Essex scouting policy pays dividends

[Valentines Park]

You have to hand it to the club. When they try hard they can seemingly do the impossible.

 http://www.essexcricket.org.uk/2013/11/01/pavilion-perspective-glass-always-half-full/

Getting a member to defend last season must have been like looking for a needle in a haystack.

[nat]

You have to hand it to the club. When they try hard they can seemingly do the impossible.

 http://www.essexcricket.org.uk/2013/11/01/pavilion-perspective-glass-always-half-full/

Getting a member to defend last season must have been like looking for a needle in a haystack.

I suppose it helps when the member in question doesn't know anything about cricket!

[Andy]

Korisne Budale.

[firehazard]

Best performing new recruit for ECCC in years. Wonder how they found her?

[eastsax]

You have to hand it to the club. When they try hard they can seemingly do the impossible.

 http://www.essexcricket.org.uk/2013/11/01/pavilion-perspective-glass-always-half-full/

Getting a member to defend last season must have been like looking for a needle in a haystack.

I suppose it helps when the member in question doesn't know anything about cricket!

Much like the CEO then.

[squarelegumpire]

To be fair, if your ambitions aren't high, it's easy to achieve them. And, had we not had that appalling performance against Lancs and put out that VERY strange team against Hampshire we might just have scraped up.

If you don't think about it too hard, look at the potential of the team, or have any concept of the club's reasonably recent history, third in Div II's not a bad performance! It was only in the last quarter of the last century that we achieved anything. Before then we were a bit of a chopping block.

What that says, of course, is that whatever coaching, management or whatever was in place from the mid 60's onward worked. Did we, managerially, revert to type after that?

[firehazard]

...
I suppose it helps when the member in question doesn't know anything about cricket!

Sounds like a suitable candidate for a place on the cricket committee.

[Andy]

Square leg brings up an interesting point, were the years 1968-1998 a blip in the clubs history? Clearly, I've picked 1968 because that's when immediate registration came in, which helped ECCC immensely - look at the unsuccessful years after then, they usually coincided with the absence of an o/s or poor performance by the o/s player. It is also no surprise that we made a step up once Gooch got going in the late 70s.

However, the decline took place in the early 1990s under the leadership of Gooch and Fletch, some just overlooked the cracks. Reading Fletch's book is insightful, the attitude of the years of sustained success being not the norm suggests the same lack of ambition seen in the club today. KWR opinion of members and message boards is also just as dismissive...

[IlfordEagle]

I am not defending the Club but a tad harsh to refer to us a chopping block . We only ever finished bottom twice in the original CC (1950 & 1998) & although we never won anything until 1979 (Happy Days!!) we had a consistently good team especially in the 30's & had a few other decent years as well as generally finishing around 9th-12th on many occasions as well as producing a reasonable quota of England players plus some on the fringes.
Our real decline has been from the early-mid 1990's or basically since Gooch retired & was never properly replaced & also as a non Test County our income is much less than say, Surrey, Lancs etc meaning we cannot attract the really top quality players from here & O/s.
Over the years we have tended to punch above our weight but whilst I don't think we will ever get like the likes of Leics who continually lose their best players to more affluent Counties the warning signs are there.

[Perov]

I think the decline came with 4 day cricket, we have tended to have one day players who excelled in the 3 day "set up a game" senario.
Now more concentration is required over the 4 day format we never seem to have the stickability to consistantly do well.