An Open Letter to Colin Graves

barmyarmy

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An Open Letter to Colin Graves

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Dear Mr Graves,

As you’re about to take up the position of ECB chairman I thought I would tell you how I and so many England fans are feeling right now. We have had enough. Enough of defensive negative play. Enough of the same tired old excuses. Enough of being told that we are outside cricket and our views don’t matter. You have the power, you have the responsibility and you have the opportunity to do something about all that.

Your background is encouraging and we’re told that you don’t tolerate failure. We were heartened by your actions in dismissing Paul Downton and in assuring that changes would be made if we failed to beat the West Indies. We don’t believe that calling them mediocre caused us to lose the series. We believe that poor selections and lack of leadership caused us to lose this series. In fact it is typical of the current England management team to want a scapegoat. It was Kevin Pietersen for the last Ashes and now it’s you for this series. We say “nonsense”. If Moores and Cook refuse to take responsibility that you have a duty to dismiss them.

We are concerned though by reports that Andrew Strauss is set to be appointed to the new Director of Cricket role. We feel that Strauss’s brand of leadership is part of the problem. His partnership with Andy Flower, while successful, also led to a joyless form of cricket that sucked everything good out of the game. Furthermore while you have said that no-one is excluded from selection, Andrew Strauss has described a Kevin Pietersen England return as an unwanted distraction. His off-the-record comments make clear his contempt for England’s leading test run-scorer and you may have opened a door for Pietersen but Strauss intends to slam it shut again.
Part of your job is also to decide whether Alastair Cook is the best man to lead England. This has to be based on his captaincy abilities and not spurious claptrap about being from the right sort of family. Appointing one of his personal friends to the Director of Cricket role seems an odd way to begin wholesale reform and change of the current, failed, setup. Andrew Strauss is the “more of the same” candidate.

You become chairman of an ECB which continues to leak to favoured journalists while denying it – a leak I trust you will be investigating. That sacks Paul Downton for a disastrous tenure yet promotes the man who appointed him, and will hear no criticism of his own actions, to honorary president. And that has a chief selector who, in combination with the coach and captain, manages to pick two exciting young cricketers for the West Indies tour and then fail to give either a game. It will be no easy task to reform it but if you don’t get them, they will get you.

So Mr Graves, show us that your words actually mean something. Show us that if Andrew Strauss is going to take the job, it is on your terms and he will work with the captain and coach that you decide to appoint. We fans are quite excited by the prospect of someone like Jason Gillespie taking charge. We would like to see some role for Michael Vaughan but most of all we want a change in the culture of secrecy, of leaking, of instinctive defensiveness both in interviews and on the pitch. We want an England team that we can get behind and feel proud of and we thought you wanted that too. The time for words is over and now is the time to back them up with actions.

Yours sincerely,

England Cricket Fans
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barmyarmy

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I'm a Surrey fan ;)

The way I see it the more Yorkshire players in the England side the less chance of them retaining the County Championship...
 

MUFC1987

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I just think we've had this talk for years about 'jobs for the boys' and all this stuff, which I think is fair enough. There are some great points to be made there. But is replacing all that with the entire Yorkshire set up and even throwing Michael Vaughan into that really going to solve anything? It'll be the exact same, just with a slightly different direction.

And don't get me wrong, Yorkshire had a great year last year, but so did Warwickshire just before we hired Ashley Giles and so did Lancashire just before we put Peter Moores into the job. It's not a cast iron guarantee of success.

And I'm not buying Graves as some sort of messiah. I'm sure the media love him, for the sound bites he gives, but I imagine there are a fair few of us who think he is talking utter, utter rubbish most of the time.
 

blockerdave

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I agree with the sentiment, though not all the points.

I don't believe Strauss should be given the role, under any circumstances, even if he agrees to a different Captain / Coach. Gillespie shouldn't get the job; I don't care about the Fletcher / Flower precedent, the guy in charge should be English.

I also believe actually the DoC should have ultimate control for the team, and there should be neither a head coach nor a chair of selectors. The DoC should be kind of like a football manager - he can appoint coaching staff and indeed scouting/selection staff under him, but he has overall control and overall responsibility. He appoints the captain.

I believe personally that man should be Nasser Hussain, he should be offered a king's ransom for it and publicly so - if he really doesn't want the job, fine, but the public will at least know when he's pontificating on sky/in the press, he didn't put his reputation where his mouth is. If not Hussain, Atherton or Vaughan.

Further, the whole English game needs reform - we do not need 18 counties, and we shouldn't fund it. About 10 with a reasonable geographical spread, a better structured season that includes time for our internationals to play in the domestic game to get them better leadership experience, more List A/T20 experience, that has time for an EPL-type competition and allows our best to play in the foreign leagues too.

Every county should also be told that their funding is dependent on them fielding at least 1 English (not English qualified, but bonafide English - or British - player who has come up through the ranks) spinner and "fast" (i.e. 88-95mph) bowler in a minimum of 75% of their matches in every format (not across formats).
 

_Sam_

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...dependent on them fielding at least 1 English spinner...

Perhaps they shouldn't dock teams for preparing pitches that suite this then? Last time Hampshire made a pitch that lost as many wickets in 2 days as the one we just played out on in the West Indies we were docked points by the ECB and following game Carberry and McKenzie put on a 500 odd run partnership in suite with the fairly flat pitches that have been produced since.

Edit : Just to add that first game was even more entertaining going down to the last over on the final day...
 
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blockerdave

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Perhaps they shouldn't dock teams for preparing pitches that suite this then? Last time Hampshire made a pitch that lost as many wickets in 2 days as the one we just played out on in the West Indies we were docked points by the ECB and following game Carberry and McKenzie put on a 500 odd run partnership in suite with the fairly flat pitches that have been produced since.

pitches shouldn't be doctored to suit spinners, we want to develop players for all conditions. but you don't want featherbeds either - we need to be playing on good, true cricket wickets that will offer turn as matches progress. this will encourage quicker bowlers too as it stops the 80-odd mph "there or thereabouts" bowlers being effective. it is why we simply either have to reduce the number of counties, or at best go to 3 divisions of 6. teams have to play vastly fewer numbers of games so they play on newer, better, faster pitches instead of the tired old ones that flog quick bowlers and reward dibbly dobblers.
 

IceAgeComing

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Gillespie shouldn't get the job; I don't care about the Fletcher / Flower precedent, the guy in charge should be English.

...who was the last English coach of England that did anything notably good? Flower and Fletcher were both Zimbabwean, Moores never really did a whole lot in his first fun as coach and I wasn't really around before those guys... They should hire the best person for the job; the nationality of the man shouldn't come into it.

The issue with the English domestic game is that they can't figure out how to work in T20s and One Day cricket - the summer months when you'd want to play Championship games with spinny wickets were locked out with T20s and now One Day games (the former was reasonable for cash reasons, the latter is dumb). I don't think that there's a decent way of getting all of what the Counties and ECB want: since Championship games are seen as being money sinks while T20s earn cash you'd want to play most of them during the summer, but doing that naturally pushes the Championship towards the start of the year. Its a hard thing to try and fix...

Also anyone suggesting that sussex gets taken out of the championship gets banned ;). Seriously; the smaller counties sometimes do a great deal for the development of players, and I think that sometimes people forget that. Thinking of Sussex just now: I can think of five players off the top of my head that Sussex developed that either played international cricket or are being tipped to play international cricket (we developed Prior, Ambrose (he played a year of test cricket, it counts!) and Luke Wright (yeah, I know) and took Jordan from being an average county player with Surrey to make him a good bowler and we may well do the same thing with Mills if England don't take him away too hastily and ruin him like they've done to so many bowlers), and have been competitive in the Championship regularly for at least ten years despite having the smallest ground of any Championship County. I don't know what Counties you'd try to get rid of, but its not as simple as "small ones go, big ones stay" since some of the smaller counties seem to develop more players than some of the larger ones do.
 

blockerdave

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the nationality of the man shouldn't come into it.

International sport should be your system against theirs. if nationality doesn't matter, the whole thing doesn't matter. the relaxed attitude to nationality in cricket and rugby is something i find distasteful. i am aware that would mean several current and recent england player's wouldn't have been eligible: so be it.
 

blockerdave

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Also anyone suggesting that sussex gets taken out of the championship gets banned ;). Seriously; the smaller counties sometimes do a great deal for the development of players, and I think that sometimes people forget that. Thinking of Sussex just now: I can think of five players off the top of my head that Sussex developed that either played international cricket or are being tipped to play international cricket (we developed Prior, Ambrose (he played a year of test cricket, it counts!) and Luke Wright (yeah, I know) and took Jordan from being an average county player with Surrey to make him a good bowler and we may well do the same thing with Mills if England don't take him away too hastily and ruin him like they've done to so many bowlers), and have been competitive in the Championship regularly for at least ten years despite having the smallest ground of any Championship County. I don't know what Counties you'd try to get rid of, but its not as simple as "small ones go, big ones stay" since some of the smaller counties seem to develop more players than some of the larger ones do.

i wouldn't advocate small go, big stay. but 18 counties is the start of our problem. i realise they all have great history, and lots of them have excellent presents, but they've no divine right to exist. we need a streamlined season that produces good, tough cricketers.
 

MUFC1987

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I've never understood the theory that less Counties would produce better players. There are a load of prospects only getting a game because some of the smaller counties have taken a chance on them and they're performing well. Charlie Morris for example, at Worcestershire.

If we streamlined to 12 counties, the bigger sides are going to get rid of their journeymen experienced players, to let that player that they know nothing about play. It's just never going to happen. All less Counties would do is keep the big clubs rich.
 

IceAgeComing

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International sport should be your system against theirs. if nationality doesn't matter, the whole thing doesn't matter. the relaxed attitude to nationality in cricket and rugby is something i find distasteful. i am aware that would mean several current and recent england player's wouldn't have been eligible: so be it.

the eligibility thing is greatly exaggerated: compared to most sports cricket actually has stricter eligibility requirements than most other sports. The problem is more people being able to switch countries (IMO only one person ever should have been allowed to do that and that was Wessels for obvious reasons) after playing international cricket for another country, and that's mostly because of the unequal way which countries are treated, especially associate nations not being allowed to play tests
 

blockerdave

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I've never understood the theory that less Counties would produce better players. There are a load of prospects only getting a game because some of the smaller counties have taken a chance on them and they're performing well. Charlie Morris for example, at Worcestershire.

If we streamlined to 12 counties, the bigger sides are going to get rid of their journeymen experienced players, to let that player that they know nothing about play. It's just never going to happen. All less Counties would do is keep the big clubs rich.

Less players = more conpetition for a place on the roster = better players make it. Excess dilutes talent.

But even more than that, too many teams means too many games which means convoluted season without international players involved, it means games played on sub standard pitches suiting the medium pace bowlers at the expense of pace.

If we must have 18 counties, it should be 3 divs. Make it conference style rather than promotion/relegation if you like but we need a much better structured season.
 

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