Should P20 or should it go?

A little bit of confusion over P20, the bright sparkling new T20 competition for next year, first there were reports the ECB had pulled the plug but then they denied it and were still in talks. It does appear though that the reason P20 may not be a go-er is because of... India. The ECB wanted to sell P20 to Indian TV viewers but a requirement of this was for every 1st division team to have an Indian overseas player. However lawyers advised that this would fall foul of UK employment law and there would also be a difficulty of specialist T20 players in getting work permits.

Save local cricket reporting!

Its come to my attention that Trinity Mirror, who own most of the local newspapers in the west midlands including the Birmingham Post and Mail and the Coventry Evening Telegraph are cutting back staff and will no longer devote time and resource to local cricket from September. Brian Halford and George Dobell, who of course cover the travails of the Bears and Pears, will no longer be dedicated to cricket and may not even continue working at the newspapers.

Sadly another sign of the football-mania that inhabits the media, its all football football football and other sports only make an appearance when things go really well or really badly. I am a big football fan myself before anyone asks but i can't see the point of endless pages of transfer speculation (which are usually nonsense anyway), boring player interviews and columns (which so often arn't written by them anyway) and insider info (so to speak) on groin strains.

Anyway it has been suggested on a forum that e-mail addresses you can write to are steve.dyson@birminghammail.net and Marc.Reeves@birminghampost.net though this is part of a wider cutting back in regional media. The overall trend in many areas in this country for decades now has been the homogenization of the country, getting rid of local brands and replacing with national and international ones. Thats why so many town centres are the same.

Its a blow to county cricket in any case, another example of the game disappearing from mass view. The ECB made a long term mistake when they plumped for Sky only for cricket, now their coverage is great (apart from Bob Dylan Willis) but the game has vanished domestically for so many people. The Premiership Rugby has just negotiated highlights with ITV why couldn't there have been at least T20 highlights somewhere terrestrially? Of course the ECB will say no one apart from Sky bid but maybe they didn't think it was worth it and that Sky were already the preferred choice because of before?

Oh well off to the Home Of Cricket ((c) Nick Knight) to watch the Bears against Derby later...

The downfall of TMS?

At the risk of sounding like the Daily Mail or Telegraph and bemoaning the continual destruction of Great Britain i notice that Mike Selvey has criticised Test Match Special for becoming too laddish, that's after he was dropped from the programme so no bias there of course. He has a slight point, some of the new presenters from Radio 5 are a bit different and their cricket knowledge is questionable as TMS presenters have always been very professional and knowledgable of course (Blowers *cough*).

I've been listening to TMS this Summer as always and enjoyed it as always, as a working class oik myself i enjoy the banter of Tufnell and the others. Simon Mann is quite good, Mark Pougatch i could do without maybe. There are still plenty of off-the-wall anecdotes and cakes, so all is well. The Empire has yet to fall.

The Web 2.0 side of TMS (blog, Flickr et cetera) is a welcome addition i feel.