Last Orders For 50 Overs After The World Cup?

More obituaries have been written about cricket than after a lively night at Passchendaele. The latest doom-monger, Vic Marks, mourns the death of the 50 overs format, proclaiming it has been gunned down by the ECB’s much-anticipated new speed thrash.

Apparently many one-dayers will be consigned to outgrounds and also overseas players are banned. And these are bad developments? I laughed so much reading these pearls of wisdom my false teeth would have went flying if I’d had any.

The Royal London cup has been scheduled to take place at the same time as the new competition IN 2020 and, according to some of the people who fly around the world watching cricket on expenses, this means it will become ‘a backwater for the not-so-good’.

The fact the ECB has downgraded the final to Trent Bridge is added proof, claim the elite.

Instead, I suppose, traditional cricket fans will be joining beer monsters, women and children in the party and family stands flocking to see the superstars at the extraordinary 100 ball whatnot.

But maybe not. Are the prospects really that bad? Major grounds will be out-of-bounds for the duration of the 100 and this is an ideal opportunity to reconnect even more with outgrounds – especially if tickets are priced generously at say £10. What’s more, the fact that overseas players are banned from playing means more opportunities for homegrown talent.

Of course some top local players will be required for the franchise teams but this is not the disaster some are predicting.

In fact, far from signalling a death-knell, this is music to my ears and from the soundings I’ve made amongst Lancashire members this is right up their street too. Local grounds, local lads, what’s not to like? Apart from the fact that Lancashire have just claimed a ground in the Yorkshire Dales for a home fixture, it’s all good.

This won’t be the perfect breeding-ground for our ODI players of the future they say. Well, why not? These commentators have been subsumed by the idea of excellence and elitism and that ‘not so good’ are not welcome. I’ve had enormous fun watching ‘journeymen’ make a positive impact in limited overs cricket. So what if they are not ever going to make an England squad that travels the globe playing less than half a dozen decent teams?

And how many of a club’s best up-and-coming young players will even make the 100 franchise squads?

For me and many others watching locally nurtured players perform is far more rewarding than a mercenary or paying top dollar for a circus act. Is there really more thrills now that a single player can batter a dozen sixes? Is 500 runs the Holy Grail with big lumpy bats, restricted fields and balls that don’t swing? Is this really more entertaining than watching Clive Lloyd or Viv Richards carve apart the opposition or grapple with Mike Hendrick? Or indeed seeing Gavaskar carry his bat for 36 in a 60 overs game!

Personally I hope the opportunity to play at more local grounds at the height of summer will woo a few more back to the game while the bish-bash-bosh brigade go elsewhere.

But these venues are invariably tightly-packed and close to the action and have a completely different atmosphere to some of the larger grounds dotted with a few speccies.

Bring it on.

Barry Turner

13 comments

  • Many years ago (when the Gillette Cup was young) I watched Bucks play Hampshire on a small ground. Hants batted and their openers were world class overseas imports (Barry Richards and Gordon Greenidge). Barry (perhaps fortunately for the bowlers) got out early and David Turner joined Gordon and both made hundreds. Turner’s was almost as good as Gordon’s. So, yes, domestic talent will shine, but would probably be improved by rubbing shoulders with international talent (this is the IPL premise, which works to an extent).

    • James that must have been a great game / partnership to watch. But if memory serves me right Turner (from Salisbury, Wilts) and definitely Greenidge (from Reading, Berks) were 17 year old home-grown talents when given their first contracts at Hants both benefiting from learning their batting in the Hampshire style overseen by Arthur Holt and then Leo Harrison – I know this because I played with Gordon in his first match at Northlands Road – the rawest of talents.

      This only goes to support the author’s expectation that 50 overs matches with lots of local millennial talent playing in front of their own communities could be a joy to watch.

      • You might be correct on that although (of course) Gordon played his test cricket for West Indies (probably a good idea in the late 1970’s). The game was a little one sided I recall. I think Hants won by about 200. Great batting but not necessarily a good match.

    • Saw Richards and Greenidge a few times, the most memorable being an end of season county game at Edgbaston, played on the edge of the square nearest the members stand. The whole stand was covered in netting to protect the punters and boy did we need it. The first session yielded over 200 runs with a number of balls disappearing over the stand into the car park behind and doing a deal of substantial damage (maybe the pair were sponsored by a car insurance company). Even with the netting punters were constantly ‘running for cover’, fearful the netting would break. Poor old Eddie Hemmings was reduced to bowling so wide of the stumps it was impossible for them to fetch the ball round.

  • It’s interesting how few comments ODI and 2020 threads create.. yet, we are told it’s the preferred format…

    • We also get about half the traffic we do when test matches are on. In fact, unless it’s a particularly memorable and important ODI (e.g. world cup) our traffic on the day / day after ODIs is pretty much the same as a day when England aren’t playing at all. Interesting eh. I’m not sure it’s representative of the larger population, as this blog is generally visited by purists / traditionalists, but it’s food for thought.

    • According to a global survey of 13000 cricket fans by the ICC cricket committee (including Gatting Bishop Sanga Ganguly Warne Rod Marsh and McCullum among others) 86% say test cricket is their preferred form of the game. At least it means Harebrain Harrison is right that the Hundred isn’t for cricket fans. It does seem odd to devise a new type of cricket intended not to appeal to fans though.

      • The point about this is that the hundred is not looking to appeal to those fans. Harrison’s point is that it is a format to attract a new audience, who would not have been included in this survey. Don’t get me wrong, I think the bloke is a typical middle management energised knob, but let’s see how the whole thing works and how it affects other forms of the game before we condemn it out of hand.

  • It’s strange to have this nostalgia about a relatively modern format, which when it first appeared in the 1970’s with the Benson and Hedges Cup as an alternative to the 40 over John Player and 60 over Gillette Cup, was not particularly popular with players or punters. There was then and still is, despite the introduction of power plays to counter it, a mid innings hiatus, where the game seems to drift and public attention reverts to beer snakes and other gimmicks to make its own amusements.
    Having lived through the entire range of limited over gimmickery, I still found the original 40 over format as good as any. I don’t think the 50 or 60 over formats have made the game more interesting, whereas the 20-20, though not to my taste, is at least different enough as an entertainment to be a valid alternative. For this reason I don’t understand ‘The Hundred’. Why not just tinker with the 20-20 if you want something different?

    • Hi Marc. I was also a big fan of the 40 over per side format. I grew up watching the old Sunday League as a junior member at Worcs and I thought the format was just right for all cricket fans – both traditionalists plus kids new to the game. It certainly got me hooked on cricket. Then again, the Worcs side I grew up was rather tasty back then and ideally suited for the format. A top 4 including Hick, Botham and Tom Moody was rather entertaining! It was always a great day out.

      • Only two formats are needed in modern cricket

        2020 for causal fans who just want hitting
        Test cricket for the longer format

        Pro
        4 day county cricket
        2020 comps

        Amateur
        League system of draw, into 45 over win lose
        2020 system on Astro, retire at 30 in coloured clothes for the causal fan to bish bash bosh

      • I suppose having been spoiled with the likes of Jameson, Amiss, Kiallicharran, Kanhai and Murray, all of whom were around at that time, I might view the whole thing with rose tinted glasses, but the one player who always typified the 40 over for me was a young Paul Smith, whose cavalier style of hitting and athletic fast bowling, was made for it. I remember seeing him as a 17 year old hit his first ball as a first team player over the pavilion and into Canon Hill Park opposite the ground. He went on to paste seamers and spinners alike for a glorious 40 odd before being caught on the boundary trying for his 50 with a 6. What a player he could have been if he’d had stronger mentors around him to curb his sex, drugs and rock-n-roll lifestyle. Ian Dury could have been singing about him.

  • Mike Atherton: To survive, club cricket must remember people actually like playing it

    Much of what is written about cricket concerns barely 1 per cent of the people who play it, or are involved in it, in this country. It is no less true in these pages, where we concentrate largely on men�s and women�s professional cricket, here and abroad, at the expense of the recreational game.

    Professional cricket may be newsworthy but it is not the heart and soul of the game, which resides in the clubs up and down the land � the 7,000 of them that make up the recreational game here, along with the many itinerant wandering sides � and through the volunteers, enthusiasts and committed week-in week-out players who keep the show rolling along.

    One of the great strengths of Australian cricket was the umbilical cord that joined the professional and amateur games, with players able to move almost seamlessly between the two, and links developed in childhood sustained through a professional career and beyond. These ties are weaker than they once were, but still stronger than in England.

    Here, the professional and amateur games, though administered by one governing body, exist largely separately, the former well funded, the latter surviving hand-to-mouth. My own club career came unceremoniously to a halt once I had been capped by Lancashire, league rules at the time preventing a capped (ie established) player representing his boyhood club as an amateur � a ridiculous state of affairs. It should have been encouraged, not frowned upon.

    No wonder, then, the irritation occasionally expressed when those from the professional game dare to tell their amateur counterparts how to run the show. Last week, Harry Gurney, the Nottinghamshire left-arm seamer, fresh from a triumph in the Big Bash League, suggested that all club and league cricket should be Twenty20, better to stop the decline in numbers and the loss of players at that crucial late-teenage stage of life, and the better to encourage wider participation from those for whom a longer game is too time-demanding.

    Reaction was mixed, but there was, at least, a reaction: part sensible, part ridiculous, occasionally humorous, often spiteful. Mixed, too, in the conclusions there were some who agreed with Gurney; more who told him to stick to the pub trade (Gurney owns two pubs in Nottinghamshire with Stuart Broad).

    The difficulty is partly knowing the state of the decline in relative terms. Last month there was an editorial in this newspaper on the decline of village cricket and this weekend the Essex batsman Tom Westley�s old club, Weston Colville, withdrew from the Cambridgeshire Cricket Association league because of the difficulties in putting out a team. They first played cricket in that village in 1867 and now cannot put out a senior team, although the junior section will continue.

    These closures tend to be newsworthy, but it is not clear that cricket is any worse affected than any other team sport. On the broadest definition of engagement, the ECB says that there are 2.5 million active players in England, roughly half of them senior, half junior. This, though, is a useless statistic, it being the broadest, most generous definition of inclusion. About 800,000 play some sort of formal cricket in leagues, and roughly a third of those might be termed regular, once-a-week, players.

    The fact that numbers have dropped in recent years is undeniable, but almost every team sport faces the same issue. The most recent Sport England study comparing once-a-week participation for over-16s showed a decline in football, for example, from a little over 2 million players to 1.8 million over a ten-year period. The general trend is away from team sports to more individual pursuits, a trend that fits with the atomisation of modern life and the decline in membership of traditional, community-based institutions.

    No club is typical; each has their own challenges. The story of my own � Radlett in the Saracens Hertfordshire League � is this: since the chairman Tony Johnson became involved in 1985, the number of senior playing members has held steady, at between 90-100, while junior participation has soared. The club runs 19 junior teams and has 220 registered junior players. It puts out four senior teams on Saturdays and one, sometimes two, on a Sunday.

    There remains a strong appetite within it for a longer form of the game at the top end on Saturdays, the type of game that will enable players of all types to be involved and feel satisfied or knackered at the day�s end. The first team (in the county premier league, and therefore a very decent standard) play a mixture of timed cricket and overs cricket and some players come from university, hundreds of miles away, for a game � something that they would be unlikely to do for a 20-over match.

    Likewise, in the same week as Gurney�s tweet, the Herts league held its annual meeting and I am told that there was widespread support for maintaining a longer format, especially in the top divisions.

    Lower down, the bottom three divisions (out of 27) voted for a slightly shorter matches of 45 overs a side on Saturdays for this year.

    It seems unfashionable to say it, but some people actually like playing the game. No sport, perhaps, does existential angst as well as cricket and in the rush for new formats to attract a new audience, for Facebook likes, Twitter followers and bite-sized packages, there is a core constituency that enjoys the layered complexity of a longer, more satisfying game. There is a danger that they get taken for granted, or their wishes ignored.

    Equally, it would be absurd to deny that, for many, long days do not tally with family commitments and many find two games a weekend a struggle. The former England captain Michael Vaughan�s idea of longer matches on Saturdays, combined with T20s on Sundays � juniors in the morning, seniors in the afternoon � certainly carries merit. ECB research suggests that numbers of core, regular players are holding up precisely because of the variety of options available. Choice of format is key.

    The biggest challenge for many clubs is not necessarily playing numbers but social engagement beyond that and finding volunteers to fill key roles. All told, there are close to 500 playing and social members at our club but many use it as a cricketing facility alone, rather than as a social hub like it used to be. Again, these are societal trends, rather than problems particular to cricket, although they bring significant challenges to income streams. It is, says our chairman, a �precarious, hand-to-mouth existence�.

    The debate around club cricket provides no easy answers, except to say that there needs to be a variety of formats to engage all, from the committed, to the irregular, as well as to provide a platform for growth. As the days lengthen, the grass begins to grow and the trumpets of spring announce the end of winter, it is also a reminder that we can all do a little more for our clubs; no matter how good or incompetent, how committed or casual, it is where we all started out.”

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