With so much international cricket being played year-round around the globe, its newspaper coverage may have shrunk, but it still has its legion of supporters and followers. Many of them may be latent – for each of the last two seasons the Cricinfo website has recorded some 30 million hits on its county cricket pages – but they are there.
As indeed I have discovered many miles away here in Australia. There I was at the Gabba the day before the first Test, trying to watch the various net sessions (with Doug Bollinger clearly making the point that he did not like being left out of the Australia side by bowling at the speed of light) and familiarise myself with new surroundings, while rather a lot of people seemed to want to ask only one question: “What on earth is happening at Glamorgan?” And the inquisitors were not all Welsh! Given the mountains of correspondence and calls I have received in the last couple of weeks, I very nearly called a press conference after the captains Andrew Strauss and Ricky Ponting had uttered their pre-series war cries.
“Everyone has resigned, haven’t they?” remarked one top-notch sports writer. Well, not quite, but three in a week is pretty unprecedented. That is captain Jamie Dalrymple, who was sacked and then resigned from the club, director of cricket Matthew Maynard and then president Peter Walker in disgust. Oscar Wilde might have had something to say about this. One? Unfortunate. Two? Careless. Three? Just plain stupid.
As cock-ups go Glamorgan’s recent actions have been top-rank. They wanted to improve matters; instead they have made them many times worse. The broad principles of their thinking were actually reasonably sound. Dalrymple is a fine cricketer – indeed I stand by my assertion three years ago that he was Glamorgan’s best-ever domestic signing – but he is no Mike Brearley. Maynard is a sharp coach, happiest with tracksuit on, but not a director of cricket with all its attendant duties. So to sack Dalrymple and demote Maynard was not wildly ill-advised. But the manner of its implementation, as well as the choice of replacements, was quite shambolic.
Glamorgan wanted Ponting or Graeme Smith to captain. They ended up with Alviro Petersen. It is not quite the same. They say they conducted a worldwide search for a managing director of cricket and ended up with Colin Metson, a former Glamorgan wicketkeeper and recently chairman of their cricket advisory group, but with little experience or knowledge of top-level cricket recently. Perhaps more pertinently he is a friend of chairman Paul Russell.
What is more nobody told Maynard he was being demoted before Russell, Metson and chief executive Alan Hamer took a trip to Dubai to sign Petersen during the recent South Africa versus Pakistan Test series. There has been a nice video clip doing the email rounds showing all three sitting in the stands. Caught red-handed.
There are a couple of wider issues to consider here. Firstly the importance of one-day cricket. Glamorgan missed championship promotion by a whisker (a mutton-headed Sussex declaration handed Worcestershire the spot instead) but yet again were woeful in the one-day stuff. That is where the cash cow lies. The players profess the championship to be the most-prized competition, but the bean counters beg to differ.
Secondly the influence of the county chairman. It is a role that has changed dramatically. Once it was mainly a ceremonial post; now many chairmen prop up their counties financially. Russell certainly does at Glamorgan. And with that comes power.
But the trouble is that very few of these men know their cricket. They think they do, but the truth is they do not. At heart they are just fans. They get star-struck like everyone else. So they make decisions in sport that they would never make in business.
Then business and cricketing needs become confused when they are asked to make decisions about the domestic cricketing structure. Most culpably, though, some poke their noses into team affairs. That was cited as a reason for chief executive David Smith’s resignation at Leicestershire earlier this year. Eventually, after much acrimony, the chairman Neil Davidson resigned too.
A quote from Sir Alex Ferguson strikes a chord: “I am the most important man at Manchester United. It has to be that way,” the manager said recently.
So it should be in cricket. Leave the cricket to the experts.
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