Testing Time For Durham
It has not been a good start to the season for Durham, on or off the pitch. With a struggling side failing to repeat last year's heroics and empty seats all over Chester-le-Street for their one and only Test match of the summer, Durham's reputation is taking a battering.
It is sometimes called 'Second Album syndrome', the difficult task of trying to replicate the brilliance which brought you so much success and critical acclaim.
It is a frustrating, infuriating situation to be in and one which can seem impossible to escape from as all the things which seemed so easy to achieve suddenly take on Everest-like proportions.
Durham were rightly lauded for their achievements in 2008. County Champions for the first time, Friends Provident Trophy semi-finalists, Twenty20 Cup semi-finalists and third-place in the Pro40 League. It was a remarkable season by anyone's standards.
Perhaps inevitably, this year, Durham have failed to live up to expectations. They have already been knocked out of the Friends Provident Trophy with five defeats in six games and, despite playing some decent stuff, are yet to register a win in the Liverpool Victoria County Championship.
While Graham Onions may have dominated national attention with an England call-up and a stunning debut at Lord's where he took 5-38 in the first innings, Steve Harmison is labouring ineffectually and may even require surgery on a shin problem which would sideline him for up to three months. So much for that Ashes recall.
Yet, it is not just the Durham team which is finding things trickier. It was the first day of the Riverside Test on Thursday and the crowd was so small it looked like a County game. In this day and age, that is about the biggest insult you can find.
Durham will inevitably be forced to take the brunt of the criticism and people will question the passion for cricket - and therefore the Riverside as a Test venue - in the North East as a result of the poor ticket sales. Yet, it is the ECB which should hang its head in shame.
They are the ones who decided to charge £40 for a ticket in the middle of the worst recession this country has seen since the Great Depression and they are the ones who, in their greed for sponsorship money and television income, decided to put on a Test match in May when the football season still hasn't finished and most of the world's best players are earning some corn in the Indian Premier League.
Durham thought they would be getting an Ashes Test this summer having done everything the ECB had asked of them. Yet, that lucrative sell out has gone to Cardiff instead because the Welsh Assembly offered the game's governing body more money to stage it.
Instead, Durham were fobbed off with a meaningless Test against Zimbabwe, which was then changed to Sri Lanka when Zimbabwe were banned by the ICB for political reasons and then, because of the IPL, switched again to a reluctant West Indian side they had only finished playing against last month in the Caribbean.
Cricket still hasn't come to terms with the rise of Twenty20 cricket and I'm not entirely sure it ever will in its present form. All the ECB are doing is chasing the tail of the IPL, a competition we are supposed to be excited by, but do you know anyone in this country who has taken the slightest bit of interest other than those who wanted to earn money playing in it?
Do you know who is leading the IPL? Do you know who has done well? Do you know which players are playing for which team? Twenty20 cricket has novelty value, particularly on the sub-continent, but I wonder, as English cricket sacrifices so much to try and compete with the IPL, is its popularity already waning?
In the meantime, as we pander to the desire of players to earn a few extra pounds, what has happened to Test cricket?
When Chris Gayle, the West Indies captain, says he would rather be playing Twenty20 cricket because nobody cares about Tests anymore it is a dreadful time for anyone who believes the Five Day game remains the sport's truest form.
Sitting watching Test matches at Lord's and the Riverside against a backdrop of rows and rows of empty seats is even worse. Cricket is in a mess and I don't think a few more Twenty20 games every summer is going to help in the long run.
If you tell people often enough that something is the future you will always be in danger of degrading the present...
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Luke Edwards - is Chief Sports Writer of The Journal and uses his blog to give a unique and entertaining insight into events at Newcastle United and Sunderland.
Good piece, Luke.
I'm parked in front of my laptop and the Test match this morning and I'll continue to park myself in front of as much Test match cricket as I can this summer.
In answer to your questions, I haven't got a clue about anything going on in the IPL, short of the fact that the teams all have silly names. Is it even televised anywhere in the UK? I haven't seen it advertised.
I see Twenty20 as being comparable to penalty shootouts in football - totally down to luck and certainly not representative of all-round cricketing ability. While I understand its appeal to those who don't really grasp cricket, it's absolutely baffling to me when players like Gayle come out with twoddle such as he did. I'd have stripped him of the captaincy and dropped him from all forms of the game if I were the WICB. Just being involved in a Test match squad is supposed to be an honour and representative of your achievements. You should be proud of it and want it to continue as long as possible - let alone being captain of one. It all came across to me as someone winding down, sick of his responsibility and just wanting to slap a few balls around the IPL to fill his bank account before retiring.
I know one thing for certain, people smashing 70 or so in an IPL match aren't going to go down in history or in people's memory, yet I still remember Graham Gooch's 333 against India in the early 90s and people are still talking about the 2005 Ashes series being the best series ever. Twenty20 won't ever do that, no matter how much money you throw at it.
So I for one hope Test match cricket doesn't die out in my lifetime as it's the only form of the game I can really get into. Maybe I'm just old school?