Weekend warmer

So England are the world champions in T20 cricket. Which suggests to me like they all got a pretty good grounding in the Vitality Blast, that same competition the ECB appear to want to marginalise in favour of a tin pot tournament that bothers very few.

Fair play to the side which looked pretty impressive throughout. With a top seven as good as that (that still doesn't include Root or Bairstow) most can only envy the depth of talent in our game. Produced by eighteen first class counties of course, let's not forget that. We never really needed to see what the rest of them could do, but with Woakes, Curran and Rashid all pretty handy with the bat, this really is a side that will take some beating.

It has been a fairly quiet week on the Derbyshire front, but the players have returned to training and it is good to see our new players involved.

Thanks to all of you for your contributions to my question last week, as to which overseas stars of the past you would bring into the current setup. Hypothetical of course, and there is no right or wrong answer, it comes down purely to personal preference.

For what it is worth, allowing only for the perceived area of greatest weakness in the current squad, I would have brought in either John Wright or Chris Rogers to open the batting in both 4-day and 50 over cricket. Both would be perfect, but if I had to name one I would take Wright, only because I rarely saw him fail. While Rogers was also a run machine, he rarely scored many when I was in attendance, much the same as Michael di Venuto.

That would then enable me to bring in a T20 specialist and I would have to pick Adrian Kuiper. For all that there have been better batters and bowlers at the county - and to be fair, between you all you named them - Kuiper was a 'gun' finisher.

I have seen every Derbyshire overseas player since Chris Wilkins, the first, in 1970. Chris was the only one remotely close to Kuiper as a long hitter. I would have loved to have seen the South African all rounder with one of the modern bats, as the ball went a country mile with the ones available at that time.

Add in his bustling medium pace and his excellent fielding and Kuiper would easily have been a multi-millionaire in the modern game.

I hope you enjoyed the little bit of fun, so here's another one for you for this week.

Which overseas player, or players in the world game currently would you bring in for the season ahead? You can split the role, should you wish, but be realistic as to who we could get. No Indian players for T20, of course, and my guess would be a maximum spend of 150K.

The international future tours programme can be found here

Have fun!