Weekend warmer

It has been a fairly quiet week from a Derbyshire perspective, although the news that Sam Conners has been selected for England Lions was widely welcomed.

He fully deserved it after an excellent season and I hope that this is just a start, for a fine young cricketer.

Further afield, I have enjoyed watching some of the Cricket World Cup and I thought that the qualifying competition was very good indeed. It was a shame that Scotland missed out, but they just seem to lack that one batsman of proven quality that some of the others had.

Mark Watt earned lavish praise from the commentators as a 'canny operator' and I think he was as good as any spinner that I saw in the past week. You can tell that he thinks about the game, but his side couldn't scrape together the extra few runs in each innings that would have made a difference.

The best player I saw in the week was Sikandar Raza of Zimbabwe. He has had a fascinating background, which included doing his degree in Glasgow and playing cricket in Scotland before moving to Zimbabwe and qualifying to play for that country after a number of years in Pakistan.

Over the past 12 months he has probably become as effective a player as any in the world game, scoring a lot of runs and taking wickets with his clever and varied spin bowling. I like the way that he conceals the ball behind him as he runs into bowl, then baffling batters with a combination of accurate off, leg and topspin. His stock ball seems to be the off spinner, but he is talent, for sure.

A blistering 48-ball 82, followed by one for 17 in three overs won them the game against Ireland, while his 40 from 23 balls saw him the only man to come to terms with conditions against Scotland and turned the match. Add in his 3-19 against the West Indies and his has been a standout performance.

I look forward to seeing how he gets on now that they are mixing it with the big guns. I suspect there will be a few people looking at him. With Zimbabwe's relatively few international commitments in the next year he would be a good option, at least for the Vitality Blast.

Should we read anything into Mickey Arthur congratulating him on his performances on Twitter? Probably not, perhaps just a man with his finger on the pulse of the world game.

But I would be very happy if Raza shipped up at the Incora County Ground.

Just what the doctor ordered, for me.