Bell Watch : England vs West Indies A

Chasing a mammoth 574-8d by West Indies A including 282 by Lendl Simmons (maybe the Bears should sign this guy as their overseas pro) England replied with 414ao before the game petered out into a draw. IR Bell made 52 in England's total which wasn't bad and from Bell's point of view Owais Shah's 9 was probably a relief.

RIP Bearded Wonder

Test Match Special's legendary scorer and statistician Bill Frindall a.k.a. the Bearded Wonder has died at the age of 69 after a short illness. He will be missed especially for his world weary and always correct retorts to whatever nonsense the other commentators were coming up with. TMS will not be the same again.

Pears consider a new ground

Considering New Road seems to flood every few years and the chaos caused over the last few years it is no surprise that Worcestershire are considering moving some of their cricket to a new ground. The new ground could be used for 1 day cricket and is located elsewhere in Worcester (i'm that not that familiar with the town so i assume this new ground would be in drier ground!)

Worcestershire however say they will remain at New Road for first class cricket, they indeed are building a new pavilion and are planning a £10 million redevelopment.

2nd XI fixtures

And here are the 2nd XI fixtures, also in iCal format (so can be imported into Google, iPods, Outlook et cetera). Most of the away venues are TBC, i had a look at all the other county websites but none had the venue information, most didn't even have the 2nd XI fixtures! So hooray for Warwickshire!

Bell watch : England vs St Kitts Invitational XI

The first match of the England tour of the West Indies. As you can expect largely batting practice though Bell only made 36 out of the eventual total at stumps on day 1 of 424-8. Centuries for KP Nuts and Shah, who is probably the contender du jour to take Bell's test spot. At least he did better than the new captain who made a duck.

Warwickshire fixtures 2009 calendar file

I have created an iCal calendar of the Bears fixtures for 2009, if you have a modern Mac and thus iCal you can import this right in. You can also import it into a Google Calendar, i bet Yahoo and other calendar providers will do the same.

How to use this calendar file

Download the calendar file(s) and then you can import them into a variety of calendar programs and devices. The following are examples that i have tried, i'm sure you can use it in a similar way in other devices.

iCal - File > Import
Outlook - File > Import/export > Import icalendar or vcalendar file
iPod - connect your iPod, in iTunes select contacts and then sync iCal calendars
Google Calendar - Other calendars > Add > Import Calendar

Live cricket could return to terrestrial TV

Live international cricket, maybe in the form of Twenty20, could return to terrestrial TV as the government is looking at reviewing the list of "protected" sports that can only appear on free to air terrestrial TV. I think this is a good thing (and i have Sky Sports already!) as the next generation of fans need to be captured. Although subscription TV isn't as much of a minority as it once was it still hinders matters.

County cricket attendances up!

Some good news about county championship cricket attendances, they were up 30% last year. Usually the media give us tired stories of empty stadia and attendances doubled by members bringing their dogs so it is good to see over half a million fans attended a county cricket game last year, excellent when you consider the championship seems to be organised and run to alienate and hinder fans as much as it possibly can!

T20 also saw an increase in attendances but the FPT was down.

Getting back into the side

The first blog posting of 2009! Well there hasn't been much going on in the world of cricket to comment on has there? But we are now into 2009, the nights are getting lighter (well a few minutes a day anyway) so the new season is coming!

I am glad Andrew Strauss is captain, i thought he should have been instead of KP. I am not a KP hater (it seems these days he polarises opinion between those who hate him and those who really hate him) but didn't like him as captain. Captains should be quieter, more considered and thoughtful. They should do the thinking to let the stars do what they are good at. So here is hoping for a bright future in 2009 for England culminating with the Ashes.