What I wanted to do with this column is show how difficult it is to follow County Cricket. Particularly the first class games. We are up to Round 5 and the season has included big scores and big collapses. And I have been working on strategies to keep up with the season.
Firstly, I need to get the fixtures in to my calendar or diary. For a while I have not been subscribing to The Cricketer, preferring instead to buy it ‘ad-hoc’ every so often. So I missed the wall chart edition. However, the ECB have partnered with Ecal to provide a service to synchronise the fixture list with your online calendar – Google in my case. You can find it here ECB.
I rather foolishly started by adding every single fixture into my diary. This is where madness lies. I mean, at least all the games start on a Thursday. For now. But we have a different number of games every week, with difficult to follow variations. For example, loads of fixtures start Thursday 20th May, but Hampshire v Leicestershire fixture starts on the Wednesday. Then the T20 kicks in in June with a couple of games every day and no Championship. I know that TV rules – and Sky has done a lot for the game – but I long for the old days of the Sunday League.
So, lesson learned, I now have (just) all the England International Fixtures (male and female) and all the Lancashire games in my diary.
This led onto my second lesson. I have now worked out that you can view short highlights of every first class fixture. But most days I cannot hope to watch it all and take it in (though some days will). So I am better just following Lancashire most of the time. That led me to Youtube – and I now subscribe to the Lancashire Youtube channel. One can only wonder if Jimmy Anderson could have got Marnus Labuschagne out in the 2019 Ashes, but he got him out against Glamorgan.
So, I will assiduously follow these sources, plus various newspapers and the The Cricketer website. And I have resumed my subscription (I went for the digital and magazine version because I like to get the magazine ‘proper’ but am often in places where the digital format is really useful so it seemed to make sense to pay an extra few pounds). I will let you know how it goes.
Cricketed 