The fixtures out and Somerset kick off their County cricket season with a home game at Taunton Vale against Cardiff UCCCE then head up to Yorkshire for 21st April when they play Yorkshire in the LV County Championship.

This is followed by another four-day game against Notts at Trent Bridge. I’ll aim to be at both games and report here with video and photos. No idea whether two away games off the bat is an advantage for Somerset given their home record but hopefully they’ll be result wickets and give Marcus’s men the chance to seize some early impetus. The link below takes you to the full fixture list for Somerset on the beeb…..

Full SCCC Fixtures

Ah Sir Viv. Glorious in that WI (West Indies not Women’s Institute) cap of his for Somerset and the West Indies and laughed in the face of danger by refusing to wear a helmet.

He has now called on the cricketing powers-that-be to bring back more bouncers and also lambasted those batsmen that walk out with padded armour beneath their shirt as big girls blouses.

Speaking whilst over here for the Antigua Tourist Board: “There are individuals out there who use the body protection as a form of staying power,” he said, “to go on as long as possible. That’s the worst way anybody can be thinking, that you should cover yourself in a suit of armour, to make yourself brave, or to enable you to hook – when you never hooked in your life – just because you’ve got a helmet on. That’s rubbish. Even though they say cricket is a gentleman’s game, it’s a man’s game.”

And for those of you who want a reminder….

What a glorious competition. Just belatedly seen highlights of it on Sky and ok, the purists will cry foul but if 40-ver or 50-over cricket is suffering a perceived slump, the odd weekend tournament like this during an English summer will pep things up nicely.

Sixes and fours were belted everywhere usually into the trees, beer tents or high rises. Bowlers nightmare and many went for 20-30 in their one over. But what a great bit of entertainment. All done and dusted in a few days, each innings is five overs and some real surprises. Sri Lanka – who I’d have thought would be world beaters - were shocking in the match I saw. Hong Kong absolutely walloped England for whom Pete Trego did well with the bat. Didn’t see much evidence of bowlers digging in yorkers though easy to say from a living room. Plenty of slow full bungers which either induced rash hole-outs in the deep or booming sixes.

ECB…a county version of this and I’m there…!

Every week on this fledgling England cricket tour to SA, we are all reminded of how far England have to go to be the best. After that dubious one-win win thanks to Messrs Duckworth and Lewis, the visitors were utterly decimated in the second match. Records were shattered as were the England bowlers who probably wept into their cornflakes if they cared to scan their bowling figures. So what, 20/20 is frivolous stuff before the ODIs and Tests, right?

Well, if you’re England then perhaps…but all the other nations are taking this form of cricket seriously. England have this frustrating Englishness about them. Why not get KP to open the batting in twenty20 cricket? Stick Eoin Morgan up the order for goodness sake. Why the hell is Cook captaining a 20/20 when he shouldn’t even be in the bloody squad?! England just don’t get it and that’s not me ranting about an absolute cricketing massacre. It was just the same in the last World Cup where we didn’t have the players a la Trescothick whose sole intention was to hit the cover off the ball from the off. It’s not even that they weren’t on the pitch, they’d been left at home!

Hopefully England can sweep this under the carpet as a meaningless blip but the cold truth is that after the weekend, SA have surging confidence and Alistair Cook is probably wishing the weekend just never happened. Bowling Joe Denly ahead of Adil Rashid? Oh dear.

As if anyone didn’t know, this is a tough Tour and if they don’t bounce back in the ODIs, it’ll also be a long old grind for England.

Wouldn’t it be great now if Strauss and Flower knock their heads together and decide to catch SA on the hop.
They’ll open with KP and Denly for the ODIs or hell, anything, anything daring….

A  great start to England’s tour to South Africa saw Craig Kieswetter brought into the spotlight – with Graeme Smith identifying him as a talent SA would aim to tempt back home. Smith undoubtedly started the verbals off on the front foot claiming surprise at Strauss opting out of the 20/20 games suggesting it would not encourage unity. Mischievous it might have been but his namedropping of Kieswetter was both shrewd and topical given the issue in the press of SA-born players turning to Test cricket for England.

For the record, Kieswetter qualifies for England in February 2010 and was drafted into the England Performance Programme for this winter. With Smith’s Somerset connections, it was a well aimed blow but Kieswetter himself was quick to dismiss any SA interest as flattering but pointless as the young keeper-batsman only has eyes for an England place.

As for the SA tour itself, several thumping warmup wins was followed by an 89-all out disaster against SA ‘A’ in a Twenty20 match. If this reverse was a surprise, England managed to stifle the malaise with a nerve-jangling one-run run over South Africa in the first Twenty20 International yesterday. It came thanks to a stunning innings from Morgan whose 85 from 45 balls meant England scored 202-6 off their 20 overs. Typically, Graeme Smith led the charge and his side were up on the rate before a couple of wickets fell and they just slipped behind when the rains came. Duckworth Lewis coming to England’s rescue but a crucial win for the tourists on what is a long tour and for Dubliner Eoin Morgan, signs he is a quality bat in that middle-order area England have been lacking for some time in ODIs and 20/20.

I’ve been stumbling through the SCC photo archives I have from the odd match I get to and thought I’d chuck a few up on here…

Well, of course he doesn’t but I’d be very happy if he did. The Montynator’s probably going to switch counties but can’t see him wanting to move to Taunton (nor us affording him though his star is on the wane as is his earning potential I’d imagine) though we could do with his batting. Plus, those of you in the know will note this isn’t Monty Panesar.

It’s Australia’s Dan Cullen who was going to come to Somerset, take stacks of wickets and…I watched him at Surrey go for a truckload of runs and he disappeared onto the horizon never to be seen again. In fairness I think it might have been injury but the point being of course that star names don’t always guarantee wickets especially with Monty’s current confidence and record last year.

Nonetheless, who wouldn’t want to see Monty twirling his way to 17 wickets on a windy dustbowl at Bath on a steaming hot August bank holiday? Get out the chequebook, Mr Rose!

The Ashes back on free-to-air TV away from the evil clutches of Sky? It seems the government are recommending that English cricket’s centrepiece rejoin those protected sporting events that nowadays seem to only include underwater table tennis and darts live from Qatar. before we all whoop with joy at Murdock’s demise (and as a Sky subscriber, I’m ever-so-slightly duplicitous), the first Ashes to potentially be back on one of the main free channels is…..2017!

But now this subject has been brough back to the fore, it’s odd because I’m not as jubiliant as I thought I would be. Partly because I have given my money to Sky now and do in all fairness enjoy top-quality sport the likes of which no other broadcaster can possibly match. But also, there’s painful memories of the Beeb getting rights to screen highlights of the last Ashes in Aus and making a shoddy mess of it. The Sky cricket team are excellent as is the coverage. The broadband they offer is quite another thing but we’ll not get onto that…!

Naturally the ECB will be up in arms and with a new government potentially on the horizon, it might all amount to nothing anyway but I’m unconvinced by the argument that more money into ECB coffers means more money for the domestic game. Clearly, that’s true on one level but I still have painful memories of the ECB  cosying up to that fradulent squabillionaire to fully trust their motives or abilities as administrators.

I’ve always felt that key sporting ‘crown jewels’ must be on free-to-air channels regardless of the money offered by Sky but that might be both naive and unfair to those clubs, county and grassroots, that have benefited from Sky’s massive pockets. Nonetheless, I hope the Ashes return to the Beeb or Channel 4 and that coming from a Sky addict….whatever next.

That’s Matthew Hoggard to Leicestershire. So unless Brett Lee digs around in his family history and realises, possibly with a degree of horror, that he was actually born in Bridgewater making him English, then the pace bowling options are dwindling by the day. That is, of course, unless Brian Rose has a top trump up his sleeve or is perhaps supremely confidently in our current pace battalion. No news of note filtering through from the first few regional AGMs. News tends to crop up via Grockles.com of the Taunton one so will be interesting to see what the hierarchy say about the taunton pitch, fast bowling, etc come mid-November. I’m off to tell Dale Steyn I’m his long-lost brother from Zumerzet and has he got a few months spare next summer…

Joel Garner, cricketing legend for Somerset  has been appointed Team Manager for the West Indies’ tour to Australia. A poisoned chalice perhaps with WI cricket in the state it is in but let’s hope Joel’s appointment starts things off afresh. It doesn’t get tougher than a trip down Under but the 56-year old will have plenty of respect one hopes from a squad meshed from those that were recently on strike and their replacements.