And, to some extent, who can blame them? If you took the idea of a new sport that lasted four days, didn’t often yield a result, was played during weekdays, played from early April to late September and could only be played when it wasn’t raining, you’d find few financial backers. However, the County Championship does all of that and support in terms of attendances is understandably low. However it’s still the only way to generate players for a Test side. The ECB in chasing the money to push the short form of the game have squeezed the unfashionable but ultimately necessary CC into the start and end of the cricket calendar. It’s why we won’t have any spinners or genuine pacemen anymore.
If the finger needs pointing at anyone, point it right at the top. However, you know full well that it’ll be a coach or a player or two that will be the one to get the blame.
Except that Cricket Australia has done exactly the same thing - the Sheffield Shield is broken in two, and played either side of the Big Bash, which gets the middle of the Aussie summer to itself as that's when the biggest crowds are likely to be out.
Now if you want to suggest that the Sheffield Shield is a tougher competition than the County Championship, I won't argue. But that has always been the case....it didn't just start to be so in recent years.
It's also the case that Australia haven't won the Ashes in England since 2001. By the time they arrive in 2019, they won't have won in England for
eighteen years.
Fact is that England produce players that are suited to English conditions, and Australia for Aussie conditions (and you can stretch that to every Test playing nation), and the only way you win on the other team's patch is if you have an outstanding team and they have a particularly poor one.
For all that genuinely quick bowlers like the Mitchells (Johnson and Starc) have looked terrifying in recent Australian Ashes series, their performances when the series have been in England have been really ordinary. So why would a county particularly look to develop a player like that, when slower bowlers than can move the ball like Overton, Woakes, Onions or Ball are more effective in the conditions you have to play in?
Although I think that it's become the norm to blame t20 for all cricket's woes - I don't think that England's lack of genuine pace or quality spin bowling is a new phenomenon. Having said earlier in the thread that we've only had one decent spinner in the past thirty years, I think we can probably count on one hand the number of genuinely quick bowlers England have had during that period too.....Jones, Harmison, Malcolm, Flintoff, maybe Gough......then I'm struggling.
