As its the end of another overseas Ashes tour its that time again to discuss the populist views that we have all been saying for years but the suits in the ECB continue to ignore.

When you looked at county cricket in the 1990s there was quality throughout the counties. Each team had one overseas player per county and the players who were over here were the top internationals - Walsh at Gloucestershire, Ambrose at Northants, Waqar at Surrey, Wasim at Lancs, Richards at Glamorgan, Mark Waugh at Essex. Now since the Kolpak ruling was brought in counties fill their ranks with second rate South Africans and Australians with EU passports that weren't good enough to get into Sheffield Shield cricket. Counties have sacrificed quality for quantity and have used all these nomadic second rate plodders instead of giving young English players a chance.

In Sheffield Shield cricket in Australia you don't get this, there is the odd overseas player every now and then but it is basically a competition where the best young players who have fought their way through grade cricket system get into Sheffield Shield, and it is a breeding ground for Test players. Does England have any young batsmen of the quality of Usman Khawaja and Phil Hughes coming through....? I think not.

Here are my suggestions for English cricket:
- go back to ONE overseas player per county, make the counties sign the top Test players like they used to
- get a proud ENGLISH coach to head up the team - how can guys like Andy Flower/Duncan Fletcher motivate English players and give them the passion needed to win? When David Lloyd was coach he used to play "What have you done today to make you feel proud" in the dressing room beforehands, can you imagine Flower doing this? There are men in English cricket who could easily show players what the Three Lions mean, starting with Geoff Boycott. As for the backroom coaching staff why do we employ never-has-beens from overseas like Otis Gibson or David Saker? What does Saker know about Test cricket, how many wickets did he get? Is he better than Bob Willis would be as bowling coach?
- England should be a team for Englishmen not these ringers like Darren Pattinson who come over here and want to have a go at Test cricket through the back door. Or Pietersen, or Trott.

I fear that English cricket has the same problems that rugby league does. Only when we eliminate the overseas menace will we get it right.

What I expect will happen as usual is that we will think these are an issue in the aftermath of an Ashes tour, but then nothing will be done and we will just carry on with same old same old, and be in the same position next time.

Isn't the Kolpak rule a extention of the Bosman ruling and therefore part of European employment law?

Hopefully.

The Kolpak rules in cricket have been pretty stringently tied up in the last couple of years, the criteria for any overseas (including Kolpak) player getting a visa to play here are now as follows...

i One Test in the past two years
ii Fifteen one-day internationals or Twenty20 internationals in the past two years
iii Hold a central contract with their home board and be a current or recent member of its Test squad
iv Five Tests in the past five years and still be eligible for their country
v Hold a 2008 work permit.

While there are a few kicking around who were originally Kolpaks but now have EU residency the standard is higher than a few years back, Yorkshire's dross Kolpak filled squad of a few years back is now a distant memory as our home grown talent has been given the opportunity to develop.

So, although I shouldn't rise to the sarcastic OP, the ECB did actually listen to the evil "populist views" before the numbers got out of hand.

Thats a good post Asim

Yes my original post was satire however had we lost this series, those would have been the reasons brought up by the punters (and some in the media).

However I do think county cricket is on a nosedive but it is not something that can be reversed. The real problem is the international calendar these days. No matter what the rules are you can't sign the top players any more because they are tied up to international duty. Its the same for the England players. You used to have Gooch scoring 1800 runs a season for Essex and Gatting scoring the same for Middlesex; Fraser taking 70 odd wickets a season. Nowadays any England player just plays the odd guest appearance for their county.

I think we have to accept that the days of bringing through talent through the county system are over. The only hope now of bringing players into the England squad is through the youth set up, ie identify talent in England U19s, and fast track them through before they get dragged down into the mindset of a county pro (like they have done with Finn). I am worried though about the lack of batting coming through. If you compare the situation now to 1986/87, there were a crop of very good young players emerging in county cricket at that time, although the inconsistency of the selectors and quality of some of the other international teams at the time, prevented them from going on to be the dominant team people had hoped after winning that Ashes.

That argument ignores the success of Tremlett and Bresnan on this tour. The next lot of players to break through will have done some time in county cricket - Morgan, Hildreth, Lyth, Woakes.

Mind you, I can never tell when you're not on a wind-up.

I noticed on the commentary that Shane Warne had nothing but praise, some of it quite gushing, for the English county system. He even suggested that Cricket Australia should encourage all their 'gun' young cricketers to move to the County Championship in England for experience, stating it was the best possible development they could have.

That was great, but in those days there was no international cricket outside England during our domestic season. Unless their national team happened to be touring England that year all those players were available to their counties for the whole of our season. Nowadays there are all sorts of internationals all over the place all year round, or so it seems, plus the IPL overlaps the beginnng of our season. Times have changed. It's hardly worth having an overseas player if he plays regular international cricket.


I think this is a total red herring and has no bearing on the strength of our national side. Most teams naturally evolve with a blend of youth and experience regardless of where the players are drawn from. I think it's the mediocre thirty year old English players who are getting squeezed out of county cricket by the Kolpaks, not the younger players. A couple of years ago I read about Leicestershire having five experienced South African players in their side; they also had five English players under 25, some of whom show great promise such as batsman James Taylor. They have a very useful looking local off spinner, Jigar Naik, who has probably benefitted greatly from the tutelage of his South African spin bowling teammate Claude Henderson. At Surrey Chris Tremlett credited the influence of his new fellow opening bowler Andre Nel as a major factor in his resurgence last summer, and now England have benefitted as a result.


We've got three times as many first class teams as Australia. If they allow more than the odd non-Australian to play for each team it's going to dilute their talent pool too much. With our eighteen counties we'd still have twice as many potential international players to choose from even if there were three or four foreighners in each team.

For me, the biggest problem in county cricket is the crazy scheduling of fixtures with so many matches in various formats shoehorned into the calendar. Next June for instance, Surrey commence their T20 fixtures at The Oval the day after a four day match ends at Derby. How on earth are players supposed to prepare properly for that? Also a window needs to be created in the England fixture list to enable the England players to appear regularly in our T20 competition.

Not only are there too many matches but every division in every competition has an odd number of teams, meaning someone has to sit out every round of fixtures. Revert to three groups of six for the T20s (i.e. ten group matches instead of sixteen) and drop the three sundry teams (Scotland, Netherlands, Unicorns) from the 40 overs competition.

This is a fair point as well. My woodwork teacher at school was an ex county pro from the 1980s, we used to talk to him for hours about cricket. One of his points was that whilst county cricket was an incredible experience for a young player in terms of exposing him to the likes of Hadlee, Marshall, Richards and so on, there were also a lot of cynical old pros who had been part of the county scene for 15 odd years, batsmen who would get their 1000 runs a year at an average of 33 or so, inflated by about 2 big innings a season on flat pitches, and bowlers who would get their 45 wickets at an average of 33 or so, again with one 7-fer in the season to talk about. These guys were bad influences on young players because as well as jealously guarding their status in the hierachy (eg there were two dressing rooms, one for capped players, one for uncapped, and the general rule was uncapped don't speak unless spoken to), they would drone on about how much hard work the lot of a county pro was and how nobody gave you any thanks etc etc

You don't see many dinosaurs of the game around now. The elder statesmen now are guys like Ramprakash and Trescothick who are still great players and very driven like Gooch and Gatting in their late careers. Like you say I think the South African influx has driven the old guard out.

By the same token, if you don't like Saker or Gibson because they've done nothing in test cricket, Manchester United wouldn't have entertained a journeyman Scottish footballer as manager .....

Actually, it is often the case the best players don't make the best coaches (usually because they have a god-given talent) and actually, the best coaches are the ones that have had to graft at the game to get where they are.

Whilst many of the names you mention have a lot to contribute to English cricket, let's not rip it apart when we've got a good thing going at the moment ...