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

Thanks for those links. All those permutations over the final 2-3 days. Championship cricket is still the best. I've enjoyed my trips to Taunton over the years

Good lord that was awful from start to finish. Christ what are they gonna do to the county game now on the back of that? Heaven knows but it is a worry. Maybe a reset but I worry there'll be further erosion and damage done to reinforce the madness of the last 5 to 10 years poor scheduling

Chris Wright tweeted this morning the draft fixtures ARE out and will be published next week

The initial BBC report may have implied YCCC were getting away without sanction but reports in today's media (Times article) clarify that fixture publication could no longer be delayed due to frustration from counties but equally sanctions on YCCC couldn't be decided until the CDP had released their findings. Equally the DCMS will be releasing their findings this Friday

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cricket/59964176

Hopefully we get a trip to Scarborough then but Durham for one won't be at all happy if all Yorkshire's punishment ends up being is banned from hosting international cricket between December and March

Colwyn Bay CC suggesting draft fixture list next week at the earliest but it won't be released to joe public until well after the Hobart Test according to The Cricketer.

https://www.colwynbaycricketclub.co.uk/first-class-match-2021/
http://www.thecricketer.com/Topics/countycricket/wait_goes_on_domestic_schedule_2022_fixtures_not_expected_until_after_mens_ashes.html

Several counties have been frustrated by the delay, which is believed to relate to both the new complexities of the women's fixture list in 2022 - with international, Hundred and regional schedules having to fit around the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham - and the situation at Yorkshire.

Worcestershire chair Fanos Hira said he expected the fixtures to be available in the "next two to three weeks"
"Hopefully that will help members in terms of booking hotels and such for away fixtures," he said. "It is frustrating and we hope it gets resolved quite quickly."

five rounds of County Championship fixtures will be played in June and July -

Which we got wind about in December

The ECB are also awaiting the findings of the CDC (Cricket Disciplinary Commission) which will hopefully be released back end of January to determine Yorkshire's penalty for their failings as a club during 2018-2021 over the Azeem Rafiq affair. I should imagine the ECB / counties will want this settled before issuing publicly any fixtures schedules to their members

McGrath is a surprise. Would he really leave Essex? He was also there around the time of some of the racism

From the looks of things it doesn't look like 16 full time appointments have come to an end. Probably 5 or 6 like that with the remainder on rolling or zero hours contracts that conveniently come to an end - e.g. the sub-contracted physio department kinda like a school or college all of a sudden deciding to source their agency catering or supply teaching staff from a different employer next year

It is clearly a move designed to appease the ECB and help get DCMS off the ECB's back this which is why it had to be done quickly. DCMS had threatened the games governing body with a regulator coming in so I guess this is the first step towards trying to ensure that doesn't come to pass. Also to convince sponsors who won't touch Yorkshire with a barge pole unless drastic measures have been taken

If as is almost certain, Yorkshire are relegated to Div 2 and lose some of their higher earning players, they will need fresh coaching and admin staff and they'll be able to cope with this upheaval better in Div 2 anyway - I reckon it'll be good for them to start with a clean slate

Will be quite a culture shock going to Headingley next season. Some of the more reactionary died in the wool stuck in the 1970's tutting fuddy duddies will be gone pretty sharpish. They are bound to have groups of visitors in from local schools - in the aim of reviving (or more truthfully, generating from scratch) interest in the county side among the local Leeds/Bradford population