Don’t go near a cricket club in winter. Eerie at the best of times, downright creepy after the clocks go back. County grounds out of season feel like open prisons, populated as they are by zombified tracksuits clutching tepid coffees, groundsmen on rollers smoking existential rollies, shuffling octogenarian librarians, dressing room attendants soiling clean whites just so they can wash them again, and press officers crafting their next release to hit the inboxes of sunken hacks with news that Glenn Jobseeker’s hamstring is not as bad as first feared and he should be fit for the squad’s Christmas trip to Barnardo’s.

But why this vision of lo-fi indie-horror? Look no further than the accursed 12-month contract. Sounds good, right? Regular cash for our studs, spread across the whole year? No need to look for work elsewhere, our heroes afforded stability through the teeth of winter, offering job security and, so the thinking goes, inoculation from the terrors of the real world?

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Early on, it was accepted that 12-month contracts – as opposed to the traditional six-month summer gig – were brought in to ensure that counties control their players’ movements, specifically their participation in those nasty overseas leagues.

Theoretically, they could control which competitions their charges appeared in, where they wintered, and what their weekly Body Mass Index is saying, all the while providing them with something to do during those dark months in the build-up to Christmas when men find the world closing in on them.

But geezers need excitement, as a man once said. A cricket club in late November is not an exciting place to be. One former county skipper recently confided to me, through hot tears of grief, that the last thing he wanted to do was go anywhere near a cricket ground until well into the new year. And as for nets – hitting balls, throwdowns, grooving technique – he could literally think of nothing worse.

[caption id=”attachment_96355″ align=”alignnone” width=”800″] Hampshire players partake in a bit of bubble football[/caption]

The problem is a player can well end up jaded by mid-April. He’s drilled so many half volleys and sweated so many shuttle runs and picked at so many post-gym Nando’s that his soul hurts, and rather than attacking the season like a coltish buck let loose from the paddock, he creaks to the crease like a boxer on his last stretch. All that preparation, all that tiresome visualisation, all that Peri Peri, only to nick the first authentic outswinger he’s seen since June last year.

And so it goes.

Out there in the cold, frosty winter: that’s where our lads should be. Do we really want to live in a world where our finest young cricketers spend their winters in draughty indoor schools getting intimate with bowling machines? Of course not!

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We want them out there, selling Christmas trees, delivering the Yellow Pages, digging graves! A few months working a shovel in some municipal cemetery would certainly sharpen the minds, if not the forward blocks, of our cossetted starlets, while injecting a hefty dose of raw hunger and perspective, useful to call upon later in the season after their seventeenth single-digit score on the bounce.

Instead, what do we get? Grown men rolling around in inflatable bubble footballs, just for something to do. And they call this progress.