Impressed with both Hamza Shaikh (15) and Amir Khan (16) today and also the ground is up another notch with the seating and boundary fence as well as the humungous net at the Cape Hill End to prevent sixes leaving the ground. Can't be many county sides with a second XI/development ground like that. Like a mini Loughbrough now. Benjamin right on the stroke of lunch silly way to get out big booming drive when he should just block it out. Quite a dark green pitch and tomorrows weather won't alter things much

Was informed earlier today that Notts, Lancs and Essex are the reciprocal counties for Warwicks members to gain entry for CC matches. Of course not if/when Warks are playing there. Derbyshire apparently not this year so will seek confirmation on that.

Updated - only Notts and Lancs but both represent great news for Warks members

https://edgbaston.com/warwickshire-ccc/member-info/#benefits also suggests Essex

A mix of three and four day games might be what we end up with again if the counties and Strauss/ECB and the players cannot agree to a sensible schedule for 2023 with all 4 day matches. There obviously needs to be more championship cricket in July and August than has been scheduled last couple of years and one way of fitting in a couple more rounds there whilst preserving all this free time the players now have to play golf/watch their favourite Premier League team, is to have a few rounds of 3 day matches. It would be seen as a backward step by many and they'd be right and it woud probably only last 1 season before they got rid of those rounds altogether and went back to just having CC games in April, May and September but only 10 of them instead of the 14 we are fortunate to still have. Can CC cricket survive in those months competing with football season? Either the Hundred has to go or CC will die basically

Agree with that about the lack of advertising although it is worth pointing out that the people in charge of marketing this format of the game at Edgbaston are trying, they do lots of social media these days etc... in a desperte effort to make up for the fact we don't really have any local press around here anymore - The Evening Mail is a shell of an organisation now compared to what it was 15-20 years ago. Thank lord for local BBC radio or else Warwicks would get no coverage at all we all know the national media are only interested in Surrey, Lancs and Yorkshire that hasn't changed and likely never will. Also the marketing dept for county cricket really are fighting an uphill battle aren't they. Thursday and yesterday were bloody freezing, People don't really think about cricket until May or possibly last week in April and then it's June, July and August when county attendances used to increase as folks had no football to go to at the weekend.

Cricket also has multiple audiences and over the last 20 years its members have become steadily older and tended to be more inclined to go on a Monday or Tuesday rather than the weekend when they have other commitments - seeing the grandkids etc... Younger potential fans also tend to have less 'dossing time' to be able to get into the sport too they are saddled with debt as graduates so lose those 3-4 months in summer to while away at the cricket instead doing all sorts of casual work so wheras in the 90's you'd have maybe a couple hundred 18-30 year olds on a Saturday and younger kids going on a Sunday these age groups are in the single or at best double digit figures now.

I would love to know how many 'life memberships' the club has these days. Used to be loads in the 90's/early 2000's as folks retired from work and bought one keeping their fingers crossed that they might get 15-20 years use of it. Again there is no incentive for retired folks in 2022 to purchase life memberships anymore if cricket is mostly in April and September plus these will be folks who were in their 40's and 50's when cricket started being hidden behind a paywall so there are far fewer older people now as a % of the general population who are actually into county cricket. All this will take years to fix and sadly there seems little prospect the folks in charge of the game are interested in addressing these issues.

It is a difficult sport to be invested in for the average punter though. No wonder numbers have dwindled. David Hopps article on the day's events today is a thoughtful one not so much a negative about the Bears approach/play in this case but more a lament about where the game is now. Why isn't county cricket England's summer sport anymore? For the majority of the sports public cricket hasn't even registered yet this year and that's for folks who are actually into the footy, rugger and motor racing (and yes, plenty will have T20 tickets or a ticket to a test match) let alone those who can't get into sports.

For those with somewhat of a passing interest today if they had a spare day and were at a loose end would have held little appeal either. For those who are fans from the past lapsed members etc.. they might consider today had the weather played ball or had something tangible been riding on it or had it been promoted better or even publicised at all?!! and so on and so on

For Saturdays/any days for that matter - to work it needs to be regularised for folks to get used to it over time again like folks were in the mid 1990's Saturday attendances at Edgbaston and Worcester were healthy and made up of some of the folks (older perhaps) who'd been on the Thurs/Fri topped up by a fair few hundred folks who had been at work all week

Home one Saturday, away the next and so on and so forth - it used to work. As did having a family fun day Sunday League competition and finishing day 4 of the CC match on the Monday which was a good place to have Day 4 as on occasion the game wouldn't last that long. Mainly though it was the regularity of home-away-home-away from the last week in April until the first week in September and throughout the peak summer months which helped build up a steady following of the proper game.

They could replicate this now by having a proper T20 league on Sundays if they thought about the spectators but the problem is the spectators are no longer anywhere near a priority. Centralised TV contracts are the priority these days hence the need for blocks of single formats making for a choppy stop-start kinda season with no rhyme or reason and no incentive for the average sports fan or retired person to follow in the local press or on the local radio or for young folks to get the gist of.

Crowd was okay up to and around the lunch interval (as good as previous days) but it was much cooler than Friday and it became more and more clouded over in the afternoon plus football, golf and the grand national on so thinned significantly. An excellent three sessions of top class first division county championship cricket for me. On the whole their bowlers were much better than ours in terms of a threat - like yesterday there wasn't much that beat the bat - very few nicks or lbw shouts at all this game and Topley/Roach tended to just bowl full and stright with the occasional bumper - although Jordan Clark got a bit of lift and movement towards the very end a few edges began flying through the slip region - their use of the new ball alongside the game situation was more in Surrey's favour but it helped they had bowlers fit and firing to come in for 3rd and 4th spells wheras Brookes and Rhodes for me looked a bit undercooked yesterday so we had to rely on Briggs for any sort of control and save bowling OHD to death.

Maybe one for the purists but I can't see any reason for negativity about the team over the last 3 days (christ the Cricinfo bloke doing reports on Warwicks in this game sounds so downbeat about Warwicks in general - although to be fair to him he did point out England couldn't half have done with a bit of the spirit and doggedness Warwicks have shown over the past 12 months) The team is by no means the finished article but once again have fought as they did for much of last season and on this occasion against much more hyped opposition suppose that goes with the territory for Surrey hype follows them and they do look a good side perhaps too easily blunted on good pitches though

Thought they all bowled quite well in the morning session. Rhodes and Miles unable to offer any control however and Brookes deteriorated in the middle session. He will improve as he gets more games into his legs. Whether that is enough only time will tell. Credit to Surrey and Foakes in particular today made the most of helpful conditions yesterday morning when it was nigh on impossible to bowl and field to a high standard and cashed in today by being careful first hour and not chasing runs just putting the loose ones away. On the whole the players stuck at it I thought against a better all round batting line up than any they'd faced in 2020 or 2021

Sorry to interrupt the thread but does anyone know if Warwicks have any reciprocal agreements with other counties for the CC games this season like we did when we were in Div 2 and also in 2019? I know Notts members have it and can watch today's game for free also Hants have one with Gloucestershire and Essex. I was thinking of going to a game next Thursday if the weather is nice either Derby or Notts as it's a week off for Warwicks.

Below is taken from the preview of Durham’s fixture away to Glamorgan - starting tomorrow - by BBC Radio Newcastle’s Martin Emmerson. TMS during the week had Farbrace and Moores defending County championship cricket and the 14 games minimum needing to be kept. Farbrace suggested need to return to 3 competitions not 4 so one of the Limited Cricket comp's needing to be removed from the schedule.

Here we go again. Another six months of county cricket beckons and Durham begin their 2022 campaign at Sophia Gardens where they hope to get - what should be a promotion crack - off to a good start. They meet a Glamorgan side who they beat in September last year, but who have added a few decent signings over the winter.
However there’s to be yet another ECB review into the structure of First Class cricket following another run of the mill hammering in The Ashes. And the defeat by The West Indies. All of it nothing new! Call me a cynic, but the fact England have only won one test in eons suggests the issue might be at the heart of their set-up and not the county structure.
On the BBC county cricket podcast this week Peter Moores pointed to the fact lots of support structures which were in place for England players, like regular winter sessions at Loughbrough and fast performance bowling courses, are no longer there. The system was designed to mirror the Australian Academy but has shrunk.
However, us lovers of county cricket know it is an easy stick to be beaten with and the usual voices have been making the usual noises about the usual England predicament.
One thing’s for sure though, working for the ECB review team looks like a job for life because those reviews come along so regularly. But what we still don’t know is if there will be two sides promoted at the end of the season or not. The elite review will take place in the summer. There have been reports of a 12-team elite league and a lesser league for the six remaining counties. The ECB denies this is a done deal though and says all options are on the table.
There’s been far too much tinkering with the game in recent years and too much concentration on white ball cricket as well. How many of the test players regularly turned out in the County Championship last year? And how many played any red ball cricket in the weeks leading up to the test series at the height of the summer against India?
England were a poor test nation in the 1990s. The ECB then introduced two divisions of nine with promotion and relegation and by the mid 2,000s they were the best test side in the world. Then the messing around with the formats began and look at the state of things now. Cause and effect?
Andrew Strauss is leading the latest review and has said in the past he believes there are too many counties. He is also one of the people who had a say about scrapping two divisions of nine and left us with two uneven divisions. He’s was involved in removing the toss only to see it brought back. And I think he had something to do with heavy rollers disappearing and coming back as well. I might be wrong but there’s a theme here, surely?
With so many formats in this country the County Championship continues to be pushed to the margins of early April and late September. But it has been for as long as I can remember so that is nothing new. As I regularly say, we are an island in The Atlantic and I couldn’t point to a single day in the six months of the season and guarantee you the weather will be good on that day. Two of the last three Marches have been the driest and sunniest on record. April last year was cold. May was miserable.
But playing little to no County Championship cricket at the height of the summer, like they did last year, is wrong. They have tried to remedy that this year with the fixture structure. But it may be a better idea to start the season with the One Day Cup and move into the championship a little later in The Spring. Having said that we got sunburned on my wife’s birthday a few seasons ago. That was April 21st and was one of the nicest days of the year. The same week two days of a County Championship match against Middlesex were lost to snow!
Easter 2019 was a scorcher from memory but the One Day Cup that May was a miserable and wet affair with all of Durham’s games away from home affected by rain. So there’s no magic answer to the question of weather.

I think this chap will be quality in a similar way to when we've signed CC Div 2 players in the past. It is that level of player who have the hunger and desire to prove themselves at a higher level - in the past Chris Wright, more recently Olly Stone, Norwell and Miles and clearly lots of thought has been given to his acquisition. It doesn't always work as intended anyone recall Chris Martin? amongst several other flops. This guy looks to be an ALL Formats player also which is huge I think. I have to say I am excited about Simmons from what I saw on Tuesday plus Johal last season and we have several youngsters chomping at the bit but not genuine 85mph bowlers who are quite ready yet

7, 8 or 9 good competition for places with Miles, OHD, Norwell, Brookes

Also a view to middle of season might be deprived of Stone, Norwell, Yates, Sibley for various ECB sides so we may end up in June/July with a side like - Davies, Rhodes, Hain, Lamb, Benjamin, Burgess, McAndrew, Briggs, Miles, Brookes, OHD

New South Wales can reasonably claim the best first class cricket set up in the world (NSW would beat most test sides routinely) given the sheer no of test players they produce for Australia so he has played lots of 2nd XI cricket for NSW's country team - ACT/NSW Country 2nd XI - as well as plenty of professional List A and T20 cricket.

At Grade level he's spent several years at Bankstown in the Sydney suburbs and this winter turned out for Woodville in Adelaide

Not often I agree with this chap but he is spot on here. As members of county clubs there is much work to do to see off the wreckers threatening the game we love. I demand my county secures for me the bi-annual visit to watch my county club play first class cricket at New Road and Grace Road and Hove (plus occasional visits to Colwyn Bay and Chesterfield) and in striving for this opposes any move towards a 12 team premier league.

A return to 1 County Championship of 18 teams must be a priority!!!

29 March 2022 Simon Heffer
The ECB has failed in its duty to protect first-class cricket, so why is Tom Harrison still in post?

Perhaps I am being more than usually obtuse, but isn’t the most surprising thing about the debacle of England’s Test cricketers in the West Indies the fact that anyone is surprised by it?

Some of us never bought into the idea that the three Tests in the Caribbean would be a stroll compared with the savage route-march to humiliation that was the tour to Australia that preceded it. The same fundamentals that contributed to that shambles remained in place for this one: a demoralised team insufficiently skilled in playing serious cricket, and exploited by its employers in playing the unmemorable, rubbish short-form games that have debauched the very idea of what cricket is. Add to that what must politely be called an eccentric selection policy, with the team’s two greatest bowlers playing golf at home while English cricket became yet more ridiculous, and the recipe for catastrophe was complete.

Most of the England and Wales Cricket Board’s panjandrums have already had their P45s. It remains inexplicable why Tom Harrison, the Chief Executive, has not had his. It would be mildly uplifting if, as in one of those excellent films about Bomber Command, Mr Harrison was like the handlebar-moustached pilot who ensures the plane crashes away from a centre of population after the rest of the crew has jumped out. Sadly, one fears he lingers for other reasons, perhaps to seek to engineer some sort of continuity from the pitiful regime over which he has presided. Since the ECB needs the most radical change in outlook and strategy imaginable, the sooner Mr Harrison is on his bike the better.

And talking of change, there have been almost universal calls for Joe Root to give up the captaincy. He is the leading English batsman of his generation, and fit to be compared with any of the country’s greats in living memory. He has a poor recent record as captain; he has lacked imagination; and if complicit in the exclusion of Broad and Anderson, he is a fool to boot. He probably will lose the captaincy, and a case can be made that he would deserve to. But it would leave an ugly taste in the mouth that he was being scapegoated for the failings and misjudgments of others. May he remain in the side for years and score many more centuries and double centuries; England needs him, and he does not deserve to be humiliated. He has done his best with the miserable resources put at his disposal.

One is tempted to say we can’t go on like this; but one says it every time a fiasco occurs, and we do go on like this; and the fiascos become worse and worse until they reach a preposterous level of absurdity, which is rather what happened in Grenada last weekend.

Nothing has changed. The fixture programme that is about to start has first-class cricket – the proving ground for the Test team – consigned to the usually poor conditions of the beginning and the end of the season. High season is filled with white-ball cricket that helps our players develop appalling techniques that makes them, especially the batsmen, play such rank Test cricket. It would seem the ECB regards first-class county cricket as an obstacle to its money-making activities and therefore as incidental to its main strategies. It has never tried to market it as a viable entertainment. That is what has to stop.

Sadly, there is no sign the ECB has grasped what needs to be done, never mind being prepared to do it. One shudders at rumours that one proposal which could be put to Sir Andrew Strauss’s performance review is a ‘Premier League’ of 12 counties, with a second division of just six. The main reason advanced for this is that it would mean fewer first-class matches and more time to ‘prepare’.

Our cricketers play too little first-class cricket, not too much. The best preparation, all evidence suggests, is done in the middle or on the field. Those who want to cut the fixture lists argue that relatively few first-class matches are played in countries such as Australia, and it doesn’t do their cricketers any harm. But this is not Australia; we have a different climate and geology; above all we have nothing like the sub-structure that underpins Australian cricketers’ development and performance, their commitment and their idea of competitiveness. What the last few years have shown is that our players need to play more first-class cricket. Look at this winter’s abominable performances if you doubt that contention.

Forgotten in all this is the cricketing public. Professional cricket exists in England because people pay to go to see it. The return on the investment the average county member gets these days compared with in the 1970s is dismal; a handful of first-class fixtures, many of which end in just three days because of the conditions in which they are played; teams bereft of Test players, for whom rest is deemed a superior form of preparation than actually playing; and an increasingly low standard of cricket because of the increasing difficulty in finding promising young players who wish to make the game their career, thanks to the near-death of state school cricket. Have a second division of six Cinderella clubs staffed by nonentities and they will rapidly start going out of business. Cut the first-class fixture lists further and membership figures will decline further: no one wants an unrelenting diet of rubbish. If you lose what remains of county cricket’s public, you will also erode the base of those prepared to pay through the nose to watch Test cricket.

The counties – six of whom, I repeat, will be lucky to survive other than as weekend and evening slogfest circuses – need to wake up and take the initiative. For too long they have been manipulated by the ECB in return for being bribed with money, mainly from television rights, that they have done little or nothing to help earn. Now they are being promised a transfer system (which will break what remains of many local loyalties) and other gimmicks to keep them silent.

The committees who run the counties need to realise that an existentialist threat to some of them will, in the end, provide a threat to them all, and to the future of Test cricket. They need to start asking whether they believe in first-class cricket; and if the answer is yes, they must be prepared to mount a full-scale peasants’ revolt to provide a more credible alternative.

The counties (and MCC, which is so much the obedient creature of the ECB that it is becoming a laughing stock and a disgrace) must remind themselves of the historic responsibility they have for our great game, and for securing its future. That future will be one of a diminishing spectacle of increasingly trivial cricket unless they act now to save, and grow, the red-ball game. The alternative is for county cricket to sign its own death warrant.

Will it be ready for April 11th?

Mar 29, 2022, 06:10 PM

1

So that time of the year for predictions !

So here we go

Where will we finish in championship? 3rd
Where will we finish in Blast/Royal London? Blast winners, RL Cup Play off stage
Who will be player of the season? Feel free to pick batsman and bowler Hain and Briggs
Who will be breakthrough player of the season? Che Simmons - looked very decent today will play lots of 2nds cricket and may be useful on harder pitches in June/July so a shoe in for the Oval methinks
What will be the team for our first game of the season ? Yates, Sibley, Hain, Rhodes, Benjamin, Lamb, Burgess, Briggs, Miles, Henry Brookes, OHD

Cheers for that. So just the Glamorgan matches to add plus a few away T20 matches. Will update the post above cheers again

Still not published the second eleven fixtures

Useful for GUIDANCE but check https://live.nvplay.com/ecb/
April 11-14 Warks v Glamorgan (Portland Rd)
April 19 Warks v Cardiff UCCE (Moseley CC) 50-over game
April 25-28 Warks v Gloucs (Portland Rd)
May 2-5 Warks v South Asian Cricket Academy (Portland Rd) SACA website says 4-day match but might be 3 so may start May 3rd
May 6 Warks v South Asian Cricket Academy (Stratford-upon-Avon) 50-over game
May 18 Warks v Gloucs (Portland Rd) T20
May 19 Worcs v Warks (Barnt Green) T20
May 24 Warks v Northants (Portland Rd) T20
May 25 Warks v Somerset (Portland Rd) T20
May 30 Warks v Worcs (Portland Rd) T20
May 31 Bears XI v Birmingham League XI (Kenilworth Wardens) T20
June 1 Gloucs v Warks (Cheltenham College) T20
June 2 Glamorgan v Warks (Newport) T20
June 3 Somerset v Warks (Taunton Vale) T20
June 13-16 Lancs v Warks (Chester Boughton Hall)
June 27-30 Warks v Worcs (Portland Rd)
July 11-14 Kent v Warks (Tonbridge)
July 18-21 Notts v Warks (Notts Sports Club)
August 9 Bears XI v Warwickshire League XI (Coventry & North Warwicks) T20
August 29-Sept 1 Northants v Warks (Northampton)
Sept 5-8 Warks v Essex (Portland Rd)
Sept 12-15 Somerset v Warks (Taunton Vale)

Hope they publish a full schedule soon but in the meantime I'm using this as a GUIDE only .

Continuing the positive theme about county cricket after all the negativity from the usual suspects, is the attitude of the Leicestershire CEO Sean Jarvis. who thinks (like me) that there should be 20 first class counties rather than a reduction

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0bjfjvk
What is the future for red-ball cricket in the English game?

Absolute top bloke. We need more positivity about the county game like this. Well done to Leics CCC memberships up 30% albeit from a low base

Home RL match v Notts August 17th appears to be at Portland Rd according to Notts website

RL Cup Final is on Saturday Sept 17th with the Semi Finals Fri 29th Aug and the wild card 2nd vs 3rd 26th Aug

HUNDRED Finals weekend must be Sept 3rd/4th