Quote ="sally cinnamon"When you looked at county cricket in the 1990s there was quality throughout the counties. Each team had one overseas player per county and the players who were over here were the top internationals - Walsh at Gloucestershire, Ambrose at Northants, Waqar at Surrey, Wasim at Lancs, Richards at Glamorgan, Mark Waugh at Essex. '"
That was great, but in those days there was no international cricket outside England during our domestic season. Unless their national team happened to be touring England that year all those players were available to their counties for the whole of our season. Nowadays there are all sorts of internationals all over the place all year round, or so it seems, plus the IPL overlaps the beginnng of our season. Times have changed. It's hardly worth having an overseas player if he plays regular international cricket.
Quote ="sally cinnamon"Now since the Kolpak ruling was brought in counties fill their ranks with second rate South Africans and Australians with EU passports that weren't good enough to get into Sheffield Shield cricket. Counties have sacrificed quality for quantity and have used all these nomadic second rate plodders instead of giving young English players a chance. '"
I think this is a total red herring and has no bearing on the strength of our national side. Most teams naturally evolve with a blend of youth and experience regardless of where the players are drawn from. I think it's the mediocre thirty year old English players who are getting squeezed out of county cricket by the Kolpaks, not the younger players. A couple of years ago I read about Leicestershire having five experienced South African players in their side; they also had five English players under 25, some of whom show great promise such as batsman James Taylor. They have a very useful looking local off spinner, Jigar Naik, who has probably benefitted greatly from the tutelage of his South African spin bowling teammate Claude Henderson. At Surrey Chris Tremlett credited the influence of his new fellow opening bowler Andre Nel as a major factor in his resurgence last summer, and now England have benefitted as a result.
Quote ="sally cinnamon"In Sheffield Shield cricket in Australia you don't get this, there is the odd overseas player every now and then but it is basically a competition where the best young players who have fought their way through grade cricket system get into Sheffield Shield, and it is a breeding ground for Test players.'"
We've got three times as many first class teams as Australia. If they allow more than the odd non-Australian to play for each team it's going to dilute their talent pool too much. With our eighteen counties we'd still have twice as many potential international players to choose from even if there were three or four foreighners in each team.
For me, the biggest problem in county cricket is the crazy scheduling of fixtures with so many matches in various formats shoehorned into the calendar. Next June for instance, Surrey commence their T20 fixtures at The Oval the day after a four day match ends at Derby. How on earth are players supposed to prepare properly for that? Also a window needs to be created in the England fixture list to enable the England players to appear regularly in our T20 competition.
Not only are there too many matches but every division in every competition has an odd number of teams, meaning someone has to sit out every round of fixtures. Revert to three groups of six for the T20s (i.e. ten group matches instead of sixteen) and drop the three sundry teams (Scotland, Netherlands, Unicorns) from the 40 overs competition.
