Something else for the weekend

Another thing occupying the minds of fans at the moment is the dearth of cricket at outgrounds next season. While Chesterfield still has its cricket week, there’s no Yorkshire fixture in any competition there, while Leek appears to have been overlooked.


I addressed this in a piece the other night. The additional costs of staging cricket on outgrounds are considerable and in times when money is tight there are obvious savings to be made in concentrating resources. Given the excellent development work at the County Ground of late, there is little logic in playing a lot of cricket elsewhere.

However…

Where I have a degree of sympathy is with regard to the respective fees for ‘full’ and ‘country’ members. Someone from the Derby area can pay £150 and watch their team on the doorstep - a steal, especially in comparison to a football season ticket. With the majority of members deemed ‘local’, I’ve no problem with that.

Yet you don’t qualify as a ‘country member’ unless you live in excess of 35 miles from the County Ground. So are still expected to pay top dollar, despite potentially bearing the costs of a 60-70 mile round trip. Thirty-five miles is a fair distance to cover and perhaps 25 miles might be a fairer figure to start the discount. When people talk of voting with their feet and not renewing memberships it suggests things need to be addressed.

The other side of it is that ANYBODY outside that 35-mile radius has then to pay £130. That would include me, living 330 miles away and able to get to only a handful of games a season for fairly obvious reasons. I know from your e-mails that there are people in similar or worse situations geographically who would still like to be involved.

Now I remember a few years ago when the club offered a membership for people like me. I forget what it was called, but probably something like ‘Living at the Ends of the Earth’ category. It cost around £25 and included open tickets for two or three games of your choice, offering access to member facilities at home and to an away ground without member facilities. It was value for money and I was happy to pay it. I was supporting the club and could call myself a member, albeit a distant one.

Why not resurrect that? Membership for the geographically challenged…

At last week’s club cricket dinner I suggested to a couple of my pals, both Durham fans, that we should take a trip down to the Riverside next season to see the T20 match there. They didn’t fancy it, not at the thought of my gloating when we beat them, but because ‘it’s three hours down there and three back, only lasts three hours and you can often predict the winner after five overs.’

I couldn’t argue. While football fans think nothing of travelling the length of the country for 90 minutes of action (a term often used loosely) many cricket fans won’t bother when the opening powerplay can make or break a game.

The other problem is that many members are older – perhaps those best placed to get full value from a membership – and as such loathe T20. My Dad does. He said he’d rather have a branding iron applied to his nether regions than go to another one. When I asked what he disliked, he’d gone through “pyjamas, slogging, loud music, drunks, daft dancing, daft blokes on stilts, silly gimmicks and chanting” before taking another breath…

A T20 membership for fans though – maybe one each for adults and juniors that offered value for money - would encourage regular attendance, even when the TV cameras were there, results weren’t going our way and the weather far from balmy. Have a country member version of that as well and the world’s your lobster, as George Cole once said in Minder.

The alternative would be to put up the membership fee and make it inclusive of T20, at least ensuring that the club got additional money if they didn’t get the bums on all of the seats.

Finally, a big name overseas star who performs well in the format, wickets that encourage stroke play and decent weather would make an irresistible package.

Shame we can’t control the latter. The rest is manageable though.