Surrey Bias - How much more blatant..?

[Neil Pickup]

From CricInfo tonight:

Surrey's Rikki Clarke has won the Cricket Writers' Club Young Cricketer of the Year award after one of the tightest votes in recent years.

The 20-year-old all-rounder claimed the prestigious prize by one vote from Kent's Robert Key, who made his England debut this summer after Marcus Trescothick suffered a broken thumb.

Clarke won the award ahead of seven other nominations, including Warwickshire's Graham Wagg and Ian Bell, Worcestershire's Kabir Ali, Sussex's Tim Ambrose and Matthew Prior, Richard Dawson from Yorkshire and Lancashire all-rounder Kyle Hogg.

© CricInfo Ltd.

Righto, there's not much that's more likely to annoy me than that. That is completely and totally injustifiable.

What's he done this year?

FC Batting Ave - 50.78. Reasonable - but Martin Bicknell got more than that last year.

FC Bowling - 11 @ 41.00. Wow... 1.1 a game. Economy of 4.77 - in FC that's dire.

OD Batting - 19.50. Less than impressive.

OD Bowling 10 @ 39.00. 0.63 a game. And at an Economy rate of 5.69 (which would extrapolate to 285/inns - pitiful).

As for the others...

Key - broken into the England side.
Ali - five-fers all over the show
Hogg - some super U19 performances, plus wickets on a regular basis for Lancs.

Slightly better candidates? Nah, Clarke plays for Surrey.

I've seen some shocking awards in my time, but that one takes the biscuit.

 

[marc71178]

How did Troughton not even get in the shortlist, yet Bell did?

An average close to 60 in his first season.

If Clarke gets called into the English team, I may apply for Australian citizenship!

 

[Gotchya]

Surrey bias hmmmmm.....
Do you have any reasons to believe that ?
I mean what would you say if i asked why?

 

[Neil Pickup]

Here are some reasons:

1) Rikki Clarke winning Young Player of the Year ahead of Key, Troughton, Kabir and Hogg
2) Ian Salisbury playing for England
3) Ramprakash getting recalled the moment he signed for Surrey
4) Alex Tudor playing in front of Steve Harmison at Headingley

 

[Gotchya]

Here are some reasons:

1) Rikki Clarke winning Young Player of the Year ahead of Key, Troughton, Kabir and Hogg
2) Ian Salisbury playing for England
3) Ramprakash getting recalled the moment he signed for Surrey
4) Alex Tudor playing in front of Steve Harmison at Headingley

Those are the consequnces (possibly) of a bias. I mean they just cant be getting those players out of the telephone directory, if there really is something going on, whats your insight on the reasons?
Why surrey, why not lancs or worcs ??

 

[Neil Pickup]

Why is there a bias? I don't know, but it does appear very strongly that there is one.

Maybe the county is perceived as more "fashionable" and other place out "in the sticks" aren't..

 

[Gotchya]

What kind of pitches do you have up in surrey ? are they any faster/better than the others?

Does the county have a history of producing good players ? (i might as well migrate )

 

[Neil Pickup]

Surrey play on the Oval, which is a good batting pitch but also helps the spinners (hence how Saqlain has bowled them to the title this year).

 

[marc71178]

Ian Ward.

 

[tenchi]

I feel that if Devon Malcolm played for Surrey he would have stood a chance of 'Young Player of the Year' - and he is close to forty.


Can someone help me here please? If I type a message, it scrolls across and I cannot see what I have already typed.

If I click the 'preview' button, then I can see the whole message.

Is it a problem with my machine settings?

I am using Red Hat Linux operating system because I do not like Microsoft (actually because it is free).

 

[Neil Pickup]

I think that Top_Cat's the one you want to ask about Linux - send him a U2U.

 

[Top_Cat]

Hey tenchi (great name, by the way. )

What browser are you using? Mozilla?

 

[tenchi]

Konqueror. Is that not good?

Tenchi? Blame my parents.

As a child, I would have preferred 'Joe' or 'Bill' or 'Zeke' or something which identifies the good guy in cowboy films, rather than a fish which roots around at the bottom of a pond.

 

[Top_Cat]

Konqueror. Is that not good?

Nothing wrong with Konqueror at all but the coding behind this site is optimised for IE and Nutscrape Gecko-based browsers (like Mozilla). What version of Konqueror are you running? Anything pre-dating 2.1 won't deal with some sites real well.

I'd suggest using Mozilla. It's the latest really good Linux browser and besides, a friend of mine codes for Mozilla so I have to give it a plug. The skins you can get for it can make it look quite stunning too! I'll post some screenshots sometime.

So do you know how to compile stuff for use if it's not an RPM?

Here's the RPM's of Moz anyway:

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/releases/mozilla1.0/Red_Hat_7x_RPMS/i386/

Or alternatively, you could just get an update of Konqueror. It's a great browser, though it's engine is slow on quite a few IE-optimised sites.

 

[tenchi]

Thank you very much for the assistance.

My son set up my system for me a few weeks ago. The reason I use Linux now is I got fed up of not being able to trust anything because of all the viruses which silly people keep writing, which all seem to be targeted against Microsoft systems (thus far I have not had any problems in Linux).