Season review

Bloody hell. You turn your back for a couple of months, move house, quit your job and then this happens! Bottom of the league. Rock bottom. Of division 2! There are school teams who wouldn't finish bottom of division 2. State school teams at that. How did this happen. Too make matters worse, captain Gidders has resigned the captaincy. Our inspirational leader, gone. Can it get any worse? The next thing you'll be telling us is that Jon Batty has retired....

So that is another season over. The Jessop Tavern View is finding all this hard to take in. No, not the fact that Gloucestershire are rubbish, but the fact that we now officially write a blog for the worst cricket team in the land. Worse than Northants. Worse than Leicestershire. worse than bloody Glamorgan. Still, at least we'll have that block of flats.

As much as it is easy to make cheap jokes, and hell, Gloucestershire provide about as many cheap jokes as you could ever want, but actually this hasn't been that bad a season.

Ok, so the table never lies, but just 5 more points and we would have been looking at mid-table mediocrity, which is, after all, what we strive for. Considering the ridiculously truncated season thanks to climate change it would be unfair to criticise such a young group of players.

However, its not unfair to criticise Captain Gidman. 528 runs at an average of 25. In division 2 of the county championship. Gracefully, Gidman has fallen on his sword and passed over the poisoned chalice of captaincy to someone else for next season in an attempt to regain his form. Let's hope so.

So, for simplicity's sake, we shall attempt to break this season down into positives and negatives.

Positives.

Ian Cockbain - 764 runs at 34 in a season when no division 2 batsman surpassed 1000 runs in the championship. That's more runs than Joe Root (averages count for nothing, before people complain)

38 - James Fuller leapt to prominence in the second half of the season. Ok, so this was primarily because he went for an improbable 38 in one manic t20 over, but after this his performances started to match his potential. In the championship he ended up with 24 championship wickets at an average of 27. In the one dayers he also demonstrated serious ability to be a decent lower order batter. Also got into trouble for intentional beamers in a 2nd XI game. Nice work.

The rest of the pace bowlers - Will Gidman backed up his career year from 2011 with 44 wickets despite missing 1/3 of the season. Ian Saxelby took 35 wickets despite missing games. Norwell and Payne provided good support with 20 odd wickets apiece. Throw in Fuller into this mix and the pace men had a good year and certainly show the promise to be worth persevering with.

O'Mish - Welcome back to something near his best. 822 runs put him near the top of division 2 run makers. An average of 37 with only one hundred suggest he still loves to get in and then throw it away wastefully. Still, a welcome return to form.

One day form - Admittedly it messed up our championship form, but it was nice to have some one day cricket to get excited about watching again. 

The Bristol town planning council - Eventually decided to let us develop the ground. Bugger knows if this really was the best thing for gloucestershire cricket. But since no one at the cricket club had a Plan B should it not have gone ahead we guess it was a good thing.

Jon Batty - For retiring. 885 runs in three seasons. Thanks for the memories.

Negatives

Alex Gidman - See above.

Ed Young/Spin bowling in general - Probably now a one day specialist as failed to build upon a decent t20 campaign by converting this into the championship. Seemed to lack the control to even tie up an end. And we thought Vikram Banerjee was bad.

Richard Coughtrie - We presume that King John has made a decision that Coughtrie doesn't have the ability for this level. Surely there was no other reason for Batty keeping wicket. The enthusiasm with which the club website announced the signing of two young wicketkeepers suggests we'll have a new stumper next year.

Paul Muchall - What? Why? Who? How? Goodbye. Please.

Anthony Ireland - For the love of God, please do not re-sign this man. Crap once. Crap always.

Murali - How many shirts did he really sell?

New Zealand Cricket - For taking Kane Williamson away and for replacing him with Rob Nicol.

The Official Club website - If Gloucestershire can feel hard done by at having to endure a winter as the worst cricket team in the land then the official club website can have no complaints at being head and shoulders the worst club website in the entire championship. In this day and age it seems incredible that the club cannot have a serious website. The lack of squad news was infuriating. Is it that hard to get someone to update this stuff?

So there we have it. Another season over. Thanks to the surprisingly large number of people who read this over the season. Apologies for the lack of interest in the closing month. We blame the re-signing of Anthony Ireland for us losing interest. Finally, if anyone wants a slightly expensive sounding 'world chic' handbag, then we'd highly recommend checking out www.danaqa.com.

Come in number 38, your time is up

Gloucestershire 290 - 6 beat Netherlands 146 ao by 90 runs (DL)


Gloucestershire bounced back from Tuesday nights t20 disappointment with a comfortable victory in Holland. In doing so Glos set themselves up nicely for their final three matches in the CB40 group stage. The fact that these three matches take place over an entire month is ridiculous. The fact that two of these matches are against Lancashire, even more stupid. Honestly, why is this competition dragging on for another month? Oh, hold on. It's not dragging on for another month. That's just the group stage. The semi finals and final are played in September. As it turns out, having two matches against Lancashire is quite a good thing as the red rose county are our biggest rivals for qualification, but how the hell did the fixtures produce this scenario? Also, why are there teams who have played far less than everyone else? Lancashire have two games in hand on us, and three games in hand on table topping Middlesex. Why?

It's as if the ECB decided that since the very idea of a 40 over competition, a form of the game played nowhere else in the world, wasn't laughable enough they'd go all out to make the competition a total joke. It's hard to think of a more poorly run professional sports competition in the world.

Anyway......

Rob Nicol showed Glos fans what they can look forward to with a very passable Craig Spearman impression (not our description, but Mark Butcher's) and frankly we are inclined to agree. Nicol looked to be primarily all about the bottom hand and, despite offering numerous chances, showed some of the firepower Glos so desperately lacked in the t20 competition. How he goes against better bowling attacks that the Netherlands will be interesting. If we are honest, he looked pretty limited against the West Indies, but hey, he sports a comic ear stud which is sure to piss off the members, so we'll give him a chance.

Perhaps more encouraging that Nicol's hundred was Number 38's 6 for 35. It shows that the young Kiwi has a lot of character to perform so well in another televised game only days after becoming the butt of numerous jokes. It was a bit bizarre to have everyone at my club up in Edinburgh talking about James Fuller, but if you're going to go for 38 in an over then he'd better get use to it. Getting hit for 36 in an over by Yuvaraj Singh didn't do Stuart Broad's career any harm. Number 38 is starting to show signs of being a handy performer. His 6 wickets were mainly a product of him being a yard quicker than the Dutch batsmen were comfortable with and, at 22, there is scope for him getting even quicker. His 40 from 24 balls also demonstrated he has some talent with the bat. The thought of a bowling attack containing Ed Young, Will Gidman and Number 38 would make for a fairly tasty batting lineup. More signs that Glos could well be on the verge of piecing together a useful cricket team.

And you heard that here first.

Next up is another televised game against Lancashire on Monday night.