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“Hi, I’ve only got seven quid. Could you cut 80 per cent of my hair?”
Some things have to be done in full. Incompletion is unsatisfactory. As another example, if you have some sort of sports competition, it’s preferable to have everyone competing on an equal footing. If each team plays most of the other teams in its league twice and a couple of them once, that doesn’t really work.
Yet that’s what’s happening with the County Championship from 2014. It’s a spectacularly literal and mindless solution to there being too much cricket, like trying to make a Formula One car lighter by removing the brake pads.
Cricket has a staggering ability to present you with a bowl of soil and bones after you’ve given it chicken and mushrooms to work with. It’s like people go out of their way to leave you dissatisfied.
To comprehensively underline the fact that the entire point of the exercise has been missed, there will also be at least 14 Twenty20 matches for each county in 2014. Attendances for the shortest format dwindled in 2011 and there will be a reduction to 10 matches in 2012. This decision is being reversed before the effects have even been seen.
Basically, the days saved by the amputation of two vital first-class fixtures will instead be used so that the nation’s cricketers can sit in buses on their way to a few Twenty20 matches which no-one gives a toss about.
And don’t give us that ‘Twenty20 is more popular’ shit. It’s dying on its arse.
Administrators treat it like it’s a thing in its own right, but it isn’t. It’s cricket with stabilisers. No-one races the Tour de France with two pink wheels keeping them upright.
I find it rather amusing that you think every time one goes to the barber the ideal situation is to have him cut 100% of your hair.
You haven’t seen our hair.
Not a whiff of ersatz apathy. Bordering on passionate. There is even a suplementary metaphor in the appeals (in addition to three in the post)before the court has had their chance to reply. I take it this has upset you?
I know, two of the metaphors are similies before the court pedants get in there.
It’s probably the bad decision-making itself that upsets us more than the impact on county cricket.
The first time my wife made proper soup, by boiling the bones and remaining meat from a Christmas turkey, she then drained the whole lot over the sink. This left her with a sieve full of bones. (*)
Coincidentally, she now works as a policy consultant to the ECB. (**)
(**) This bit isn’t true.
(*) This bit is, though, but don’t ever mention it to her if you enjoy having intact legs.
That story seems to get funnier each time we read it. By the fourth read-through, we were picturing all sorts of subtle facial nuances at the various different stages from various different parties.
She had a faraway look in her eyes, so that’s where I went.
At Christmas, when I tried to make a stock from the giblets of my bird (the goose that is, and not my mrs), the sodding water boiled off, leaving me stockless for the big day.
Twenty20 is shite.
Morgan is in the “Team Photo” pose. Have the rest of his team snuck off un-noticed?