A House Divided
August 17th, 2009 by Gideon Haigh in The Ashes 2009
So Jonathan Trott is to make his Test debut at The Oval. More power to him. The good news is that The Oval is perceived as an English stronghold, the bad news that it isn’t a great place to make one’s Test debut. On the last-on, first-off principle, Paul Parker, John Stephenson and Alan Wells failed, and never played again. Australians starting their careers there haven’t prospered much either. Mick Malone, Shaun Young and Dave Gilbert never got another chance against England after being capped here – Malone and Young, in fact, never reappeared in Tests. It seems all too easy, having come in at The Oval almost as an afterthought, to be consigned to a footnote later.
No Ramps? Well, you could see that coming. Yet the reasoning that making runs in Division Two of the County Championship is not a preparation for playing Test cricket is meretricious. How much county cricket of any description prepares one for, apart from playing more county cricket, is not screamingly obvious. And after all, the vast bulk of Ramprakash’s first-class runs have been at the highest possible level in England. What does Surrey’s temporary relegation matter?
Yes, there is a difference between first-class and Test cricket, but that applies everywhere, and arguably less so in England than in some other countries: one is likelier to face a bowler of international quality playing for a county than for a West Indian island or a New Zealand province. Discriminating against Division Two cricketers simply because they are in Division Two smacks of making them prisoners of circumstance. The experience of playing in a poorer team has its advantages: more chance to bat under pressure, more opportunity to bowl long spells, more necessity to really covet victory. It might even be considered a useful preparation for representing England in Test cricket.
Posted in The Ashes 2009 | 4 Comments »
August 17th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
Gideon
I’m not sure how much County Championship cricket you see these days – probably like me, not a lot. And unless some outlet offers you a big bag of gold to cover a County Championship match I would stay well away. Incidentally no outlet, not even the estimable TWC, will do that because the domestic First Class game in England is hardly covered by the reporting media at all. At the AGM of the Cricket Writers Club our honourable chairman Pat Gibson made a stout defence of the County Championship, bemoaned the fact that increasingly newspapers weren’t covering it and asked us to rally round the dear old thing. The room was uncomfortably silent after Pat’s cri de Coeur. Most hacks know that it is a dead parrot. Frank Keating summed it up well a while back:
“…another summer of what has tragically become a drawn-out primeval charade, the English County Championship. For decade upon decade it was a cherished adornment of the summer sub-culture, certainly for my generation when heroes were giants and giants were locals. About a quarter of a century ago the championship began fraying and then in no time unravelling. It is now a pointless exercise, unwatched, unwanted, serviced by mostly blinkered, greedy chairman-bullied committees and played by mostly unknown foreign and second-rate mercenaries.”
Keating is right – if cruel. And the consequence of a competition that matters only to a few is that the matches therein matter only to a few as well. And very often the players aren’t amongst that few. The Saffers are there to pick up a cheque – as are the rest of the mercenaries. Some of them, of course, are there to get a bit of experience of English conditions under their belts – Marcus North’s five county travelling has done him a heap of good this year hasn’t it? Yes there will be some international stars of real quality, like North, playing – but not as many as you might think. They will mostly be either “second-raters” or those on the gentle slopes towards retirement like Langer, Harvey, Boje, Goodwin, Azhar Mahmood and Alfonso Thomas. And those was just those playing in Twnety20 Finals day at Edgbaston!
August 17th, 2009 at 9:15 pm
Thank you Gideon. I have been waiting for someone to make that point about the 2nd division ever since the Ramps hysteria started. I would add: if scoring runs in the 2nd division is so easy, why is Ramps scoring so very many more than anyone else?
The sad truth is that he probably only crossed their radar because they were asked about him by the press. Having selected Trott for the squad in Leeds he was bound to play. Selectors are generally rather more conservative than those of us whose jobs don’t depend on it.
August 18th, 2009 at 7:00 am
Would you rather play 1 Test or none at all? If I am asking myself that question, I think the answer is I am not sure. Another possible answer is that the question is so hypothetical for a player of my limited ability that the answer is irrelevant anyway. But we all have to dream don’t we. I remember reading a Peter Roebuck article where he said he was either too desperate too play for England or did not really want to play for England at all. I can understand that. At the end of the day, what does it all matter. When I was a young boy I used to dream of playing cricket for Australia. That dream ended when I was about 21 and could not make the local first X1 when everyone turned up. Now I dream of dominating a lowly local attack for just one Saturday afternoon and making an elusive hundred. This dream is just as exciting.
August 18th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
Mick Malone would surely have played more if it wasn’t for the Packer thing though, wouldn’t he? 5-60 from 47 overs and 46 at number ten was a fair start. Even as a nine year old English boy I still felt Max Walker deserved a ton that day…