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    Hard work never actually killed anyone

    By Scott last year, at the end of December Leave a comment on this post

    The often readable but sometimes whiny Scyld Berry has had one of his whiny days, complaining in the Daily Telegraph about England’s workload as part of the reason for the declining fortunes of the English Test team.

    England are not going to be the best team in the world, in any form of cricket, under the current system. There is no way they will be No 1 because there is no official will. The ECB’s objective is to make as much money as possible out of cricket, primarily for the first-class counties to spend, not for England to be excellent, let alone the best.The ECB say that England is the first item on their agenda, but no action of significance is taken. The Schofield report made two major recommendations: the England team, who play too much, should have their schedule reduced; and county cricketers, who play too much, should have their schedule reduced, for then they can rest, practise, play and analyse properly. But nothing has happened, only tinkering of the management structure by adding a couple more ’suits’.  

     I thought this was a pretty poor effort from Berry because it is a typically insular English point of view- it seems to have not occurred to him that other teams have a lot on their plate as well. If you look at the 2008 international program, you will see that Australia, for example, will be in action every month in 2008. It is a pretty onerous agenda, and leading into the 2009 Ashes, for example, Australia will be due to play in South Africa as well.

    Increasing pressures on players through a more demanding fixtures schedule is a problem that every team has to cope with. To use it as an excuse for a poor performance strikes me as a cop-out. England don’t lose because they play too much cricket- they lose because they play too much poor cricket.

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    3 Responses to “Hard work never actually killed anyone”

  • The Half-Blood Welshman wrote:
    December 30th, 2007 at 11.38 am

    Yep, agree with you all the way about this article. Complete dud. Berry didn’t offer any solutions apart from the “cut down the workload,” which as you point out is a nonsense, and seemed to have no other idea of what to do about England’s lousy batting, bowling and fielding, other than a new cry of “drop the keeper,” which he’s been shrieking every week since about 2002 in default of having anything else to say.

    For the record - the reason why Prior’s there is because there’s currently a dearth of good keepers, especially batsmen-keepers, in England. Foster might be an option, but I’m not convinced by his keeping (I’ve seen him miss some real clangers) and his batting isn’t as good as Prior’s. Read’s batting definitely isn’t world class for all his brilliant keeping, and as for Ambrose, he couldn’t displace Prior as keeper at Sussex, where he played as a batsman, so why’s he a better option for England? That leaves Luke Sutton. Nuff said.

    Irritating though it is to say it, maybe England should try and work with what they have, rather than what we’d like them to have. And maybe certain correspondents should keep their pens capped unless they have something intelligent to write.

  • Colin Campbell wrote:
    December 30th, 2007 at 8.40 pm

    Watching and listening to Australia demolish India last week, there has to be a combination of factors that go to developing such a devastating sports machine. Although Australia have had some time off, they are primed and ready to go. Berry’s arguments sound too much like whining.

  • Chris wrote:
    January 3rd, 2008 at 7.50 am

    How do you pronounce Scyld?

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