This blog went into abeyance last year as my last year before retirement
proved to be exceptionally intense, as I was working on three missions
simultaneously, including one as Deputy Project Scientist during Mission
Adoption Phase (a particularly busy and stressful time). Of course, the season
did not turn out as we expected, although the team showed great spirit by
ending the season with two wins when it looked as if the Shire might be the
first team since 2014 to be relegated without winning a match.
For various reasons I missed the Glamorgan and the Worcestershire games this
season almost entirely and the Yorkshire match was a washout, so that was not good
material for re-starting the blog either.
With now more than a quarter of the team’s games complete, the Shire lie
6th in Division 2, having played a game more than everyone save for leaders
Durham. The unbeaten run has extended to seven games which, on paper, looks
pretty good, but no one would argue that the start of the season has not been
disappointing, with the last batting point attained against Warwickshire, six
games ago.
Looking back at 2022
The 2022 season did not go as we had hoped. Early season, the Shire were
hit by a mixture of bad luck, including a quite astonishing run of injuries. Even
so, four of the first five games were, at least, competitive and the Shire had
their chances in them. However, the seeds of the mid-season collapse to a
series of heavy defeats had already been sown. A severely depleted attack
struggled to take wickets. Batsman struggled against excellent bowling. Confidence
took a battering and, on the rare occasions when the team got into a promising
position, luck was not with them. A case in point was the two Northants games
in which, both times, the opposition finished eight wickets down in the final
innings: those four, un-taken wickets cost the Shire 24 points (the games ended
in a draw and a defeat respectively). Most often, though, as the season
progressed it was a case of desperately chasing the game and trying to salvage
a draw. Even if the two Northants games had been won, a haul of just 26 batting
and 29 bowling bonus points ensured that even four wins would not have been
enough to escape relegation.
Hopes for 2023
Expectations for 2023 have been cautiously optimistic. However, a huge
2022 operating loss has left the coffers bare. The consequences have been,
first, no new big-name, signings and, second, a serious effort to reduce costs,
hence the departures of players on white-ball-only contracts. The latter will
mainly be felt in the white-ball campaign, which could be difficult. The
former, though, has hit squad depth and led to an inability to reinforce the
squad. Marcus Harris will miss potentially six Championship matches with
Australia; with money tight, rather than making a big-name, short-term signing,
he will be replaced by Grant Roelofsen, who is mainly a white-ball player and
certainly, not a name known to most members.
However, a decent attack, a batting line-up with real potential and
opposition that is nowhere near as frightening as that faced in Division 1
makes you think that Gloucestershire should be competitive. Within the club the
expectation was that the team would be in the promotion mix. Time will tell if
this has been realistic. Experience shows that relegated sides either bounce
back quickly or have to settle for a long stay in Division 2.
Facing up to reality
The start of the season has thrown up a rapid dose of reality. These
were almost no outdoor practice possible in pre-season and problems started
quickly to rear their ugly head. With David Payne recovering from ankle surgery
and Matt Taylor also recovering from injury and unavailable, the seam attack,
so good on paper, is worryingly thin. The departure of Ryan Higgins hits the
balance of the side: with no genuine all-rounder, picking a fifth bowler means having
a non-specialist batting at 7. This leads to the eternal conundrum: do you pick
a seventh batsman to shorten the tail, or a fifth bowler?
If the batsmen from one to six are scoring big runs, you would not
hesitate to pick the extra bowler. Trouble is that the Shire are far iffier
than that: James Bracey average 20.2; Ollie Price, 19.3; and Jack Taylor, 13.
There is still no batting bonus point (the only one of the eighteen counties not
to earn one), so you are reluctant to weaken the batting to fit in the extra
bowler. Four bowlers, then. You want to have Zafar in the side because of the
control he brings and his ability to exploit any pitch with a minimum of
assistance, but then you have only three seamers and if one gets injured or has
a bad game, the situation can run away from you in the field like an express
train. Even though you have four batsmen who can deliver some passable spin, there
is no one who can turn their arm over and hold up an end with ten overs of
nagging medium pace if the seam attack is flagging. This was the situation that
the Shire found themselves in against Sussex.
Paying the price against Sussex
On a curtailed Day 1 with the opposition put in, Tom Price showed that
he is, after all, human and struggled with his control, ending up being very
expensive. Atmospheric conditions looked good for the bowlers but, despite the
fire of de Lange and Singh Dale, only one wicket came. On Days 2 and 3,
glorious batting conditions allowed Sussex to make hay and the ensuing
spectacle resembled the worst days of the 2022 campaign. You cannot fault the
attack’s effort – Singh Dale, in particular, as he went at 2.4 per over in a
batter-friendly run-fest – but a second bowling point never looked likely to be
attained. As the score mounted and the relative bounty of 9-1 and 58-2
disappeared into the past, the captain must have longed for the extra seamer, particularly
a brisk left-armer who would give the batsmen something different to think
about. The way that the Sussex batsmen accelerated to the fifth batting point
was particularly depressing to watch. When Pujara fell, Sussex, who had been
scoring at a run-a-ball for much of the fifth wicket partnership, had 39 balls
to make the 42 runs that were needed:
they made it with considerable comfort. New batsman at the crease: 35 balls, 47
runs scored in a hail of boundaries, rounded-off by a Hudson-Prentice six.
The acceleration was brutal.
· At 55 overs, the scoring rate was 2.86
runs per over.
· Coles and Pujara added 144 in 30.2 overs
for the 4th wicket at 4.75 runs per over.
· Pujara and Carter added 106 in 18.5
overs for the 5th wicket at 5.62 runs per over.
· The final 47 runs of the innings came
at 8.06 runs per over.
Watching a quite decent bowling attack being assaulted so freely
inevitably hits morale. As the Sussex charge to a declaration continued, on Shire
fan worried that a pitch that looked like a traditional Bristol road would
become a result pitch when we batted on it. Oh Jim! How right you were!
With only four and a half sessions left and rain forecast for Day 4 the
match should have petered into a hunt for bonus points. Shortly before Tea on
Day 3 things looked so rosy and it really did look as if Day 4 would be a
tedious push towards an inevitable draw. Chris Dent and Marcus Harris had put
on 66 for the 1st wicket and were batting well when Dent was unlucky
to chop-on from an inside edge. In came Winterbourne’s finest, batting looked comfortable,
and the score had reached 99-1 when everything went horribly wrong. It all
started with the sort of wretched luck that dogged the team in 2022. Harris
pushed the ball out to mid-wicket and set off for a tight single. Tom Clark
gathered and threw. As everyone started to appreciate the danger, the umpire
moved away from the stumps but, as Harris dived, was certainly not in position.
From the TV images it looked very tight. Certainly, it would have gone to DRS
had DRS been available. Twenty years ago, you would almost certainly have expected
the batsman to get the benefit of the doubt but, the umpire called it as he saw
it and Harris had to go.
Pujara brought back McAndrew, who dismissed Bracey and van Buuren with
the first two deliveries of his new spell. Here we go again! Five wickets fell
for 46 runs on a blameless pitch to an attack that stuck to its task but was not
the most threatening in Division 2.
This is the sort of situation that seems to bring out the best in Miles
Hammond. Bags of talent. A former England U19 player, he seems to thrive in a
crisis but, unfortunately, not when the score is 250-2, as well as having a
tendency to give his wicket away to loose shots. The result is a First Class
average of 28.9 and just three of the eighteen times than he has passed fifty being
converted into centuries.
When the opposition has made 455-5 with contemptuous ease and you find
yourself 145-6 in reply, there is a certain inevitability in the situation:
follow-on and a battle to save a game that should never have been in doubt. Miles
Hammond, though, decided that today would be the day for another of his remarkable
innings in adversity. A stand of 34 with Tom Price threatened a recovery before
a further mini-collapse saw Price, Zafar and de Lange fall for 8 runs in 28
balls.
The arrival of Ajit Singh Dale saw Hammond start to attack and show that
there was not much wrong with the pitch. Any demons were mainly mental.
Although Singh Dale has a First Class average of 8.7, he has shown that he can
hang around and, together, they saw up the 200, then saw off the New Ball
thrust. Up came the 200 and the score crept up towards that magic 250.
Hammond was magnificent, controlling the strike and Singh Dale solid.
Jack Russell would have celebrated it on canvas. Felicia Dorothea Hemans
would have celebrated it in verse, something like the following (adapted from the poem Casabianca):
Miles Hammond stood
on the burning deck,
Whence all but he had fled;
The flame that lit the pitch’s wreck,
Shone round him o’er the dead.
Yet beautiful and
bright he stood,
As born to rule the storm;
A batsman of heroic blood,
A proud, though childlike form.
The bowlers spun on –
he would not go,
Without his captain’s word;
That skipper, in batting collapse below,
His voice no longer heard.
He called aloud –
‘Say, captain, say
If yet my task is done?’
He knew not that the captain lay
Dismissed in the pavilion.
‘Speak, captain!’ once again he cried,
‘If I may yet be gone!’
Slowly a
bubble of hope had started to rise. Could the last wicket pair get that elusive
batting point? Could Hammond reach his century? Eventually it was the very
confidence with which they were playing that was their undoing. Normally, the
fielding side offers easy singles for four balls before bringing in the field
to cut them off for the last two balls each over. Seeing that his partner was more
than holding his own, Hammond started to accept some of the offered easy runs. With
just 3 needed for the 250, Hammond took the offered, long single from the first
ball of an over from Haines, who was sporting the remarkable figures of 8-5-4-0.
The next ball was straight. Singh Dale missed it. The hunt for a first batting
bonus point since the Warwickshire game, six matches ago, goes on and Hammond
was left high and dry on 87*.
Instead of
inspiring the batsmen to do better second time around with only 44 overs left
and a draw all but certain, the opposite happened. A side should not need rain
to save them in such a situation. The only positive was a good fifty for the
Captain, but the fact that Sussex took it down as far as just 4 overs to go spoke
volumes for their confidence that it only needed a single wicket to fall for
the bowlers to feel that two, three, or even four might follow quickly.
What next?
The side get
a week off before going to Derby to play what is currently the bottom side – although
they may not be after the Coronation Weekend round of games. With more than a
third of the season complete after the Derbyshire game, it starts to acquire
“must win” status if Gloucestershire want to make a serious push for promotion.
Even more so, as the lack of batting points means that the Shire effectively
needs to win at least one more game than its rivals to keep pace.
[Update:
that was prophetic. Derbyshire just failed to force an unlikely win against
Leicestershire, but the Shire after four rounds of games have been completed are
now firmly bottom of Division 2. That said, the gap between 2nd and
8th is only 25 points.]
How to solve
a problem like the Shire?
The trivial
answer is: “more first innings runs”. Back in 2021, many of Gloucestershire’s
wins came from poor positions, mainly thanks to a fightback on the third or
fourth day; the Glamorgan and Worcestershire games brought back echoes of 2021.
However, always chasing the game is like a high-wire act without a safety net.
The issue,
at least in part, is one of mental toughness. Batsmen need to book in for bed
and breakfast and sell their wickets dearly: the fact that it is a cricketing
cliché does not make it any less true.
If the top six
are scoring runs, the side has more liberty to experiment with the bowlers. Unfortunately,
that is not happening. So, the balance will probably stay with four bowlers and
seven batters. Unless the Derby pitch looks like a raging turner, the most
likely change may be to bring in Matt Taylor for Zafar Gohar, who has bowled
more overs than anyone (and also did, by a wide margin, in 2022). Zafar has
earned a rest after labouring, once again, on unresponsive pitches, while Matt
Taylor will offer a fourth seam option and left-arm variation. Matt is playing
for the 2nd XI this week against Glamorgan taking 6-1-19-3 in his
New Ball spell and looking quite lively.
Both Ollie Price
and Jack Taylor are short of runs this season: Ollie Price averages 19.3, even
with two not outs boosting his figures. Jack Taylor is averaging 13 and seems
to have lost confidence again in his batting. One option would be for Ben Charlesworth
to replace Jack Taylor. His gentle medium pace would have helped to relieve the
pressure on the attack in the Sussex game, although he is not a front-line bowler,
and it would be asking a lot of him to take on the fourth seamer role. Ollie
Price’s position may be probably safer. If Zafar misses out for a fourth seamer,
the side will look to the Captain and to Ollie Price if a few overs of spin are
needed. The obvious difficulty with these solutions is that neither Ollie Price
nor Ben Charlesworth are front-line options: the former has just two First
Class wickets and the latter, ten. Less likely is a more radical change, with
Ben Wells coming in too, possibly for Ollie Price and taking the gloves to give
Bobby Bracey a chance to concentrate on his batting. Wells is not playing this
week for the 2nd XI, so looks to be further from the thoughts of the
selectors.
Once again,
the lack of a credible all-rounder makes achieving any kind of balance
difficult. The Sussex game showed that having four specialist bowlers was not
enough, more so when all the more occasional bowlers in the side are spinners
and the pitch was not offering much help even for Zafar.
[I have
left this as it was, although that we know now that the only change in the
squad is Matt Taylor coming in for Ollie Price.
The
Glamorgan 2nd XI game ended in an innings defeat, with the side all
out for 79 in the second innings and no one making big runs in either innings.
Suspicion among
the fans is that Matt Taylor and Ben Charlesworth will replace Ollie Price and Jack
Taylor. Zafar will, thus, be batting at 7, which looks a place too high, with
Tom Price at 8.]
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