County cricket news

King Cricket’s county players to watch in 2012

Right, let’s get this over with.

First, let’s restate the qualification criteria:

• Qualified to play for England
• No established internationals
• Youngish
• Playing in the first division of the County Championship

Think that’s it. There might be other things. Who knows? Presumably us, but we don’t like to scrutinise the workings of our own mind in case we damage it. We reserve the right to apply further criteria later on if we feel like it. (more…)

Lancashire are making a proper balls of their first match

At the start of this sentence, Lancashire were 39-4 in their first innings of the season against Sussex. We fully expect five wickets to have fallen before we click publish. We are not unduly concerned by this.

Lancashire won the Championship in an odd way. They didn’t generally look like winning matches most of the time. In fact, we remember them being 39-4 pretty much every week and our memory is famously good (this is not in the least bit true). In 2011, Lancashire’s batsmen had a strong preference for single-figure scores and it would usually be down to one of the lower order to make 53 to salvage something from each innings.

As masterplans go, this probably isn’t sustainable. It is definitely easier to win matches if you’re not selecting five specialist fielders each match. Then again, it’s hard for us to get too concerned until Lancashire actually do start losing. Maybe they need a fraught situation in order to function properly the way most of us refuse to open our eyes at work until we’ve received at least nine physical threats.

CB40 Final match report

Sam writes:

Saturday morning, late September
Cut price tickets through a friend who is a member
South West Trains and then the Bakerloo
Tesco express for a beer or two

First to the Tavern, then to the Warner
Down to the toilets with a window in the corner
Through which you can look and what sights you can see
While you’re standing with the other members doing a wee

Forgot the suncream, didn’t bring a hat
The Somerset fans love to have a chat
Shut up will you please, the teams are on their way
It’s the last game of the season – Lord’s cup final day.

Opening with a spinner? What a novel thought
Davies gets a stumping and Kieswetter is caught
Crack open the sea salt crisps, this might not last for long
I thought it would be closer, looks like I might be wrong

But wait, look, here’s Jos Buttler – what a funny name
He might be only 21 but he plays a cracking game
He scoops it over fine leg, he cracks another four
What a super innings, you couldn’t ask for more.

We started up a sweepstake on how many they’d get
I’m not a gambling man but I thought I’d have a bet
Turns out my guess was closest, which made me warm inside
And I treated all the losers to a pint of London Pride

Sandwiches at half-time, couldn’t find a bin
Over on the Nursery Ground you could meet Steven Finn
But here they come again and now it’s going to rain
How a bit of water can cause us so much pain

We did a little circuit to keep from getting bored
And soon found out that one of us was taller than Stuart Broad
Then Duckworth and Lewis came along – are they even real?
By this stage we’d all had a few and didn’t know how to feel

So in the end it finished with a strangely muted tone
Surrey seemed quite happy and we headed quickly home
Soggy and out of pocket, but at least we could say
That was the last game of the season – Lord’s cup final day.

Eight counties in the first division of the County Championship?

Eight counties, 14 matches, home and away against everyone else in the division.

Yeah, we’d be okay with that. Our official stance is that the second division doesn’t count, so it would seem a bit odd to get all het up about them having some mix-and-match half-arsed fixture list of indecipherability down there.

The first division is what counts. The first division is about establishing which is the best county (Lancashire). The second division is really only there so that you can get a vague idea who might have half a chance of being able to compete in the first division next year (Yorkshire).

It’s not ideal, but other than ‘a cup of tea right now this second’, what is?

Chris Gayle to play Twenty20 for someone

In a not-entirely-surprising move, Chris Gayle has signed to play for Somerset in next season’s Twenty20 Cup.

Gayle’s ‘people’ released a statement quoting him as saying:

“I’m delighted to be heading to [insert name of cricket team]. Hopefully I can make a key contribution to their T20 campaign this year.”

Somerset’s director of cricket, Brian Rose, said that Gayle would get into any world T20 XI.

Low-level cricket media nonentity, King Cricket, said that Gayle would only play for a world XI if he was happy with the pay. Otherwise he’d be playing for a Groningen XI that weekend in the Netherlands Super Twenty20 Cup of Superness, because they’d put together a very competitive financial package.

Travel time reclaimed from County Championship

“Hi, I’ve only got seven quid. Could you cut 80 per cent of my hair?”

Some things have to be done in full. Incompletion is unsatisfactory. As another example, if you have some sort of sports competition, it’s preferable to have everyone competing on an equal footing. If each team plays most of the other teams in its league twice and a couple of them once, that doesn’t really work.

Yet that’s what’s happening with the County Championship from 2014. It’s a spectacularly literal and mindless solution to there being too much cricket, like trying to make a Formula One car lighter by removing the brake pads.

Cricket has a staggering ability to present you with a bowl of soil and bones after you’ve given it chicken and mushrooms to work with. It’s like people go out of their way to leave you dissatisfied.

To comprehensively underline the fact that the entire point of the exercise has been missed, there will also be at least 14 Twenty20 matches for each county in 2014. Attendances for the shortest format dwindled in 2011 and there will be a reduction to 10 matches in 2012. This decision is being reversed before the effects have even been seen.

Basically, the days saved by the amputation of two vital first-class fixtures will instead be used so that the nation’s cricketers can sit in buses on their way to a few Twenty20 matches which no-one gives a toss about.

2012 Twenty20 Cup schedule

There’s little point criticising the 2012 county cricket fixture list. They’d made a report saying how they might change it before it had even been released. That said, we still find the Twenty20 Cup schedule bizarre.

They play every day for a month. Then they play quarter finals two-and-a-half weeks later. Then they play the semi-finals and final another month after that.

For a sport so besotted with momentum, they sure know how to screen its calls and forget its birthday.

Why England shouldn’t drop Jade Dernbach

We’ve spent the day badmouthing Jade Dernbach and we’ve previously written that his ‘variations’ often blind people to his deficiencies, but despite both of those things, we still don’t think England should drop him.

Why? He’s shit

No, he isn’t. Calm down.

Jade may have looked pretty shit while bowling slower ball wides and beamers in his final, crucial over against India, but his face told of a man struggling to keep it together.

So he’s shit then

No. Jesus. What’s with you?

Jade Dernbach isn’t the earl of modern one-day bowling, as he was portrayed during the summer, but nor is he shit. He’s a skilful bowler who hasn’t played in front of tens of thousands of roaring fans in India many times before. That’s a tough experience and he went a bit flaky.

Like any normal person feeling that way, he retreated to what he knows best. For us, this would be some sort of social isolation. For Jade Dernbach, it’s his ‘variations’. They’re his strength. They’re what got him into the England side. No matter that they’re going all over the park – if he hasn’t got them, what has he got?

Did I miss the part about why he shouldn’t be dropped?

Dropping him means starting again. Dernbach should be stronger for the experience, whereas Stuart Meaker still has to walk that particular potholed road. Dropping him means wasting today’s experience.

If England truly think Dernbach has qualities they’re looking for – and they do – then they need to condition his brain so that those qualities are more reliably accessible. He has to have these shit games to learn from them – the learning part is non-negotiable, however.

But what if he costs England the next game?

England are 3-0 down in a five-match one-day series that’s taking place a few months after the World Cup. Be honest, how much do you honestly care about this series?

This is the perfect time to test English one-day players. To them, it’ll feel like they’re playing under immense pressure, but none of their supporters will actually be heartbroken should England go down in a blaze of apparent ineptitude.

England have seven one-dayers in India next winter. It is worth persevering with someone. We’re trusting England’s selectors that Dernbach is that someone.

On the same subject, Craig Kieswetter is a little further into his international career, so we’re not sure to what extent the above also applies to him. All we will say is that his keeping today did smack more of meltdown than inability. Make of that what you will.

2011 County Championship players to watch review

Suppose we should take a look at how our 2011 County Championship players to watch fared.

Adam Lyth, Yorkshire

553 runs at 26.33

Yeah, that’s pretty shoddy.

James Hildreth, Somerset

893 runs at 38.82

That’s okay.

Ben Stokes, Durham

628 runs at 48.30 and 17 wickets at 33.00

Three hundreds, five sixes in five balls against Hampshire and selection for England. We’ll have that one.

Adil Rashid, Yorkshire

556 runs at 24.17 and 39 wickets at 43.38

Less than amazing, but we’re not losing faith in him, even if we’ll have to ignore him next year because he’ll be in the second division. Life isn’t slow, steady progress, it’s fits and starts and going backwards and forgetting where your car keys are and having a pain in your knee and not knowing whether that hoummus is okay to eat or not – THAT’S what life is.

Adil Rashid is 23-years-old. Writing off leg-spinners or batsmen when they’re 23 is moronic. Shane Warne made his Test debut at 23 and took 1-150. Rashid still has a long career ahead of him.

Paul Horton, Lancashire

1,040 runs at 37.14

That doesn’t read all that impressively and nor did Horton hit any hundreds, but it’s worth looking at the context. Horton scored the most runs for Lancashire this season. Being as Lancashire won more games than anyone, clearly Horton was making runs that mattered, it was just that they were low-scoring games.

A run doesn’t have a set value, it varies depending on the match. Paul Horton had a good season, although that would be a bit more obvious if he’d managed to add a handful to any of his biggest innings. At various points this year, he hit 93, 94, 95, 96, 97 and 99.

Oliver Newby, Lancashire

Eight wickets at 32.50

Didn’t break either leg at any point this season.

Are you convinced by Jade Dernbach and his variations?

We’re not making a point of criticising England’s newer bowlers. We’re just pointing out that we aren’t living in a bounteous land of champagne fountains and gold furniture. Players are being talked about as if they’re staggeringly gifted when they’re not.

The English treat one-day cricket like some mystical oddity. ‘There must be some secret behind 50-over cricket or why else are we so perennially gash at it?’ we think to ourselves.

If you conclude that the secret is all to do with reverse sweeps and slower balls, a player like Dernbach can seem like the answer to your prayers. What he does is eye-catching. A 75mph off-cutter slower ball is followed by a 65mph back-of-the-hand slower ball and then a 90mph in-swinging yorker. He’s mixing it up. He’s keeping the batsman guessing. It’s the future of cricket.

And yet is it? Dernbach is clearly a talented bowler, and we’re in favour of his playing more one-day cricket, but the notion that England’s one-day bowling attack is suddenly built around him just doesn’t stack up for us.

Various commentators and pundits were oohing and ahhing about his ‘variations’ during the one-day series against India. No-one seemed to notice that he took four wickets in as many matches and went at seven an over. Powerplays and rain reductions make that hard to properly analyse, but it ain’t earth shattering.

It seems like many focus on the eye-catching headline qualities of Dernbach and don’t evaluate the whole article. He’s talented and seems to cope okay with nervy situations, but he’s a long way from being Malcolm Marshall.