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In July, god willing, Sir Alec Bedser will celebrate his ninetieth birthday. This year will also see Guildford celebrate seventy years of first-class cricket, not to mention me wondering whether I really have been editing Oval World for the last twenty years. But, perhaps the most significant anniversary of all is the Supporters' Club's thirtieth birthday. I wouldn't mind betting that we have now been going longer than any other body of cricket supporters. So, to start this particular editorial on a positive note, happy birthday to us! Lancashire's chairman Jack Simmons reckons that Andrew Flintoff should be cleared of blame for drink-related incidents and groomed as the next England captain. Now there's a thing, Lancashire are sponsored by Thwaites Beers. Given what I had to say last time about drinking, I was heartened to receive a media release from the ECB in January announcing that Buxton Natural Mineral Water was to become the official water supplier to the England team. My sense of satisfaction did not last long - the very next day another ECB media release landed in my inbox informing me that Marston's Smooth had become the official beer of the Twenty20 Cup. I hardly need to tell you which of the two announcements received the most press. Marston's will also be backing a Drink Within Your Boundaries campaign. Blimey, don't say the players are also going to be encouraged to beer it up during the match. I am told that some don't need any encouragement! Michael Vaughan said that England would learn from their defeat in the Test series in Sri Lanka. The lesson he and Peter Moores ought to learn is that if you do not play your strongest side (i.e. one including Mark Ramprakash), you are not giving yourself the best chance of winning. The other lesson must surely be that it is folly to think that a four-pronged bowling attack is capable of taking twenty wickets at a reasonable cost in a match lasting five days. Even less likely when one of the four is Steve Harmison. David Collier, the chief executive of the ECB, is the latest to join a growing line of people expressing concern that England's players are in danger of burning themselves out. England are due to play non stop between now and Christmas. When the domestic season is over, they are bound for India (even though they toured there as recently as 2006), where they will play three Tests, seven one-day internationals, and as many Twenty20 internationals as the administrators can squeeze in. They then get a short break, but, at the beginning of 2009, in the build-up to the Ashes, they are due to go to the West Indies for a four-Test rubber. Giles Clarke, the new ECB chairman, has said that player rotation is the obvious answer. At least he was not as two-faced as Collier in, on one hand, expressing concern for the players, but on the other doing cartwheels at all the money the ECB makes from such a packed programme of international cricket every summer. I wonder if Clarke has thought of becoming a theatrical producer. Where else would you see the cast being rotated in order to give everyone some time off? He no doubt got the idea from club football. In the Premier League, however, it's only the teams with large and expensive squads who occasionally rest one or two of their stars - and when they do, it is invariably against the weaker sides in the division. I was slightly amused when, in the same week as the Worcestershire chief executive Mark Newton described 50-over cricket as boring, the one-day international between England and New Zealand in Napier ended up being tied with a total of 680 runs on the board. I remember when Newton moved from Yorkshire to Worcester, one west midlands based journalist moaning to me that all Newton was interested in was the Sunday League. Now that Twenty20 has come to the fore it seems he is partial to that instead. I wonder if we can look forward to Worcestershire calling for the introduction for a five-over competition in the near future. I fear 2008 will see the rebirth of the buffet or declaration bowler. With the number of overs per day in the championship being reduced from 104 to 96, but no change to the system for scoring first innings bonus points, we could, on decent wickets, be well into the third day before the second digs start. I have said it before, but I'll say it again, I trust the players' wages will also be cut by 7.5%. It has been put to me that the change was due to the increase in the number of matches - what two extra Twenty20 Cup games, because that is all it really amounts to? I cannot sign off without mentioning the cricket revolution that appears to be underway in the sub-continent with the Indian Premier League and the unauthorised Indian Cricket League. As far as the former goes, one suspects it will be a success purely on the basis that, as in every other sport, money talks. One good thing that may come from the IPL is the beginning of the cricket season in England moving to the start of May. Well, there's a revolutionary thought. The first-class game in this country only survived nearly a hundred years (1890 to 1987 in fact) with the first championship match being played no earlier than the last week of April. My fear, of course, is that this will be used as an excuse to cut the four-day programme rather than the one-day one; which even the players themselves think is saturated (if last year's survey carried out by the PCA is anything to go by). The ICL, however, has thrown a spanner into the works following the ECB's announcement that overseas and Kolpak players who appear in the ICL will not be eligible to play county cricket this season. From Surrey's perspective that casts some doubt over Saqlain Mushtaq's return to the Brit Oval. The club says it is confident the ECB will regard Saqi as any other England-qualified player and allow him to play for the Brown Caps. I would not mind betting that if a player is barred from turning out for their adopted county, due to their links to the ICL, they will immediately get their lawyers involved and play on until the legal process has runs its course, which could well take months.
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