By Nick Creely
A late push from one of Victoria Premier Cricket’s most historic and powerful clubs to shake up the 2021/22 fixture and bring back red-ball cricket has been knocked on its head at a club presidents meeting on Monday 6 December.
The Melbourne Cricket Club – who wrote to Cricket Victoria just days before the season commenced on 16 November – proposed that the one-day only fixture for this season be altered to allow red-ball cricket to be reintroduced after Christmas, with yet another white-ball season viewed as an “erroneous decision”.
Despite the late push to bring back red-ball cricket – which was met with differing views from the clubs in the competition – Cricket Victoria will instead put a stern focus on red-ball cricket next season, with the logistics of Covid-19 and planning around changing fixtures not possible at this stage of the season, which is already a month in.
In the letter, seen by Star News Group, Melbourne Premier Cricket chairman and champion batter Andrew Kent said the decision for back-to-back white-ball seasons was putting Victoria in a tough position to properly produce players for the next level.
“It significantly delays or fails to properly develop the broader skills and improvement of players, effectively impeding their progression to higher levels,” he said in the letter.
“CV’s approach to high performance, selection processes and higher representative selection has been heavily scrutinised recently.
“This scrutiny had come from us, the presidents. The platform that we now offer the High-Performance team to select from is ‘sub par’.
“A second season of solely one dayers cannot provide a better preparation for first-class cricket than a mix of one and two day cricket.”
Kent said that white-ball cricket – which will see a total of 37 one-day games, 11 Twenty20s and no two-day games across the last two seasons – is producing “flat-track bullies”.
“Players need to be tested against the unique characteristics of the red ball, and cope with the rigours of sustained spells, technical and mental examination, spin bowling and balancing the modes of attack and defence,” he said.
“Batters in one day cricket have relative freedom once the white ball stops moving while bowlers are forced into containment strategies rather than trying to create wickets.
“We risk producing a group of ‘flat track bullies’ and miserly ‘dibbly-dobblers’. Neither of these groups tend to succeed at higher levels.”
The re-jigged season would have seen red-ball cricket after Christmas – including finals – with the argument that the fixture is already compromised because of Covid-19 impacts.
However, red-ball cricket will now become the major focus of the CV Premier Cricket department next season, with more two-day games to expose players to.
After five completed rounds, Carlton, St Kilda, Melbourne University, Northcote, Footscray, Melbourne, local outfit Casey-South Melbourne and Richmond make up the top-eight, with one round before the Christmas break.
