Posts tagged with ‘ECB’

Michael Vaughan’s recent comments on the state of the County game have stirred up the debate. Here are some ideas for an organised protest movement.

There has been renewed press speculation that the 2012 Olympic stadium could be used for cricket once The Torch has begun it’s four-year crawl in the general direction of Rio. Naturally, the ECB and surrounding counties say they know nothing about it.

But, in order to keep up with the rest of the world (i.e. India) with it’s T20 finance boom, English cricket needs a modern infrastructure to match. Instead it has Old Trafford, about as modern as Alf Garnett.

Do me a favour, and take a look out of the nearest window. There may well be a winged hog somewhere in the vicinity. Meanwhile, in the cricket world, a county chairman has been heard saying the things that Giles Clarke gets paid to sweep under the carpet: English cricket is as anachronistic as the crew of USS Enterprise strolling around the Wild West.

The ECB has announced it’s new England Performance Programme, with a new category system that tells everyone who is next in line for a place in the senior side.

Three categories – imaginatively named A, B and C – include those closest to selection (A), those “one to three years away” from selection (B) and those younger players who might make the jump in the future (C). So, here’s the list.

Sussex coach Mark Robinson knows a few things about getting the best out of players. Sussex won the Twenty20 Cup and the Pro40 this season, and were runners-up in the FP Trophy. So when he publicly states that his team are having to play so much cricket during the summer that they can’t train properly, you would think that the ECB would pay attention. They won’t.

Matthew Hoggard has been released by Yorkshire without so much as an “ay-oop lad”. It would seem that Hoggy is among the first victims of the ECB’s new age-related incentive payments, as Yorkshire naturally resent having to actually pay his salary themselves. So much for 15 years of loyal service.

The government has decreed that the Ashes should be restored to the Grade A list of showpiece events, meaning that it should be broadcast on free-to-air TV in 2013.

The ECB are considering whether county cricket needs a transfer system. The move of Steven Davies from Worcestershire to Surrey recently, and of Stuart Broad from Leicestershire to Nottinghamshire in 2007 highlights the problems for smaller counties who develop talented young players from an early age. This is one area where cricket could learn a valuable lesson from football.

As Andrew Flintoff delays the signing of his newly downgraded ECB contract at the prospect of earning more as a freelance Twenty20 cricketer, it is easy to get caught up in accusations of mercenary greed and a sport losing it’s identity.

But is cricket simply returning to it’s roots? Money, like it or not, was the catalyst for everything that has gone before. Even W.G. Grace would attest to that.

English professional cricketers via the PCA have given the ECB a public vote of no confidence over it’s running of the game. But are they serious enough to take on the closed inner-circle of self-serving administrators and their County supporters? Most importantly, how do the fans want County cricket to be structured? Let the debate begin…