The contempt with which the One-Day Cup is being treated is a cricketing disgrace. The wilful neglect of this wonderful tournament makes me angry, disappointed and sad in equal (double) measures, writes Sam Dalling.
First, let’s be clear. This is not (another) Hundred bashing article. Plenty of those exist, some rationale and reasonable, others blinkered. I rarely watch the tournament, but plenty do. I don’t think it needed to exist, but it does. Enough said.
The column instead focusses on the further denigration of something that has, by accident rather than design, flourished. The first iteration of the revamped 50-over competition – a format that England were World Champions of at the time - wasn’t the best. Even hardened members, those who flick through every 2nd XI scorecard, were struggling to identify the new batter from 80 yards away.
But season-by-season it has grown. Most teams now have a handful of players with international caps to provide the ballast, an overseas or two, a gaggle of lads who have 20-30 List A appearances and, finally, the respective county’s finest recent academy graduates. Some belting cricket has been produced, there have been out grounds aplenty and counties are doing fine work turning match-days into festivals.
But despite all the challenges the One-Day Cup faces, the powers that be are determined to drop more obstacles. If counties were playing Mario Kart, they would be on Rainbow Road, desperately swerving to avoid turtle shells while trying to avoid plummeting to oblivion. It is almost as if the 50-over tournament is an afterthought.
For coaches, selection has been tricky. At the drop of a WhatsApp message, players can be whisked away to a franchise for as little as one night. Fine. Well, not fine – there needs to be more clarity on this – seemingly both publicly and internally given the Cricket Regulator’s recent announcement Manchester Originals and Lancashire County Cricket Club have been charged with breaching a regulation relating "…to the release of a player…to participate in the Metro Bank One Day Cup without meeting the relevant requirements."
A coach needs some certainty. With bowling workloads to be managed, the selectors need to know who can be rested when and that there will be adequate cover. The inter-change between competitions isn’t going to stop, but there should be a requirement that a replacement signing plays in The Hundred. They should not be shuffling drinks on and off. And there needs to be more lateral (or should that be downwards?) movement the other way – players sat on franchise benches must be available for their counties, albeit granted this is not quite so simple. There is travel, player willingness and insurance to consider.
What county head coaches didn’t need, then, were the further dilemmas caused by the poxy scheduling of the England Lions game with Sri Lanka. It is a brilliant moment for those involved, to get that call, to feel the warm fuzziness of knowing that your country is peeking.
But the game at Worcestershire is simply a glorified friendly, designed to give England’s next Test opponents a feel for conditions.
To have it covering the last group game of the One-Day Cup, and the quarterfinals (more on them later) is, depending on your level of cynicism, somewhere between dumb and spiteful.
Take Durham. Had they beaten Derbyshire on Wednesday, they would have had a home knockout game on Friday. Yesterday, they had Ben Raine batting at six and it was not a cunning plan to avoid right-handers facing Samit Patel’s left-arm spin. They simply had no other option.
The batter they lacked was Ben McKinney, a 19-year-old opening star in the making. Last Sunday, he scored his maiden professional hundred at Canterbury. How is a meaningless game more beneficial than him representing his county in a win or bust match? Games like that are where young players learn how to cope with that heat, to thrive under it. Or they fail. But they at least get an opportunity to find out and, should it go well, can push their career on three of four paces.
Durham have five County Championship games to come and with another decent score or two, McKinney might have found himself in the team. With both Will Rhodes and Emilio Gay to join over the winter, he would love the chance to make that opener spot his to lose.
Warwickshire will play their knock-out game on Friday without Hamza Shaikh and Rob Yates. Hampshire will miss Eddie Jack, while Josh Hull, who has played just twice in the Hundred, could easily have played for Leicestershire. It’s unclear whether Somerset will have Kasey Aldridge and James Rew for the semi-finals. They wouldn’t have had them had they been in action tomorrow. It is nonsense.
Yes, the England Lions are important. But it is not a true Lions team, is it? After all, only Hull was released from the 100-ball tournament to play.
Then we have the case of Worcestershire, who despite a season littered by tragedy, injury, rain and just about everything, finished second. No one deserves success more, and a tasty derby clash against Warwickshire at New Road provides both adrenaline and financial boosts. Except they haven’t got that. Because here is the twist: the eagle eyed amongst you will already have realised that New Road is out of action. Arranging an out ground game takes care and planning, so Kidderminster was never an option. Instead, home advantage has been ceded. Presumably the powers that be looked at it over the winter and thought ‘Worcestershire? Nah, no chance’. What a sadness. A potentially packed New Road, one of the last bastions of county cricket, will be swapped for what one imagines will be, at best, a quarter full Edgbaston. And inevitably that will be used to evidence a lack of interest. Infuriating.
Speaking of quarters, here is another gripe. By definition, to have a whole there must be four quarters. Four games that lead into a semi-final. Some might argue that Friday’s games are quarter-finals, with two teams simply getting byes to the next round. That doesn’t wash with me. While technically it might be correct, invoking sub-clauses tends to suggest something is amiss.
And anyway, having peeked at the franchise – a tournament, remember, organised by the same people - fixture list, Saturday’s match at the Oval which will decide who shall play in Sunday’s final is not called a semi-final. It is the Eliminator. Call them what they are. Words matter and it is disingenuous to describe tomorrow’s two games as quarter-finals.
And why not just have four games? Four teams are already having to make travel plans, to book hotels, to sell tickets, to staff a matchday at 40 hours’ notice (again, ridiculous and a form of cricketing self-harm) so why not make it eight? What is the cost? Surely, there would only be the benefit of extra revenue and additional exposure to knock-out cricket for youngsters.
As ever county cricket will find a way to jump the hurdles. Until, that is, it doesn’t. And then it will be too late. Those double measures of anger, sadness and disappointment will be trebled and trebled again. We will be left with simply “I told you so” and nowt else. That day is coming, perhaps sooner than you’d think.
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