Weekend thoughts

So, with white ball cricket finished for another season and becoming but a memory, we are left with only twenty red ball days of cricket in 2024, weather permitting, of course.

Like a few of you. I watched the interview on the club site with Mickey Arthur and he showed understandable pride in the performances of individuals and in some cases the team. The wins winds over Somerset and Durham were excellent and both Middlesex and Lancashire were summarily dispatched. As a correspondent noted the other day, all but two of the sides we played were from division one of the County Championship, while the others were only relegated last season. 

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It gives a sense of perspective in the five wins, but nor should we forget that some of those teams were heavily impacted by players absent at the other competition going on at present. While acknowledging you can only ever beat who is in front of you, it would be difficult to claim a genuine sense of achievement in beating sides with ten players missing, as was the case with Somerset and Lancashire.

For Mickey Arthur and Derbyshire to claim progress this season, we need to finish strongly in red ball cricket. We currently have no wins and three defeats, being adrift by nineteen points at the bottom of the table. 

I felt a certain sympathy for Arthur when he claimed that we had lost out on two top line bowlers from overseas before the season started. It explains why we ended up with those we did, but it also highlights that he had misread the greater need of the side. Regardless of their ability, if two overseas bowlers are signed of that quality they have to play, but you also have to omit your home grown talent. 

If Ben Aitchison is fit for next year (crossing fingers and toes as I type) and with Conners, Brown, Chappell and a raft of all round seamers to choose from, not to mention Harry Moore, we don't need two overseas bowlers. If one is a really good leg-spinner you might persuade me, but not easily.

Nor am I easily convinced by protestations that the players are tired. Between July 19 and the start of our next game on August 22 they will have played eight days of cricket. I accept there are physical and mental demands, but no more than my father experienced when he was working five or six days down a coal mine each week, or more than many others in high pressure jobs, trying to keep their families fed. Support mechanisms are in place and people have to get on with their jobs within that. The pressures are there for all teams and for everyone, whatever their calling or responsibilities in life. 

So we must await the return of the 4-day game and hope that the bounce and carry that was increasingly evident in the recent one-day cup fixtures at Derby has continued. As I said on the radio the other night, we need one or two in the win column, because it has been a long time since that happened at home. 

How to address that has to be number one on the list of priorities as we approach the final month of the season.