Monday musings

This is quiet time in county cricket, as players, having said their goodbyes to team mates and staff head off for well-deserved holidays prior to reconvening in the nets in a few weeks time.

The Champions Trophy in India is a mild diversion, if only to marvel at how far Chris Gayle can hit a cricket ball, but for me there's no cricket like Derbyshire cricket. Good, bad or indifferent, they're still my team and I'm sure many of you feel exactly the same.

The conjecture continues about the overseas role, as it will do until we confirm names. I've seen mention of Phil Hughes and various other New South Wales batsmen, but most of them would not get visas. Hughes is a fine player, even if England found him out a little, but I'm unsure as to whether he would want another county stint after his successful spell at Middlesex.

I was intrigued yesterday when looking at the enhanced blog stats from Blogger. In the past month the biggest use of the blog has been from the following countries - in order:

UK
USA
Romania
Iceland
Netherlands
Australia
Germany
Latvia
Russia
New Zealand

I was quite staggered by that and am assuming that the usage is made up of people on holiday or business in these places, or ex-pats. Whatever, if any of them are you, I would love to hear from you and how you came across the blog! Any ideas for additional features are also appreciated from all of you.

I'd just packed my cricket gear away last week when I got a call asking me to play an indoor match in a couple of weeks time. Now it has snowballed to three matches and its the first time I've played indoor cricket since Gandhi was a lad. OK, maybe not that long ago, but I'd guess that Peter Kirsten was our overseas player at the time, which dates it a little. It promises to be fun and should help me keep in trim, having lost six pounds last week on the decorating diet, aka not having enough time to eat...

 Finally tonight, I'm planning on a lightning trip down south in a couple of weeks time, also known as a "use the holiday allocation before you lose them" trip. To be fair, this is much nicer than "use the holidays up to decorate the house" so I'll go and see my folks down south for a few days before winter sets in and the really busy season for the company I work for.

If anyone fancies meeting up for a drink and some cricket chat while I'm down, drop me an e mail to the blog address (peakfan36atyahoodotcodotuk) and we can sort out a time and place. Always good to meet up with like-minded individuals!