Furball
Evil Scotsman
IMO, if you're a talented youngster from the West Indies or India, then County Cricket is an excellent "finishing school" due to the amount of cricket you can play and the facilities to analyse and improve your game.Yea, I think part of the reason might be that the best athletes in the UK are going into soccer rather than cricket that might explain why arguably the best domestic structure in the world doesn't necessarily always mean the best Test team? Obviously sports are different, but most times, you'll find the best athletes are remarkably good at many sports.
I'm just guessing here, I'm not sure. What do people from the UK think?
However, I don't think it's an ideal environment for developing talent for 2 reasons - the relative independence of the counties means that short term success is more important than developing players long term, and the volume of cricket played leaves little time for developing players to work on technique etc. in between games. Towards the end of the season in particular, the schedule is frankly ridiculous.
It's telling that 2 of the more recent captains in Michael Atherton and Michael Vaughan have been extremely critical of English domestic cricket. Vaughan in particular gave a scathing interview to Wisden in July/August 2008.
edit: having said that, England's relatively poor performance over the last god knows how many years and complete lack of any world class talent coming through over the last 20 years has as much to do with a poor grass roots structure as it does with County Cricket being "broken."
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