Weather to rearrange?

Could I say it? Might I risk it? It looks like the dreadful weather that we have been experiencing might just be starting to turn the corner. There I’ve done it. Now before you touch wood, cross your fingers or spill salt over your shoulder, whichever superstition you prefer, it is important to consider just impact the weather has had on our cricket season already.

As I write, two of last year’s title challengers in the Nottinghamshire Premier League sit in the bottom four of the table. This is wholly due to the fact that they have only managed one completed game between them. West Indian Cavaliers, have yet to bowl a ball in anger and Welbeck Colliery have only managed one outing, last week’s home defeat to high flying Cuckney.

While this has really thrown open the league this year so far, it does beg the question, can this be fair? Surely, for a team to be over 40 points behind the leaders, having yet had a chance to get out on the pitch, it seems a little harsh. Yet how on earth could we do it in such a way that would avoid such disparities, when the circumstances are beyond the control of any of us?

Kimberley Institute has its own mangle to save us from the rainy days

Coming from a multisport background, my experiences playing and coaching hockey and rugby through the winter months opens up some suggested solutions. It is quite common during the winter for our hockey matches to be lost to snow or frost (occasionally a waterlogged pitch too!). Yet, we do not go down the route of an abandoned game with equal points awarded. We have set slip dates, Sunday’s across the season, on which rearranged league matches are then played. If the slip date is also off? Then another date is scheduled. Indeed, this year we needed to extend our season by a week in order to get our last match in.

So why can’t we just do this in cricket? Well firstly, we all know that cricket loves a cup competition (PK Riley especially). There is the 45 over National KO, the County Twenty20, the Derbyshire Cup and so on. So our Sunday slip dates are already mostly booked, and in addition, where would the slip dates for the cup games be?

Secondly, and probably most importantly, the incentive to play a match on a damp day would quickly evaporate. As I eluded to in my recent article, the hard work of ground staff, players and volunteers to get games of cricket on in wet conditions, often produce some of the most exciting games of the season. However, if we move to a culture of slip dates and rearrangements, you would see more and more people, who are less willing to play on a wet day, ‘when we could wait for a better day later in the year’.

So how can we solve the problem? Well one option is to alter the points so it is not such a big difference between an abandonment and a win, however, we would suffer from many of the issues just mentioned with it proving to be a disincentive to play. Another, more pragmatic option, which has been used by some leagues in the past, is to call off all league matches on a particularly wet weekend, and fix a date for all the block fixtures to be played later in the season. While it may hit a little friction in that there may be cup clashes, it does seem a sensible solution that perhaps could have been used during round one and particularly two of the Nottinghamshire Premier League fixtures.

The fact is, with a game which lasts for a full day, and that is so dependent on the elements, including the daylight hours, there is no easy solution when the weather intervenes. So reach out for the table, get those fingers crossed, or throw that salt over your shoulder and let us that hope May and June bring a little more sunshine than those dastardly April showers.