Midweek musings

There's a degree of irony in the fact that the eyes of the world over the next couple of weeks are on Glasgow, while mine are firmly fixed on Derbyshire.

Don't get me wrong, I love Glasgow and took great pride in the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony last night. It is a friendly city and, even though we live in a semi-rural location around nine miles north of it, we went into the back garden last night and on a beautiful, still evening could clearly hear the fireworks that heralded the end of proceedings.

On an enjoyable day off today, in between enjoying the sunshine, I watched the remarkable Brownlee brothers swimming, cycling and running around Strathclyde Park, the splendours of which are but ten minutes from our house. I pass it every day on my road to work and a lovely place it is.

It's not Derbyshire though and people round these parts excuse and understand my bias in such things.

The T20 draws to a close tomorrow and it has been a pretty depressing competition for us. Ironically, as has been pointed out, we've batted pretty well and posted totals that, with better bowling, should have resulted in positive results. Much work needs to be done on the skill sets required in the Power play and at the death before we can genuinely expect to compete in this competition. Perhaps another year some overseas input in this area will be available, courtesy of findmealangeveldt.com...

There has been encouragement in the performances of youth, however and the likes of Taylor, Cotton and Cork could, given hard work and experienced assistance, improve our performances another year. I'm regarding this as the nadir and look forward to a future improvement in our fortunes. 

As Graeme Welch points out in the Derby Telegraph today, there is no reason to be despondent about fifty-over prospects in the Royal London One-Day Cup, because the games tend to ebb and flow more. Innings need to be built and teams can over-extend in the quest for an unassailable score, when they are unaware that they are already going above par on a particular wicket.

Top half of the league will do us fine and enable us to reach the quarter-finals and on paper we should beat some of the opposition in our group. Whether we can win enough to make it count is a moot point, but we should be full of confidence and ready to give a good account of ourselves.

It was interesting to read that Shiv Chanderpaul looks likely to have played his last championship match for us and even more so to see Graeme Welch suggest that there are options other than Marcus North to replace him. Presumably that will be a portion of the Groenewald salary and it remains to be seen if we do bring someone in and who that might be.

It's going to make interesting watching, though.

Finally tonight and harking back to the references to loom bands of a night or two back, I realised today that Derbyshire's fortunes have taken a turn for the better since our daughter made me one in club colours. I say realised - actually she pointed it out to me... very nice it is too and I wear it with pride.

Think I'll be keeping it on for the immediate future!