Dawid Malan franchise deal a complex argument on all sides as Yorkshire CCC lose another captain - Comment
TO lose one captain during mid-season to a franchise competition may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
Oscar Wilde did not quite put it like that in The Importance of Being Earnest, but you take the point.
Misfortune or carelessness? Perhaps a bit of both. Certainly Yorkshire’s supporters would be entitled to wonder after the news that Dawid Malan, the club’s T20 captain, is to follow red-ball skipper Jonny Bairstow by leaving to play for another team, having joined up for the Max60 competition in the Cayman Islands next month (be there or be square) which clashes with the end of the T20 group stage.
“I can resist anything except temptation,” Wilde also wrote, and, let’s be clear, the rewards and opportunities for players now far outstrip those of yesteryear.
Whereas once you played cricket for your county and international cricket for your country, and perhaps took a job in the winter to make ends meet, the demarcation lines clearly defined, now there are seemingly more white-ball tournaments than countries on Earth, with player-power rampant in all sports.
How long before the Burkina Faso Bash, anyone, or the Tonga T10? Watch out, they’re on the way...
This is not an easy subject to write about because there are complex arguments on all sides.
From a hardcore fan’s perspective (someone whose priorities might be, in descending order: Yorkshire CCC, beer, football, fish and chips, the wife), there can be no argument. Playing for Yorkshire must come first. Period.
From a player’s perspective - and regardless of the attachment that they feel to any one club - they are, first and foremost, professionals doing a job like anyone else, albeit a privileged one. Their first priority is to themselves and their families as in any walk of life.
This is sometimes difficult for hardcore fans to grasp but it serves as a useful starting point here.
For if a sport is set up so that players can leave a club suddenly to temporarily go somewhere else, then that is a fundamental reality of that sport and, depending on your viewpoint, reveals a fundamental flaw within it and the way it has been allowed to develop my administrators, some of them at Yorkshire. It is, of course, within any player’s gift to turn down such chances, another strand to the matter.
Equally, a supporter is entitled to baulk at paying good money to watch a team whose leaders have decided that they are better off not playing for that team. No one could argue against that either.
Where does Yorkshire CCC sit in all of this? Somewhere in the middle, no doubt.
On the one hand, they are victims of a sport transformed, some would say ruined; indeed, Oscar Wilde’s reference to “misfortune" certainly applied in the case of Bairstow’s stint at the Indian Premier League, when he went off to Mumbai Indians at short notice after that tournament was temporarily suspended due to political tensions.
Bairstow remains a centrally-contracted player, of course, while the sums of money on offer at the IPL have long persuaded counties and countries that there is little point standing in players’ way.
Equally, a player’s acceptance of such offers assumes a vastly different perspective within that financial context, leading to the inevitable corollary that few, in any walk of life, would turn down such money if they had the chance.
On the other hand, Yorkshire must have given their blessing to Malan to miss the latter stages of the Vitality Blast to take part in Max60, which sounds like the sort of thing that you might use to treat a verruca.
Again, though, the arguments are complex: Malan is 37 years old – only two years older than Bairstow – and coming to the end of a storied career, with both men naturally keen to optimise franchise opportunities while they still can.
Both still offer great value to Yorkshire as players, so the vested interest element from the club is there too. Handing them the captaincy no doubt reflects that and, in some people’s eyes, they were the obvious candidates.
Equally, it could be argued that Yorkshire might have taken a much “safer” route, given the talent of both men and the capacity for their services to be in high/sudden demand, and appointed the likes of Jonny Tattersall, for example, who did such a sterling job in the second half of last season, or perhaps Dom Bess.
Of course, other factors then come into play such as team selection, while it was only the other day that Bess (surely a long-term captaincy option for Yorkshire in all formats) said that one of his principal goals was to break into franchise cricket (you start to see the problem).
It is difficult, therefore, for players and clubs, a result of the way that the sport has evolved.
Perhaps they might console themselves with another of Wilde’s famous sayings: “There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”