Weekend Warmer

We are nearly at the end of January and you know what that means? 

Later this week we will be able to say that the county cricket season starts next month! Only just, with the start of the three-day friendly against Leeds MCCU on the last day of March, but we are looking at small wins here. Hopefully a prelude to some big ones when the action starts..

England gained a quite remarkable win in the Test match, thanks to an extraordinary innings by Ollie Pope and a second innings seven-wicket haul by Tom Hartley. I have to admit that nothing I had seen of the Lancashire spinner suggested he was going to win a Test match anytime soon, but fair play to the lad, he came back from a first innings mauling to be the hero of the hour.

Forty-two wickets in his previous twenty first-class matches didn't suggest he was the new Hedley Verity, but he showed remarkable mental fortitude in rising to the occasion and outbowling established counterparts in the Indian side.

But what do we expect of spinners? If there is a pitch in this country that shows a degree of turn before the last day, pitch inspectors head in. Most get marginally more opportunity than I do and we have selected three for the tour who don't yet have one hundred first class wickets between them. The days of the specialist spinner are long gone and they generally need to be decent batters to get a game at most counties 

You don't generally become fully-skilled at the spinning art in your youth. No greater authority than Edwin Smith told me that he didn't regard himself as the finished article until he reached 30, by which time most modern equivalents have been consigned to the scrapheap, or are only playing a few first-class games at the end of the summer. 

I suspect that there are plenty more twists and turns in the series but India will not have expected Messrs Ashwin and Jadeja to be outbowled by a young lad from Ormskirk...

Moving on, my post about my FAVOURITE Derbyshire eleven produced a bumper mail bag and plenty of comments. I must stress again that it wasn't my greatest Derbyshire eleven, which would be really difficult to do.

How do you compare someone like Arnold Hamer and, say, Peter Bowler? The averages suggest the latter a far superior player, but the former played on uncovered wickets, where batting was a lottery if it rained. Contemporaries said he was a brilliant player against all bowling and often  didn't have a lot of support. 

Similarly, how do you compare Les Townsend and Geoff Miller? Many of us saw Geoff, loved and rightly respected him, but none of us saw Les and his batting and bowling averages were better. Geoff scored 2 hundreds and 72 fifties, to go with 888 wickets at 28, while  Les scored 22 centuries and 102 fifties, as well as over a thousand wickets at 21 each. 

Was Mike Hendrick, as an example, better than William Mycroft? The latter took 863 wickets at just 12 runs each! Granted at a time when the game was vastly different to today, but he dominated in his era and none can do more than that. George Davidson must have been another terrific cricketer, with the figures he produced, yet how does he compare with George Pope, Derek Morgan or Dominic Cork as an all rounder? How do you compare the runs made by batters against the plethora of quick bowlers in the 70s and 80s against those made today? Kim Barnett and Wayne Madsen are probably the two finest batters in our history, yet the conditions in which they made their runs - and the bowlers they faced - are very different.

I don't pay too much attention to social media 'greatest' elevens, because they are heavily weighted in favour of those, understandably, who have been seen. If you follow football, you would think the game didn't matter before the advent of the Premier League. Yet if I chose my favourite eleven most people in it would pre-date that. Was Steve Bloomer better than Kevin Hector, or Bobby Davison? In his era he was a giant of the game and his legend lives on, but most voters in such a poll would likely vote for Chris Martin...

If everyone who reads this submitted a 'greatest' Derbyshire eleven, I would reckon no two would be the same. 

Especially when the format would need to be clarified!