*Official* UK off-season 2009/10

[Richard]

Who seriously believes Carberry or Moore are going to be playing Test cricket at all, never mind having lengthy successful careers?

 

[superkingdave]

Some of those names are an absolute joke. Have the selectors even watched any of them play or just looked at the hype with the odd glance at the twenty20 statistics...or perhaps they pulled them out of a hat...i mean Keith Barker, Andy Carter?

At least half that list will be lucky to make it as county pros

Where is the proper Tom Smith? I wouldn't have Stephen Parry in there but lets face it he ****s on most of the spinners named in there.

 

[Richard]

And having a closer look there it's really rather worrying that the ECB genuinely believe the likes of Vikram Banerjee, Keith Barker, Will Beer, Andrew Carter, Richard Jones, Ian Saxelby, Oliver Rayner, Max Waller, Adam Wheater, David Willey, Jade Dernbach and David Griffiths are worth ECB-funded training and development.

41 players is just way, way too many. There is barely half that which is ever going to make international-standard cricketers in any one generation, especially in this country.

EDIT: Dav's pretty well beaten me to it while I was cooking lunch.

 

[zaremba]

And having a closer look there it's really rather worrying that the ECB genuinely believe the likes of Vikram Banerjee, Keith Barker, Will Beer, Andrew Carter, Richard Jones, Ian Saxelby, Oliver Rayner, Max Waller, Adam Wheater, David Willey, Jade Dernbach and David Griffiths are worth ECB-funded training and development.

41 players is just way, way too many. There is barely half that which is ever going to make international-standard cricketers in any one generation, especially in this country.

EDIT: Dav's pretty well beaten me to it while I was cooking lunch.

As for 41 well, yes, it may be a lot. But they have decided to go for a big pool of players to analyse and develop. If only one in eight makes it in a couple of years, that's 5 quality players that will have emerged. The difficulty is that it's not that easy to tell, at this early stage in their careers, which ones are destined to make it and which aren't. Hence the big pool.

Dav may have a point about good players being left out (eg the other Tom Smith) but it's a little presumptuous of any of us to declare that any (or many) of the younger players who have been selected aren't good enough. Very few people on CW, if any, have the in-depth knowledge of the younger players, or of junior cricket or 2nd XI cricket (at least outside their own counties), to have a truly informed opinion. There are of course some slightly older players among this party that are better known, but they're not really the ones I'm referring to.

 

[zaremba]

Take, for instance, Andy Carter and Richard Jones. You write them off as not good enough, Richard, but I very much doubt that you've ever seen either of them play. I rather suspect that your view is "I've not heard of them therefore they're not good enough", or "they've not made it by age 21/22 therefore they're not good enough". Neither of which is a line of reasoning that is worthy of you.

Apologies if I'm being presumptuous. For all I know you may have studied these players in depth, watched them turn out for their respective 2nd XIs and in the nets and so on. But I suspect not.

 

[Richard]

I've, obviously, not travelled up and down the country watching county second XI cricket just to keep tabs on every player whose name might be mentioned. But I do keep a brief eye on what's happening in the ol' Second XI Championship and certainly take considerable note of what happens in each game of the First-Class County Championship. And "the whatever-it's-called-this-year League" ((C) Matthew Engel 2006). If I don't feel I know that much about a player (and there are indeed a handful of them in that list - Blake, Meaker, Richard Johnson and Hales) I don't tend to form nor venture an opinion on them.

But I do feel that if any of Banerjee, Barker, Beer, Carter, Jones, Saxelby, Rayner, Waller, Willey, Dernbach and Griffiths make, as dav said, even particularly good county players then it'll be something of a surprise. At least the likes of Bairstow, Godleman and Dawson have shown some degree of promise (considerable in Bairstow's case) and at least the likes of Lyth and Mickleburgh have looked something beyond totally hopeless in their county outings so far.

As for Chris Jordan and David Wainwright being "B" banded players that's plain ludicrous. It's very possible neither of them will even make it as decent county players as well! The rest (Finn, Gale, H-B, Nash, Sayers, Shahzad, Taylor and Woakes) have at least shown some amount - in some cases plenty - of promise.

 

[superkingdave]

A couple of points to consider:

If a player has already lined up a contract to play for a club side say in Australia, he's very unlikely to cancel this contract to attend training camps in loughborough through the winter. Obviously the guys in group A would be basing their winter around their prospective England career. But for the guys in group B and C, a winter playing some grade cricket would be much more beneficial than some training camp. This might explain why some names are missing from this list, but they should just have reduced the number involved if it was the case.

I've also heard in the past that some counties are a lot more active in spruiking their young players to the selectors and with few of this players having exposed performances it may be a case that the words in the relevant peoples ears about their 'potential' has got them in there.

 

[four_or_six]

I think the banding looks good, different levels of involvement for different groups, it's good that our younger players are getting a chance to go to a playing and training camp. The C-camp should give the ECB coaches a chance to look at these players first hand and see how they look. Hopefully working with people like Gooch, Donald and Mushtaq might inspire a few of them into working harder and becoming better players.

Bummer if you're in the B-camp and end up in Loughborough instead of Pretoria though!

I also like this bit, it looks like a very sensible idea given the lack of warm-ups for test series these days.

"The 'A' graded players will receive individualised support programmes, meeting their specific developmental needs, and will link up with Ian Bell, Steven Davies, Ryan Sidebottom and Liam Plunkett for a training camp at the CSA High Performance Centre in Pretoria, ahead of the Test series in South Africa this winter."

 

[zaremba]

I've also heard in the past that some counties are a lot more active in spruiking their young players to the selectors and with few of this players having exposed performances it may be a case that the words in the relevant peoples ears about their 'potential' has got them in there.

Nice word, spruiking, I had to look it up!

Anyhow counties having a word in the selectors' ears about players with "potential" seems to me to be completely sensible. Obviously the selectors need to have their wits about them, and should take uncorroborated spruikage with a pinch of salt. But this kind of communication is one of the main ways in which promising young players have always been identified and I've no problem with it at all.

There are also other routes by which information will reach the selectors, for instance reports from 2nd XI games (eg from umpires and others), youth representative cricket, and so on.

Ultimately what I'm trying to say is that the selectors are, or should be, vastly better informed than we are.

 

[superkingdave]

Also there's more than a little influence of late season pro40 commentator orgasms on sky in some of the selections.

 

[Richard]

Ultimately what I'm trying to say is that the selectors are, or should be, vastly better informed than we are.

It's always possible to make that claim. In my book if you do that there's simply no point in criticising any selection at all. Because if it's true once it's true always, and even if a piece of selection doesn't pay dividends, if the reasons for it are the right ones then the selectors have acted correctly.

So we can take the view that selectors always know more than we do so we can never, under any circumstances, reasonably criticise them; or we can take the view that our knowledge in many cases is sufficient to question the merits of selections. I take the latter, TBH. And I also take the view that there are many cases where it's frankly fairly obvious that selections have been influenced by matters which they should not be - such as the televised-game-commentator-orgasms dav mentions above, and that's merely one such thing.

What irritates me is when people try to find a middle ground, because there purely and simply isn't any such thing.

 

[zaremba]

It's always possible to make that claim. In my book if you do that there's simply no point in criticising any selection at all. Because if it's true once it's true always, and even if a piece of selection doesn't pay dividends, if the reasons for it are the right ones then the selectors have acted correctly.

That point has some merit in some situations, but it has much less validity when what you're talking about is very young players. For the reasons I've given, the selectors ought to be in a better position to judge those sorts of players than we are. Returning to the examples of Carter and Jones I gave before, I have no idea how good they are, and I suspect that neither does anyone else here. I invited you to say if you'd seen them play and it's pretty clear that you haven't. It jars with me a little that you can see fit to accuse the selectors of having no judgment in selecting them, when you've never seen those players play, and almost certainly know less about them than the selectors do.

Also, a part of me thinks, let's just give these kids a tiny ****ing break. Let's assume that they have some ability and/or potential rather than slating them (and the selectors who have selected them) before their careers have even started. So what if some prove not to be up to the job? We're not talking about team selection for an Ashes-deciding Test. We're talking about a graduated development squad to try to bring on some promising youngsters.

 

[Richard]

I don't see any point in the ECB spending money on what might very easily be blood-out-of-a-stone measures. I've said it before - players like Carter and Jones should not, in my book, have professional contracts. If you have a pro contract you should be a player who has proven himself worthy of it. Until you do that, you should be treated as such.

It's a personal judgement call that Carter, Jones and many others aren't likely to amount to something. I may be right or I may, just the tiny chance, be wrong. It is not a personal judgement call that to date they've achieved nothing of note - that's stone-cold obvious. I like to see ECB spending confined to areas that have obvious, palatable likely benefits. Not on hit-and-hope schemes like this. It's absolutely certain that the ECB will receive no or next to no return on the majority of this investment. Therefore it strikes me as a poor decision.

 

[four_or_six]

I don't see any point in the ECB spending money on what might very easily be blood-out-of-a-stone measures. I've said it before - players like Carter and Jones should not, in my book, have professional contracts. If you have a pro contract you should be a player who has proven himself worthy of it. Until you do that, you should be treated as such.

It's a personal judgement call that Carter, Jones and many others aren't likely to amount to something. I may be right or I may, just the tiny chance, be wrong. It is not a personal judgement call that to date they've achieved nothing of note - that's stone-cold obvious. I like to see ECB spending confined to areas that have obvious, palatable likely benefits. Not on hit-and-hope schemes like this. It's absolutely certain that the ECB will receive no or next to no return on the majority of this investment. Therefore it strikes me as a poor decision.

It's all very well saying you have to be 'worthy' of a pro contract before you get one, but in that case how do you stop the more promising youngsters giving up cricket for something that gives them more security?

It would be interesting to know how much the ECB spends on this, because then you could judge what the risks are compared to the potential returns. For example: "The C-squad process costs £x" and "progressing a player who wins us 10 ODIs and 2 tests (for example) gives us £y".

 

[zaremba]

I don't see any point in the ECB spending money on what might very easily be blood-out-of-a-stone measures. I've said it before - players like Carter and Jones should not, in my book, have professional contracts. If you have a pro contract you should be a player who has proven himself worthy of it. Until you do that, you should be treated as such.

It's a personal judgement call that Carter, Jones and many others aren't likely to amount to something. I may be right or I may, just the tiny chance, be wrong. It is not a personal judgement call that to date they've achieved nothing of note - that's stone-cold obvious. I like to see ECB spending confined to areas that have obvious, palatable likely benefits. Not on hit-and-hope schemes like this. It's absolutely certain that the ECB will receive no or next to no return on the majority of this investment. Therefore it strikes me as a poor decision.

I think you're missing the point. It's not about rewarding achievement, it's about encouraging development. Players don't, for instance, go to a cricket academy because of what they have achieved, they go because of what they might achieve in the future.

As for your characteristic "absolute certainty" in the failure of this endeavour, well let's just wait and see shall we?

 

[BoyBrumby]

Yorkshire CCC is tight with its purse strings and still operates slightly different to other counties with an air of arrogance and importance (both a good thing and a hinderance). No player is sacred (unless you were called Boycott).

Even Sir Geoffrey got the arse in the end. He was well into his mid-forties by then, admittedly, but he wanted to play on. In fact he was offered a deal by Derbyshire but (unlike Close, Trueman, Illingworth, etc) he couldn't bring himself to play for anyone but the white rose county.

 

[Richard]

It's all very well saying you have to be 'worthy' of a pro contract before you get one, but in that case how do you stop the more promising youngsters giving up cricket for something that gives them more security?

Incremental, or "rookie" to give them the Australian term, contracts. The way the Australians use to get up-and-comers into cricket is so infinitely superior to the way over here - it encourages players to get jobs to learn a bit about life after cricket before cricket. That way you don't get the situation you get over here where players hang on in the game despite either a) no longer being good enough or b) never being good enough. Once they realise they're not going to make it as a pro, they go and do something else, and aren't scared to do so. But equally they realise that as long as they're under, say, 25, they're still a chance to get somewhere.

I dread to think how much more money could've gone to worthier causes down the years if the infinitely more efficient Australian way of contracting were used over here.

It would be interesting to know how much the ECB spends on this, because then you could judge what the risks are compared to the potential returns. For example: "The C-squad process costs £x" and "progressing a player who wins us 10 ODIs and 2 tests (for example) gives us £y".

Ind33d.

 

[GIMH]

I don't see any point in the ECB spending money on what might very easily be blood-out-of-a-stone measures. I've said it before - players like Carter and Jones should not, in my book, have professional contracts. If you have a pro contract you should be a player who has proven himself worthy of it. Until you do that, you should be treated as such.

It's a personal judgement call that Carter, Jones and many others aren't likely to amount to something. I may be right or I may, just the tiny chance, be wrong. It is not a personal judgement call that to date they've achieved nothing of note - that's stone-cold obvious. I like to see ECB spending confined to areas that have obvious, palatable likely benefits. Not on hit-and-hope schemes like this. It's absolutely certain that the ECB will receive no or next to no return on the majority of this investment. Therefore it strikes me as a poor decision.

If you only throw money at guaranteed successes then it's pretty obvious you'll make a loss in the end. If you invest in ten players, and one of them turns out to be world-class, it was almost certainly worth it.

 

[Richard]

I think you're missing the point. It's not about rewarding achievement, it's about encouraging development. Players don't, for instance, go to a cricket academy because of what they have achieved, they go because of what they might achieve in the future.

The two are not as different as you paint. Once someone is aged 14-15 or so, they will have achieved something in some cricket, which will be a pointer to how much they may achieve in future at that and higher levels. Generally when you attend an academy of some sort, it's because you've done well enough at the next level down to merit it. The players I mention have done dreadfully\poorly at all levels for which data is available. They have not merited a call to an academy of an international side.

As for your characteristic "absolute certainty" in the failure of this endeavour, well let's just wait and see shall we?

So you think more than 6-7 (at absolute best) of those names will enjoy substantial Test careers?

 

[Richard]

If you only throw money at guaranteed successes then it's pretty obvious you'll make a loss in the end. If you invest in ten players, and one of them turns out to be world-class, it was almost certainly worth it.

If a player is going to be World-class it's almost always pretty obvious from an early age. None of those players in that list are remotely likely to be World-class; Test-class will be a hell of an achievement for most. And as I say, county-class would be a good start for not a few.

The ECB are not investing in 10 players, they are investing in 41. Which in my book is far too many. If there were 20 that'd be more fair enough.