A(nother) call for more downtime

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Photo by Sarah Ansell

For players mostly, but also for fans.

Our latest Wisden piece delves into how Jonathan Trott went from his normal run-gathering self in early 2013 to down and out by the end of the year. It also takes a quick look at how his Warwickshire team-mate ended up worn down by international cricket by his early-30s.

It also highlights that 2021 schedule we were on about the other day.

DON'T BE LIKE GATT!

Mike Gatting wasn't receiving the King Cricket email when he dropped that ludicrously easy chance against India in 1993.

Coincidence?

Why risk it when it's so easy to sign up?

12 comments

  1. Oh come on, I just finished commenting on the last post. We are not robots, you know? We cannot just go from blogpost to blogpost without rest.

    1. Humans wind down, they don’t switch off. There’s no time for this in 2021, so some players will probably go a bit bonkers.

      1. I agree with the last point in that article. I care more about my own downtime than the player’s downtime.
        That is a strong reason to have less matches

  2. “Imagine a film that’s 100 per cent action sequence”

    Mad Max: Fury Road?

    1. I’m impressed; I’ve never spent three whole days in Leicester. Well, maybe the very first few.

      Weird that the only two games Leicester have lost this season were the ones where they ended up 200+ runs ahead on first innings.

      Apparently you weren’t the only person impressed by Chappell; he reportedly has seven counties trying to get him to leave Leics. I’ll be happy as long as he doesn’t head up the M1 to the next stop – so doubtless that’s where he’s going. I’d even take Warks in preference.

  3. As for cricketers getting downtime, what with all these T20 leagues all over the place – the latest being a bunch of Aussies playing in Canada, in one of those odd tournaments where players nominally represent different provinces but they don’t seem to have any link to it bar the shirt they are wearing and all teams play at the same venue anyway so it isn’t as if they even have a homeground in the place they’re supposedly playing for, or have even ever been there – I was surprised to learn that Abdul Razzaq was playing for Eagles in the NPL T20 (that’s the Norwegian Premier League, which features a surprising number of pro players).

    I thought well, if professional cricketers keep turning up for increasingly generic teams (the NPL also has “Tigers” and even yet more “Knight Riders”) in utterly random leagues, no wonder they’re knackered and we’ve run out of attention span to follow their exploits. You wonder how they remember who they’re playing for or even what country they’re in.

    Then I discovered Abdul Razzaq has been playing Norwegian club cricket on and off since 2001. An internet search of videos for “abdul razzaq norway” provides some refreshingly batty clips. Approaching two decades of ties to one of cricket’s more scenic backwaters is quite impressive. So I take it all back* – good on you, sir.

    *Well almost, still not convinced all globetrotting cricketers, at all times during matches, actually know where they are or who they’re playing for. We’re the ones in blue are we? Is it “Knight Riders” again, or was that in the last continent?

    1. The team names are bit unimaginative, aren’t they? Why always Knight Riders? There are plenty of other David Hasselhoff programmes they could name teams after.

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