chris Woakes to play all the England games and also bowl hundreds of overs for Warwickshire like say, Darren Gough or Angus Fraser did in the 1990s for their counties, the landscape isn't the same. There's more international cricket than in the 80s/90s, let alone any other distractions.

Then you have someone like Moeen who is off to play in the CPL now. Of course he's going to do that rather than play 4 day cricket for Warwickshire, when he's retired from Test cricket. Where's the value in him staying here?

If we were talking about the current footballing landscape and someone started banging on about Howard Kendall's Everton...well, it's two different worlds entirely, isn't it.

The County Championship doesn't really rely on overseas stars, I actually don't think it's in too bad health although there is a very definite gap now between teams who are perennially in D2 and those who are largely in D1 - whether that matters or not, I don't know (I mean no-one cares too much that Man Utd are better off than Stockport, do they). It's predominantly there to be a breeding ground for the national team and that has been the case since central contracts were introduced a quarter of a century ago and you could easily argue with how quickly the likes of Brook, Smith, Atkinson, Hartley and Bashir have taken to international cricket in the last two years alone, it's actually working in that sense.

Scheduling will forever be a problem because there are only so many days when you can play cricket in England, and The Hundred doesn't help, having two T20 (basically) tournaments is unnecessary but equally you can't shut off a whole revenue stream for a host of counties who don't have a franchise. But you can't uninvent it, it's howling at the moon to suppose you can. I'm not keen on the 50 over competition being shovelled to the margins but arguably The Blast had long since pushed it into a distant third place on the rostrum anyway. I guarantee you that there were complaints about the domestic calendar in the mid 1980s, they'd just be different complaints.

 

[Paddingtonwolf]

As I remember the complaints were that both the 60 and 50 over tournaments were pretty much all season with the finals at Lords in September, so you were at the mercy of early Autumn. Ideally, one final should have been in August really, but that impinged on the England test season. At least that is how I remember it.

I don't mind the two division county championship. At least the divisions operate in a round robin format so you get home and away against everyone in your division in a season. I don't think that was the case in the era I am getting misty eyed about. But I do think it is a bit short sighted to fire the four day game into the sun for the best six weeks of conditions. Spinners bowling at Taunton in August improves them and also the batsmen facing them, which would help the test team a bit. As it stands, you might as well put cows on Taunton for half of the season.

I also agree that you can't uninvent the Hundred now. However, the words from the ECB about changing the format suggests to me (at least) that there is some recognition that the concept just is flawed. I think it will probably end up being a T20 competition in a couple of seasons. It's what, 25 minutes longer per innings, so I don't think the time constraints are an issue. With the blast not really being pushed as it once was by Sky, then maybe a revised Hundred replaces the Blast, although that would really only annoy the counties on the outside more as they would as you say lose massive chunks of their income.

For me, among its myriad other faults, the big issue with the Hundred was randomly disenfranchising half of the counties and assuming that fans would switch. Am I going to cheer for Welsh fire as a Somerset substitute? Am I fuck.

If the Hundred stays, which surely it will, it needs to involve ALL of the counties. And you can bin off this draft nonsense as well. Counties can use their contracted players in it. Of course, that's my hope and desire, and it won't happen.

 

[Tony Towner]

As I remember the complaints were that both the 60 and 50 over tournaments were pretty much all season with the finals at Lords in September, so you were at the mercy of early Autumn. Ideally, one final should have been in August really, but that impinged on the England test season. At least that is how I remember it.

I don't mind the two division county championship. At least the divisions operate in a round robin format so you get home and away against everyone in your division in a season.

You don't. 10 sides in Division 1, playing 14 games.
Before The Hundred the 50 over final had been ruined by playing it at Lords in September. Win the toss, bowl first and win the game.

 

[Tredman]

Interesting few posts, doesn't seem like there is an easy solution.

 

[Carrotdude]

The thing I don’t get is that even if we ignore the 50 over competition surely there’s a way to get the blast played and finished in a block of time and the hundred in a second block of time. Having a 2 months gap after the groups before the quarters is so bloody stupid. And putting finals day in the middle of an ODI series is even more so.