mad
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BristolBear wrote:
In regards to out ground cricket I just think some places do it better than others. Scarborough is excellent, I’ve really enjoyed Cheltenham, Arundel and the old Whitgift festival in the past. Liverpool, Guildford and Merchant Taylors are really rather poor.
But equally, there are some grounds where what’s put on for fans during CC matches is shocking. Old Trafford is very inhospitable, almost everything closed, stands closed. Bristol not much better in my experience. Whereas the Oval, Hove and Chelmsford are very pleasant with full access, plenty of amenities or easy to walk down the road to grab a bite at lunch or tea.
Agree it's nigh on impossible to set one up from scratch. The legacy ones that have stood test of time are best. Colwyn Bay is sadly not used any longer. Agree about Hove and the Oval. I think Edgbaston is friendly and welcoming especially the personnel (it was good to see a few familiar Edgbaston based stewards up at Old Trafford helping out with their test match last week) who work there it can appear slightly drab in the background for a county match but I'd be happy to forgo one home fixture perhaps every other year to have use of an outground. Someone could spend a year setting it up and then repeat it the following year switching formats. They'd probably have to risk a One day Cup game first and then try a Championship game there the following year a bit like Yorkshire did when they set up their York fixture just before COVID
Part of the charm of outground cricket was/is the slight discomfort/alternative views
Of course with the scarcity of fixtures these days that presents issues. When you had 8 or 9 home championship games per season (and more than that before my time) an outground or two of festival cricket was viable for all counties.
Sadly it is a sign of the reductive and closed minded attitude of some administrators in our game that want to remove the counties altogether and replace with big city entities. Festival cricket was an important part of the branding of the game and widening it's appeal beyond the obsessives and towards the curious. It's absence directly leads to poorer crowds at county matches in general and dwindling memberships everywhere bar Surrey and Somerset. It mirrors the disappearence of the game from free to air, from our state schools and from coffee machine banter in the workplace.
Festival county cricket through the peak summer months or this futuristic 'demonstration sport level' of cricket this lot are trying to shove down our throats? Your choice.
I think a bit of discomfort ain't so bad
BosworthBear wrote:
If they have to reserve wickets for the Hundred why on earth didn't they plan ahead and use an outground?
Especially during the school holidays.
Unfortunately we seem Edgbaston obsessed these days!
Indeed.
The ECB need to shoulder some of the blame for this. Gary Barwell has clearly been instructed to reserve several available decent pitches for the garbage that's to come in August. Imagine the NFL scrapping their fixtures in November and having 4 rounds of 'flag football' plonked there instead
Think there'll be plenty of play. Mostly light showers bit more thundery day 1 but BBC saying low percentage chance most of the 4 days so plenty time to get a result. And importantly doesn't seem to be anything significant overnight that could hold up start of play
Yes thought his contribution in that Kent game was excellent.
He sounds very clued up. With the sound effects I'm not keen on any of them - but it is slogball after all - he probably doesn't get that British sense of humour and the pantomime stuff in general just doesn't seem to land well with many Aussies who have just that little bit of a 'German' sense of humour about them. It's weird because in some ways Australian society is a long way ahead of the UK in terms of attitudes towards equality and respect for all, their women's sports teams professionalism a decade or more ahead of here etc... All this despite the country, certainly it's authorities being slightly more right wing than the UK traditionally has been but in other ways it seems a throwback to the 1970's/1980's at times even after twenty five years exposure to the Barmy Army their efforts at creating atmosphere within games is limited - constant adverts for Milo between overs at test matches notwithstanding - although I think the Barmy Army isn't these days what it was and has become ever so slightly generic and slightly crass at the edges - mirroring wider society sadly - (Ingerlund etc...)
See what Khawaja has said about the ashes crowds. He does have a point imho. When fringe elements of the barmy army are just using the c-word at will it's gone away from what it was for so long a lovely fun way to keep England test side going during bleak times. Sadly once again it's a mirror of UK society and how it has deteriorated really awfully the last 15-20-40 years or so. Then again I'm now an old guy and can recall far worse in bay 13 at the SCG
You can blame Joe public but to me it's the stakeholders that have inculcated this type of fan behaviour at the cricket. We've seen it at blast games with the cheapo tickets when the footy isn't on but obvs people paying 150 notes for a test ticket are no better
They have a very decent recent-ish record at Edgbaston. Usually in April or May with Jimmy available
Interestingly from one of Maxwell's comments in that BBC comms piece it does appear to be the case that they sounded him out about possibly playing in the Essex County Championship game - the one that followed the Blast away games at Durham, Yorkshire and then the Friday night Bears v Pears derby.
Slightly disappointing to hear he rebuffed the idea - seems to suggest he's gone "no chance am I playing a short game Tuesday, Thursday & Friday and then a proper game Sunday to Wednesday".
duplicate post
Interesting chat before the final on 5 live extra. From 10 mins;
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001nvfq
Glen Maxwell spoke well on a range of topics although I think he overegged the "burn out" point a tad
Does the Hundred justify itself if all the best players in it are no better than the players on show at Finals Day in the Blast?
And what is the Hundred's impact on the England 50-over ODi side going forwards if the next generation of England white ball players aren't in it but instead playing a random 100 ball format nobody gives a monkey's about?
SC_Bear wrote:
First time I've felt quite resentful on finals day. Seems perverse that the 2 other white ball comps played over a shorter period guarantee the group winners a semi-final place whilst the only reward for group winners in this comp is the same as coming 2nd i.e a home QF. Not suggesting we'd have gone on to win it but I'm finding it very hard to maintain any interest in an all south finals day brought about by the current format.
Trust me you'd not have wanted to be sat there today it was alright in the shelter of the family stand square of the wicket but soon as I moved round to the traditionally sunny seats christ the wind was chilly. I lasted till half time of this final game
Sitting here just highlights for me how many top county players we as Warwickshire members just don't get to see very often any more compared to 20 years ago. You used to see them all pretty much over the course of a two year cycle. Now not the case at all. Think they could do away with the groups stages for this and just have a proper 17 match league of it with top 4 into finals day and if 17 is too many play some of them abroad pre season
Mikkyk wrote:
What a session, is this where our CC season is reginited?
Have to say that 6th wicket decision looked poor. At the very least hit him outside the line.
Not sure about that. Seemed to square the batter up he's missed the ball and struck him perhaps umpires call on off stump. Hard to see from the video but might have just clipped the front pad before thudding into the back pad at which point it looks like it's hitting outside the line but that fraction of a second is ommited from the frames in the video. I'd say it's close enough and defnitely not too high. Reasonable enough decision. Labuschagne got one 2 years ago off Darren Stevens down there everyone went mad about but again to me it looked close enough to be given. Batter has little to complain about other than he's just missed the ball and the pads have stopped it clipping off stump
Certainly makes sense if they're only going to show 2 QF's live in future.
The other way is to use a system similar to the Big Bash and have a preliminary final between the two group winners - this season that would've been Somerset v Warwickshire. Winner of that goes straight to finals day. Loser gets another chance as they play in the elimination games (like quarter final but only need three of them) to see which three sides join the winner of the first game
Sounds complicated but it rewards group winners with two bites at reaching Finals Day
Cynically one might suggest they don't want county championship games on during test matches because it might affect ticket sales for the test matches.
I hope you're right though and next year because there are two tests in August fingers crossed there'll be at least two rounds of Championship Cricket too in August, ideally three
Is a marquee signing that important in the format? Especially considering you only have to finish 4th out of 9 to qualify for the QFs and then it's a bit of a lottery. Away QF might suit Bears better. I think I'd rather play more or less the Royal London squad in the T20 Blast and use it as a development comp from now on. I'm not even sure it would have that much of an effect on the crowds - we'd still get 15k versus Worcester and 10k in a couple of the other group matches/if we had a home QF. Use the money saved in that area to recruit top all round championship and one day players that can play all season
Seems to make no difference whether we sneak into the QFs in 4th place or piss the group. Not sure the format is all that great for supporters of the individual counties. A 14 match group stage followed by a straight 1 match eliminator seems overblown. Certain counties seem to peak at the right time - usual suspects all still involved. I think smaller groups with fewer games would make it easier to swallow losing in the QF every season
And counties placing lots of emphasis on this format (guides recruitment etc...) seems misplaced and frankly silly. Sure the crowds are half decent but one bad game and it's all over for another ten months.
I wish we had a proper limited overs league May thru September to sink our teeth into as county supporters and also a proper knockout cup to dream about trips to the final
Prefer if it was one game a week or straight knockout. I always look forward to watching these games but after seeing one or two they start to get a bit samey all played one after the other. Changes of the season alterations to the grass cover on the wicket and evolving conditions would make it a bit more variable if played as a season long event although they'd probably have to lop off ten overs which wouldn't be the worst idea either
Yes there's a big shelf coming at the end of this summer if we see Jimmy Broad and Woakes all retire at the same time. Curran comes back into the reckoning. How on earth England will miss that lot for home series particularly.
BristolBear wrote:
The class issue I lay purely at the feet of the ECB. They’ve left a huge gulf develop in terms of coaching and funding around the age of 13. State schools don’t have the funding, and coaches will always follow the money like any other profession. And the money is in private schools
I saw a wonderful point from someone on another site, how many dedicated cricket coaches salaries could be paid for from the wages of the players alone in the hundred. Even without the marketing and other crazy costs involved with setting it up, just the players wages could pay for hundreds of dedicated coaches to be kept in state schools and keep the game alive and a wider player pool.
But the coaches are in private schools, those same coaches are often the “pathway” coaches, and it’s easy to see how we get to where we are.
You could agree with local clubs for schools to use their nets and pitches.
Because as good as clubs are when players get to 16 upwards and adult cricket. You need to get to the players when they’re younger, and not have to make parents drive them to training at a club or to matches. Get them whilst they’re at school, they have to be there, get them into the game there. Because some parents won’t consider cricket, won’t take them to a cricket club, so you’ve got to get them into the sport at school age.
Excellent point. The elitism has just meant we have a narrower pool of players to pick from than a country with smaller population like Australia. Because in Australia it has mostly been kept on free to air and not seen as a posh boys sport so it is a viable option for hundreds of kids in all sorts of backgrounds even kids who are from non cricket families - Yugoslav and Greek and Italian communities in Australia from the 1970's onwards have clearly not faced the type of barrier to entry that working class kids of all descriptions have in the UK since the playing fields were sold off, large works were split up so there aren't the factory workplace leagues anymore - miners welfare clubs etc...and then to exacerbate that the promise of 2005 ashes series was squandered when in 2006 the sport hid itself behind a paywall. A generation lost
None of this will make a jot of difference. The very people who have run the sport for the last 15 years will say they've done better than those who ran it the previous 25. Have they???? Sky TV, BBC, ECB, county chief execs at big county clubs all will try to suggest they got a handle on the issue so trust them to come up with the plans to fix the problem. The problem they will suggest rather rudely is the existing members of cricket clubs and the very existence of 'county' cricket itself
You just know they are keen to link this to the rejection (eventually nobody thought it was a good way to reorganize the schedule not even the Warwicks chief executive seemed convinced) of the Strauss Review. We all know it is THESE administrators that allowed the sport to fester in this mess in the first place