County Cricket Live 2012

This may feel like the worst summer ever, especially to the good folk of Glamorgan...but don't we have short memories.

The abandonment of last night's match between the Welsh Dragons and Worcestershire in Cardiff brought the 'no result' tally this soggy season to 12 from 68 matches. That may seem like a lot - and at 16.66% of all the games so far, it certainly is - yet it still comes nowhere near the scale of damage inflicted by the elements only five years ago.

Surrey’s second thrashing at the hands of Hampshire in three days was soon overshadowed by news of Rory Hamilton-Brown’s extended compassionate leave. It is too early to suggest that he will not captain again this season, although the possibility cannot be discounted. But Hamilton-Brown's continued absence will not surprise anyone who witnessed how distracted he was at the Rose Bowl on Saturday in his first game since Tom Maynard’s death in what was patently too swift a return.

Hamilton-Brown’s replacement, Gareth Batty, has a difficult task. Having won two of their first three matches in the T20 tournament, Surrey have lost three consecutive ones since Maynard’s death. The squad will be loath to use his death as any sort of excuse; and such is Hampshire’s current form Surrey may well have lost both games against them regardless. But it is ridiculous to think Surrey will easily be able to move on from the tragedy.

It’s the final week of matches coming up so high time to take at look at the standings. Starting up north, Yorkshire lead the way, two points clear of Nottinghamshire who are separated from Durham by a point and from Lancashire by a further point. Durham only have two games remaining, Yorkshire and Lancashire thee and Notts four, so they’re in a very strong position. Derbyshire and Leicestershire are out of contention.

Down South, unbeaten Sussex are pretty much through with 12 points already on the board. One more win from their last three matches will confirm their progress and leave Hampshire having to win all their remaining three games to overhaul them into top spot. One more win for Hants should see them through too. Both Essex and Kent are facing knockout cricket with three games to play.

Crying out for KP The miserable spectacle of Surrey’s batting collapse against Hampshire – 9 for 4 in the third over and 42 for 6 in the 12th – was proof that their side had a bizarre imbalance. It consisted of only four specialist batsmen, three spinning allrounders and four specialist bowlers, including Murali Kartik’s left-arm spin. At least another batsman should have been selected, with any of Mark Ramprakash, Zander de Bruyn or Rory Burns each having cases.

But Surrey’s seven-wicket thrashing came, at least, with one consolation. When they play the same opponents at The Oval tomorrow, they will do so with Kevin Pietersen in the side. He will presumably bat at No. 3, the spot ignominiously occupied by Murali Kartik in the last two games: he has recorded consecutive ducks, though considering his T20 career batting average is less than 15 that should hardly be a surprise. Pietersen should be available for all five of Surrey’s games next week, of which they need to win four to have a realistic chance of qualification, and will have the chance to take some focus away from England’s ODI series with Australia. It should be fun.

Northants win – at last There is little doubt Northants are the worst English Twenty20 side. In their last two seasons, they have lost 17 matches in the format, winnings just three. But they did manage a victory yesterday. And you will find few easier ones in T20 than Northants’ nine-wicket win with almost seven overs to spare against Glamorgan.

Plenty of talk once again about tearing up our T20 competition but if you look at the attendances last night, there's an excellent case to say we're not that far wrong at the moment. 10,000 turned up at Headingley, 7,000 at Taunton, I'm sure they had good crowds at Chelmsford and Hove too. The challenge is obviously to keep these numbers up regularly.

There are several things that could be done. Theory No. 1 is spread the matches out over the course of a season. This would make the events more special - there wouldn't be another game a couple of days away to go to instead - and more affordable for spectators - £20 every month rather than every week or an even tighter schedule. Spreading the games out would mean the audience isn't diluted and there can be more build up to matches.

When T20 brashly introduced itself a decade ago and county members stood aghast as the comforting serenity of their treasured domain was shattered by hordes of unfamiliar faces encouraged to indulge in overt displays of fun, no one quite knew what to expect.

Well, actually that's not strictly true. It was quite easy to know what to expect: namely that there would be a surge of interest, perhaps even a substantial surge of interest in a new, bold and potentially exciting version of an essentially familiar game, but that after a while it would become an established part of the cricket calendar, alongside the Test matches and the County Championship, the novelty would wear off, the hoardes would not come in quite such large numbers and the great and good of the game would scratch their heads and wonder what to do next. And, of course, that somewhere else in the world there would be someone who had taken our idea and done better with it than us.

As the franchise debate rumbles on, comparisons have been made with Australia’s T20 league. If Australia, which shares the deep history of the English domestic game, were able to make franchises a success, why can’t England?

Actually quite a number of reasons. While any potential franchise system in England would remove perhaps half the counties, thereby making games less accessible, the opposite was true in Australia. The Big Bash kept the traditional six state sides, while supplementing them with extra ones in Melbourne and Sydney. It meant it was easier to go to Australian domestic cricket than ever before, whereas a franchise system in England would, on average, double the distances supporters had to travel.

The Big Bash received huge short-term impetus from the return of former Australian greats like Shane Warne, Adam Gilchrist and Matthew Hayden. This is a legacy of Australia's success since the mid-90s - something England doesn't have; short of dragging Andrew Flintoff out of retirement for a few games we have no comparable names who crowds would be desperate to see one last time. Regardless, that the Big Bash’s initial success was so dependent on returning 40-somethings suggests it may lack genuine long-term viability.

Tony Greig’s Cowdrey Lecture contained calls – following on from Muttiah Muralitharan’s and David Lloyd’s recent comments – for the introduction of franchises in England’s Twenty20 league. But it’s a suggestion not grounded in reality.

England lacks India’s population or interest in cricket. And, unlike in India, cricket fans tend to have deep attachments to domestic sides: it is optimistic to expect that, say, Somerset and Gloucestershire fans would suddenly be happy supporting the same team. Any franchise system would have an instant problem of reach – many supporters would have to travel long distances to what would now be artificial sides. New fans would replace rather than supplement existing ones.

Peter Moores appreciates the value of a hungry player. Last summer, the Lancashire coach backed Farveez Maharoof's desire to play himself back into the Sri Lankan national side to work in the county's favour. This time, perhaps, he has landed Yasir Arafat at just the right moment.

The widely-travelled allrounder has already achieved the objective that drove Maharoof by earning a recall to the Pakistan T20 side for the first time in two years, taking an international career-best 3 for 18 against Sri Lanka earlier this month. Now he wants the chance to play at the World Twenty20 in Sri Lanka this autumn and sees a good run in the FLt20 with Lancashire as the springboard he needs to clinch a place. But that's not his only motivation as Lancashire bid for a fifth appearance at finals day and a first title.

Dimitri Mascarenhas and Mark Davies are fine bowlers, while Darren Stevens is a perfectly useful one. But that all three, in their wicket-to-wicket styles with the keeper standing up to the stumps, were able to open the bowling and go for under five an over doesn’t bode particularly well for English Twenty20 cricket. The problems were twofold: a slow wicket that made aggression unattractive; and – as so often – the complete inability of English batsmen to use their feet.

Without denying the bowlers’ skill, it did not amount to the greatest spectacle on Kent’s family day. Just as well there was a bouncy castle to keep everyone entertained until the big hitting later in the Kent and Hampshire innings.