Hampshire Cricket History

Many thanks for all your contributions through 2015 – it’s what keeps this going.

Thanks too for the thoughts about the New Year. The panto season is still going to feel free to keep adding.

My one wish is a stable and sensibly scheduled Championship of at least 16 matches for the forseeable future – but I do like the thought that we might win the Championship!

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 120,000 times in 2015. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 5 days for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Oh Yes I Am

Here we are then in ‘Panto’ season and here’s question for you as the New Year looms: Let’s imagine I’m the genie from Aladdin, escaped from the bottle and able to grant you just one wish, anything at all to do with English cricket in 2016. What would your wish be?

I hope you had a good Christmas. Ian sent a nice Merry Christmas ’round robin’ describing “Dave looking back as usual with rose-tinted glasses” – I liked that, made me smile, but after all, what’s an Archivist to do?

Still the first two days of this Test, while being rather slow, have been very interesting. I’m reminded of 1960 when I paid close attention to a Test series for the first time and saw three days of the South Africans in Portsmouth v the Combined Services. I had no means to compare it with anything else but it was clearly a pretty dull series:

At a time when cricket was struggling to retain and develop its audience, there were no centurions in any of the first three, decisive Tests – all won by England – then at Old Trafford the fourth Test had no play for the first two days and only on day four did South Africa’s Roy McLean at last reach 109 (out of 229). Not until the penultimate day of the series, did any England batsmen finally reach three figures.

There were three major issues: anti apartheid protests, falling attendances (even at the Tests) and financial problems, and bowlers with illegal actions – notably Geoff Griffin who was ‘called’ out of cricket.

Throughout the series, England’s batsmen scored at around 2.4 runs per over which in today’s games of 90 overs per day would give a total of around 220 runs per day. The defeated South Africans were slightly quicker at around 2.5 per over – just a few runs more.

So the olden days weren’t always the golden days!

To you all. I’ll keep an eye on the Comments but otherwise no new posts now I think until after Christmas – when there’s a Test Match or two to follow

Have fun everyone – here’s something crackers to entertain you

Just found this. It does not show the great finish to the match but it does show him taking three wickets in four balls to wrap up the first innings on his Test Match comeback. How wonderful to watch that ‘run’ up (walk up?) by England’s opening bowler! Wonderful bowler:

There’s always Channel 4 I guess (ITV 4?) but anyone thinking cricket will (ever?) return to BBC might check this story

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-35149963

It’s true

However surprising

From Donald Bradman to Michael Clarke, state school graduates have dominated the ranks of Australian Test teams, leaving the question of what private schools are doing wrong, writes Steve Cannane.

The problem is, it’s in Australia!

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-07-16/cannane-the-cricket-curse-facing-private-schoolboys/4823314

In case you missed it, thanks to Ian for spotting this news (which I find very disappointing)

The County Championship game away to Middlesex is to be at Merchant Taylors’ School, Northwood. Middlesex apparently put it on their website 10 days ago but Hampshire have remained silent (at least if you’re outside the Twittersphere) but just quietly slipped it into the fixture list. I wonder whether the same silence would have applied to a T20 match…

Brad Wheal has been selected for the Scotland squad to travel to Hong Kong. His mum’s Scottish.