Category: Lancashire and Counties 2021

Look at the Fixture List. Its rubbish. School holidays start quite late in July for Stockport Primaries, and then we are on holiday for a week. I went online to look at the options for taking my older son to some cricket at Old Trafford after August 8th. To say the options are sparse does not cut it. Just look at it!

OK so we have tickets for a couple of The Hundred games. But as far as I can see, no cricket is taking place at Old Trafford between the 13th August and 10th September. What is more, Lancashire first eleven do not even have fixtures after 13th August?

Am I missing something? What is going on? How on Earth am I meant to get my kids into Cricket with hardly any cricket to take them to in August? Something does not make sense.

So what can we make of the county season so far? We start with some extreme scores.

Big scores and little scores. We have seen 612/5, with 231 for James Vince (but off 220 balls). We have seen an even bigger 672/8; this time Ollie Pope was relatively slow in scoring 245 off 272 balls. Surrey again scored 560/7 including a Hashim Amla 215 with a more normal strike rate of 59. We even have some people talking about whether anyone will score 1000 runs before the end of May.

But then we have some truly dreadful scorecards. Middlesex 79. Essex 96 all out but they won that game because Durham flopped for 123. Essex crashed to defeat this week after being bowled out for 99. After another good score (470) Hampshire have been dismissed for 92 and 79. Kent were bowled out for 138 and 74 in a game. Warwickshire were bowled out 87. Sussex for 106.

Don’t get me wrong, some difficult conditions will have been involved as well as some great bowling. Apparently Kemar Roach was simply brilliant in Surrey’s destruction of Hampshire, but batting performances of 92 and 179 cause one to ask questions about the batting.

I wanted to compare that to England’s recent shambles in India. England’s scores ranged from 578 and 81. And you head back to England in the Trevor Bayliss era. 67 all out in the Ben Stokes Headingley test match. 85 all out against Ireland. I could go on with the low scores. But as well as 3 big scores in 2021 built entirely around Joe Root, you can point to some 600-ish scores in the Bayliss years.

England have tried to correct this tendency for high paced scoring – resulting in scores ranging from 67 to 600. They have looked to build. This has to be the way. I know it failed in India, but it is the right approach. With the types of scores we are seeing in the 2021 county season…it is little wonder we have seen an England side often unable to dig in and battle it out. Hopefully this change in approach from the top will effect the county game too, and we will not see so many big scores and little scores. Hampshire take note!

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.

In 2021 I started with high ambitions. I was going to follow the domestic cricket season much more closely. On the 24th April, Lancashire have just completed the 11th day of the first class season. Two games are already completed. And the first game only started 16 days ago on the 8th. This is bonkers. And I have not even thought about how I will go about supporting Manchester Originals when The 100 starts.

What I am finding is that it is pretty difficult to follow first class cricket unless you have the luxury of time. Lots of it. When you have 2 children under the age of 5 and a full time job, you cannot spend 4 days watching a First Class game. The live streams and radio broadcasts are of limited use. The newspapers no longer have whole pages devoted to yesterday’s county fixtures (when I was a kid I loved to get hold of a Telegraph just so I could read all the reports). The Cricketer Magazine is great of course, but monthly.

Don’t get me wrong, you can do lots of things to simply find out the scores. There’s some really good journalists writing about the game. Tanya Aldred’s County roundup in The Guardian is a good tool. Elizabeth Ammon keeps us up to date on Twitter and in The Times. And I could mention many other journalists. Speaking of The Cricketer, they have lots of content freely available online relating to the county game.

The problem is not finding out that Joe Root has got 2 low scores against Sussex. The problem is that I have no idea if Root ‘looked a million dollars’ and was unlucky to get out, or if he is dreadfully out of form. My team, Lancashire, constructed a massive 525 down at Canterbury thanks in no small part to centuries from Wood and Lamb down at 8 and 9. Are they brilliant allrounders, or did Kent bowl dreadfully?

The problem is I just do not get chance to see the action, and it is not televised – at least, not much of it is. So what about highlights? Well, I can watch back many of the ‘key moments’ via the Lancs website (in the case of the current match, Kent are providing a live stream and the highlights are from that). But with no sound and no commentary, and you have to select each highlight. The ECB website carries highlights of 3 games.

As Elizabeth Ammon pointed out recently on Twitter, the answer is a Match of the Day type of program. Otherwise, how will anyone get into First Class cricket – and therefore how will Test Matches survive?