My thoughts turn today to Surrey. Soon to be the cricketing home of recently retired South African quick Morne Morkel. Yet another Kolpak cricketer, one of many. It’s that time of year when the papers contain reviews of First Class Counties’ prospects for the forthcoming season and each County will swell their ranks with two or more overseas players. Of course, Morne does not count as an overseas but de facto he is. I cannot be bothered to do the arithmetic, but if I were to total up the genuine overseas and the all Kolpaks, the number of players not from the UK playing across the 18 First Class counties would add up to a substantial proportion of the first choice playing force. English cricket is the only place where this happens. You don’t get droves of English professionals migrating to Australia, New Zealand and South Africa for their summers.
What good does this really do for English cricket? Don’t get me wrong, I really admire Morne Morkel for the player he is and all credit to Surrey for maximising his post-international pension pot. But what good do all these Kolpaks and overseas really do? Very few such players materially boost attendances. They might give a county a slightly better chance of gaining promotion or avoiding relegation, but so what? What they do do is present a massive obstacle to the development of the home grown players and if you take the view, as I do, that the sole purpose of county cricket is to identify and nurture home grown talent for the potential benefit of international cricket, the presence of so many players from abroad is utterly perverse.
Already gone from Surrey is Zafar Ansari. The Times reports that he has written beautifully crafted, almost elegiac piece for the 2018 Wisden explaining his departure from professional cricket. Apparently, this super bright lad (double first from Cambridge etc) struggles with the competitive ethos of sport and its emphasis on personal responsibility. So, to cut a long story short, he bailed out.
Call me an old cynic if you will, but a more prosaic explanation might well be that he was bright enough to realise that by the tender age of 25, he had ticked every box he possibly could in cricket, had gone about as far as he was ever going to go in the game and had no desire to spend the next few years slogging around the circuit in the remote hope of making it back into the England set up in the company some at least who read The Sun upside down (becasue they know no better) and regard farting and practical jokes as the height of humour and social intercourse.
As it is, he has brilliantly augmented his academic CV with a terrific sporting side and will be a “first draft pick” for many a law firm who like that sort of thing. Becasue that is what he currently studying to do. Yes he is studying law, a highly competitive, dog eat dog world with narrow horizons and an emphasis on personal responsibility. In other words, all the characteristics that were the apparent reasons for giving up cricket. Funny that!
SW
Sticky Wicket 