There’s nothing better than a three day win and although they don’t come around that often, ours, against Gloucestershire this week was our third inside four games.
It is a sign that we are playing some pretty good cricket at the minute and although we lost to Glamorgan in the middle of those four games that has hopefully proven to be nothing more than a minor blip.
We have guys scoring good runs at important times and certainly on tricky surfaces. In Tom Curran, it looks like we have the best young bowler in the country…Certainly on current form.
As many people will know, Tom is Irish qualified and I did in fact have a brief conversation with him about it last year.
His thoughts on the matter were that Surrey had done so much for him since the death of his father. That he felt that’s where his loyalties should lie and that he wanted to concentrate all his efforts into being the best he could be for Surrey.
Fair enough and admirable for a young guy to think like that. He is in great rhythm at the minute and he will go from strength to strength throughout the remainder of the season.
We’re up to five wins in the championship now and another two or certainly three should see us promoted. In an ideal world we could just keep the ball rolling now and keep playing but we have only three championship games over the next two months… further indication of how ludicrous the early part of the season was.
We have crammed in 10 games between the middle of April and now. Leaving us six to play in three months. One day they will maybe see sense and come up with a reasonable structure.
I think everyone appreciates that you are never going to be able to keep all eighteen counties happy but at the minute I think you would do week to find one player in England happy with the current scheduling.
I’ve got just two more games, both t20’s, before joining up with the rest of the lads as we launch our latest bid to qualify for a world tournament. One of those is against my old mate, well actually two old mates, Paul Stirling and Eoin Morgan.
Every time I play against Eoin he seems to get runs so I’m hopeful he has used them all up and we can keep him relatively quiet in the game on Friday night. As for Stirlo, we will probably be rooming together come the qualifiers so I want to make sure he saves up his runs for then!
He has been in great touch of late and hopefully he will continue that on through the next month, somehow just skipping out friday!!
The big news this week for cricket fans in Ireland and indeed other countries outside of the top eight was of course the announcement (or lack thereof) coming from the ICC after their meeting in the Caribbean that in 2019 the World Cup in England will be a 10 team tournament as was planned.
Now, you only have to go and look at my twitter feed to see that I thought the ICC should be served some choice words after that decision. No doubt, they would have barely noticed it and if they did, realised that I only played for Ireland. So in fact, who cares?
I’ve said many times that although we have to look after our own best interests that this shouldn’t be about just Ireland wanting to be in the 2019 World Cup. The ICC have a duty to ensure that the best interests of the game are being looked after.
Dave Richardson will tell you that he believes the World Cup should not be shop window for Associate sides rather the marquee event with the highest possible standards. When what he really means is the the World Cup will be a shop window for brands to get as much air time as possible and therefore line the ICC’s pockets with silver.
He maintains that associates are now better off, especially Ireland and Afghanistan now being on the ODI future tours program but in reality with odds stacked against qualification (by the way, we still 100% believe we will be there), a t20 World Cup only now every four years (oh and by the way once you qualify for that, you’ll still have to go through a pre tournament qualifier when you get there) and NO guaranteed games on the FTP!
I really hope he has something big lined up for us. Keep lining up the hoops mate and we’ll keep jumping through them.