No Play Sunday

Had a nice long walk this afternoon. Not what I intended - I expected to see the first bit of cricket of the new season at Trent Bridge (a friendly match against Leicestershire). But when I got there the gates were shut, and the scoreboard blank. Maybe the teams had checked out the BBC's weather forecast and been scared by the picture of blue lightning. I know I was.

Then again, county cricket might be being run by Eric Liddell these days: Notts have fixtures on only six Sundays this season - that is an unbelievable waste. Saturday fixtures are almost as rare: just six county championship fixtures are scheduled for Saturdays (and even then it's the fourth day in all but one of them - so the games could have finished already) plus one solitary one day match and the Twenty 20 finals day.

As reigning County Champions, Notts have seen a 40% increase in the number of junior members this season but I suspect that they, and many others, will be frustrated by the lack of weekend cricket this season.

The Sunday League - 40 overs after lunch on Sunday - worked. It put bums on seats, and introduced many youngsters (including myself) to the game. But vociferous opposition by big mouthed old pros like Bob Willis, coupled with the muddled thinking that it was in some way to blame for England's poor performance at Test level in the 1990's, persuaded those gin-soaked old-buffers who run the game to 'fix' it, even though it wasn't broken - only to have to keep trying to replace it with one thing or another.