Monday musings

I’m well aware of the difference between even high quality league cricket like the Derbyshire Premier League and the first class game, but weekend events in the game between Chesterfield and Ticknall are worthy of note from a county perspective.

In that game Paul Borrington reeled off an apparently brilliant unbeaten 143, his fifth ton of a prolific summer for Ticknall which has given him an average of Bradmanesque proportions, a staggering 168 from just eight innings. His innings contained fourteen fours and four sixes, suggesting that the old accusation of a player unable to force the pace is no longer valid.

Borrington suffered the unluckiest of injuries pre-season that ruled him out of matches in which he might well have been expected to play. Now of course, the surfeit of T20 in the next month makes it unlikely he will force his way into the side until July at the earliest. Even the seconds are playing smack and giggle stuff all month, an environment hardly conducive to making a case for inclusion at a higher level.

But what then? Borrington is an opening batsman – a specialist position – and in his way are our most prolific batsman in Wayne Madsen and our overseas player, Martin Guptill. We could, of course move Madsen to number five, where he does so well in one-day games, but who do you drop? Hughes, Durston, Smith and Redfern have all done well so far and none of them deserve to miss out on current form.

When we are considering options for next season, however, I hope that the path of a young, locally reared player like Borrington isn’t blocked. Martin Guptill is a fine player with a growing reputation in the game, but the likelihood of him being here after this year is slim, given the congestion of the international calendar. Borrington, however, is potentially a Derbyshire player for the next ten years and it would be a shame to see him have to move elsewhere for greater opportunity after the years he has been at the club. We have, after all, seen Wayne White make a success of such a move, while I’m still minded of young off-spinner Bob Swindell who showed promise but had his path blocked by the signing of Venkat many moons ago.

Some will say that Borrington hasn’t made the most of opportunities thus far, which is fair, but he’s rarely had the chance to bat in his preferred position (some bloke called Rogers…) and needs more than a game or two here and there. My understanding is that his current contract is to the end of next season and it would be to everyone’s advantage if he had the opportunity to show what he can do between times.

In six years since his debut in 2005 he has just 42 first-class innings to his name, some of them for Loughborough UCCE. An average of a shade under 30 is no disgrace and the signs are that he is ready for an extended run that could just be the making of him. It may well not happen this season, but I'd certainly like to see him given the chance to make the position his own next year. In between times he can only keep scoring runs at every opportunity, work on his technique and enjoy a spell where it would appear he could get runs with Geoff Boycott's proverbial 'stick o' rhubarb'.

In a normal match such an innings as he played on Saturday would be a match-winner, but an extraordinary knock of 131 from 65 balls by James Pipe stole the show. Pipe’s innings contained 19 fours and 9 sixes, which means that he only ran one single before, with delightful irony, he was run out, presumably having forgotten he could do…

Such an innings, not his first of the season, highlights something we have missed over the past couple of seasons, a lower order player who can take the game away from the opposition in a short space of time. Luke Sutton is a fine cricketer who will give 100% at all times and is at least Pipe’s equal behind the timbers, but he is unlikely to turn a match with dazzling stroke play and the launching of a counter attack. He will always sell his wicket dearly though and has made an excellent contribution already this season.

In closing tonight, the T20 division is starting to take shape, with Lancashire top and Nottinghamshire second. That makes our tie on Friday night the more laudable, while the loss to Nottinghamshire was hardly something new. There are games coming up that are winnable and our campaign is far from over, irrespective of what happens against Durham in next weekend’s double-header. I maintain that we’re not too far away from winning games and I disagree that the lack of a second overseas role will cost us. Looking at who sides have brought in and what they have done so far, it is hard to argue with Chris Grant.

Our success will be more a case of what our overseas player does. If Martin Guptill plays a few major innings, rather than attractive twenties, we will win more matches than we lose, as he is a naturally quick scorer. If he doesn’t, I suspect that the win/loss ratio will be less favourable, simple as that. While Botha and Vaas at Northamptonshire, Voges and Hussey at Nottinghamshire and Van der Merwe at Somerset have done well, there’s a few under-achievers at present.

Let’s hope it stays that way when we play them.