World Cricket: Charlie Bennett - 1 Match Suspended Ban

 

04/10

The independent Cricket Discipline Panel (CDP) has issued its decision in relation to a Charlie Bennett, an Essex CCC player, after he was charged following allegations that he used a misogynistic and discriminatory term whilst playing in recreational cricket. Mr Bennett is subject to the Professional Conduct Regulations (‘PCRs’) by virtue of his contract with Essex CCC.

Mr Bennett admitted a charge of a breach of paragraph 3.2 of the Professional Conduct Regulations (‘PCRs’) for improper conduct in using misogynistic language with the effect of creating a hostile or offensive environment on the field of play towards another player.

Mr Bennett was issued with a reprimand for his admitted conduct, given a one match suspension that was suspended for a period of 12 months only to be enforced in the event of a further breach of Regulation 3.2 of the PCRs and ordered to undertake equality, diversity and inclusion and/or anti-discrimination training.

Managing Director of The Cricket Regulator Chris Haward said: “I would like to thank Essex CCC and the recreational league clubs for their open co-operation in this matter.

"Professional cricketers are role models within the game and have a duty to act appropriately and responsibly at all times. Where a professional cricketer uses any form of discriminatory and/or misogynistic language or carries out any actions of that nature, the Cricket Regulator will ensure they are held to account in line with their professional responsibilities as set out in the Professional Conduct Regulations.

"There is no place in the game for discriminatory or misogynistic behaviour and the Cricket Regulator will ensure that those displaying such behaviour are held accountable. Ensuring that cricket is a safe, welcoming and inclusive environment for all is a priority for the Cricket Regulator.”

Anyone who has experienced any type of discriminatory or misogynistic behaviours in cricket can contact the Cricket Regulator via  integrity@cricketregulator.co.uk or safeguarding@cricketregulator.co.uk.

The full judgement is available here.

Grade cricketer 314*

29/09

Sheffield Shield Trial for the first 5 rounds.

Good, bad, unworkable, open to abuse?

20/09

Trimming the Championship and Blast is not the answer to England's exhaustion

HUW TURBERVILL: ECB chair Richard Thompson says "we have to look at the schedule", but cutting domestic competitions isn't confronting the problem head-on

Thank goodness we have the freedom to challenge authority.

ECB chair Richard Thompson gave an interview to BBC Sport recently. During it, he declared that cricket must "look at the schedule" of an "unrelenting" calendar, with some players "obviously exhausted" this season.

It prompted me to reply on X: "Gosh, I wonder what new tournament taking up the whole of August has added to this fixture congestion/player exhaustion. The counties were never going to give up T20. We should have stuck with what we had and revamped it."

Perhaps I must learn to love The Hundred, just as the Labour Party learnt to love Peter Mandelson during the Tony Blair years.

Prolific commenter Dan Kingdom outdid me. "It is misleading how Thompson segues from creaking bodies at the end of the India Tests into the shrinking of the Blast and possibly the County Championship… England Test players hardly play in the CC or Blast, and the ECB have the power to rest them from matches in those competitions anyway!"

The major problem is not exclusively that the County Championship and T20 Blast are too long. It's that England Men play six Tests a summer, six ODIs and six T20Is. The paying public want the stars in all of them… Joe Root, Harry Brook, Jamie Smith, Ben Duckett and so on (mercifully, Ben Stokes is being wrapped in cotton wool).

It prompted me to research just how much cricket England's main men have played this season.

There have been 167 days from April 4, the date the County Championship started this year, through to the end of the penultimate round (September 18). The hardest workers have been Ollie Pope (62 days), Zak Crawley (56) and Smith (55).

Next are Brook and Tongue (51), Duckett (48), and Root (47).

As Kingdom pointed out, most England stars play little Championship or Blast cricket, so what benefit will cutting those competitions have, particularly a the ECB can tailior their schedule anyway?

hompson did make some pertinent points, however. 

"We're the only sport to have a World Cup every year, which I personally think is too much." He is right on that – one 50-over World Cup every four years, one T20 World Cup every four years is, of course, the logical way to go – but when did logic ever come into it when it comes to the ICC?

Next year's Men's T20 World Cup will be the fourth since 2021. Meanwhile, the women's tournament in England next summer will be the fourth since the turn of the decade.

On the England v India Test series, concertinaed into a ridiculously tight schedule of 46 days, he told the BBC: "I'm not surprised some of the players were obviously exhausted… I can't ever remember a five-Test series going five days in every Test."

While obviously the all-powerful Board of Control for Cricket in India had a big say in the schedule, Thompson and the ECB cannot completely absolve themselves of blame there.

He added: "We have to look at the schedule. We're reducing the number of T20 Blast games we're playing. We're looking to potentially reduce the amount of Championship cricket."

But not The Hundred, of course. And if you had to put money on it, you can only see that getting bigger in the years to come, now new overseas owners are on board.

Of course, I sympathise with Thompson and the players. Three formats are too many. But what do you do? The top players prefer Tests and T20. The 50-over game is great, but you can increasingly see that one making way in the long term.

"At this stage of my career across a 12-month calendar, it is no longer possible to commit to all formats at every level, both physically and mentally," the words of Jamie Overton were an insight into the dilemma players are facing. 

Meanwhile, punters want to watch the best players and resent talk of cutting schedules. It's a hell of a hard job trying to keep everyone happy.

Thompson called the scheduling "the hardest game of Jenga" when he took over, and I am certain that he hasn't changed his mind.

14/09

Changes to boundary catches law explained

12/09

Touch on by Mick Newell when defending Ben Duckett last night, the relentless schedule

05/09

Ross Taylor, Samoa

27/08

Revealed: Cricket is running out of BATS - here's why the IPL, climate change and expensive trees are all to blame... as we take you inside the race against time to save the sport from an existential crisis

Lawrence Booth

A recurrent grumble during the recent England–India series concerned the state of the Dukes ball, with fingers pointed in every direction – including at the Aberdeen Angus cows who supply the leather. But behind the scenes, another equipment-related headache has been raging. And they’re calling it the ‘cricket bat emergency’.

In a nutshell: there aren’t enough trees. Or at least there aren’t enough trees of the kind needed to make cricket bats.

English willow has always been the sport’s wood of choice. Kashmir has a huge willow market, producing around two millions bat clefts a year, but the quality is variable; so does Serbia, believe it or not, though only 100,000 clefts a year, and again the quality is unreliable. Poplar, the next-best alternative, has been tried, and there have even been experiments with bamboo, but they did not go well.

To complicate matters, the willow has to be grown in the UK. When cuttings were sent to Australia, the wood grew too quickly, which made it brittle. When they were sent to New Zealand, the trees were damaged by the wind, which will come as no surprise to anyone who has covered a Test match in Wellington. All told, then, English willow – salix alba caerulea to its mates – is where it’s at.

Like money, however, willow doesn’t grow on trees: it is the tree. And those trees are struggling to keep pace with a demand for high-quality bats that has exploded, especially since the end of the pandemic, and especially on the subcontinent, where the sport’s economy continues to boom beyond the capitalists’ wildest dreams.

The repercussions have been inevitable: with supply chains unable to balance the equation, prices have shot up. A good bat might now set you back the best part of £1,000, which is a blow to cricket’s attempts to shake off old accusations about elitism. And that’s before you factor in the cost of pads, helmets, gloves and the rest.

The economics of willow growth sounds like one of the more obscure specialist subjects on Mastermind, but it helps explain why the sport – led by MCC – is now exploring other means of producing bats good enough to survive everything thrown at them.

JS Wright & Sons, who have led the industry ever since WG Grace approached Jessie Samuel Wright in 1894 to request a supply of willow, say their trees take between 12 and 20 years to reach maturity and be ready to become bats.

The trouble is no one accounted for the post-IPL boom in India, which meant the quantity of willow planted back then is insufficient to meet modern needs. As Rob Lynch, MCC’s director of cricket operations, put it during the recent World Cricket Connects conference at Lord’s: ‘The situation is becoming unsustainable.’

JS Wright, who claim to produce three-quarters of the world’s English willow bats, planted around 15,000 trees 20 years ago, and have now upped that figure to more than 40,000. One tree, well tended, can produce 40 bat clefts, and the company are assiduous about replacing every felled tree with three or four new ones. This year, they have produced 700,000 clefts.

But even sustainable planning in the here and now leaves an issue in the short- to medium-term. ‘Not enough competitors have planted enough trees,’ said Jeremy Ruggles, a director at JS Wright for over 30 years.

The problem starts at the top, with the best players now getting through bats at a rate once considered unthinkable – three a year has become more like 15 or 20. And with ever more Indian stars now signing bat sponsorship deals worth around $1m (£740,000), the companies have to claw their money back somewhere.

Players train more, too, and – thanks to the IPL and other T20 franchise tournaments, which seem to be growing rather faster than salix alba – hit the ball more ferociously. They also train more regularly against the harder new ball. All this adds to wear and tear. Tree prices, meanwhile, are said to have trebled since 2017.

Then there’s climate change, which has meant milder winters in the UK and accelerated tree growth. Things get a little technical here, but essentially fast growth leads to wider grains, and that in turn produces bats which require longer to knock in. Pros, inevitably, prefer the ready-to-go narrower-grain bats.

What to do, then, while the willow-growing industry catches up with demand, and attempts to keep at bay a crisis that could make cricket accessible only to those who can afford it?

One alternative is laminated bats, pieced together from two or three pieces of wood, with an English willow face backed by lower-grade wood. These bats are already allowed in junior cricket, but remain illegal in the professional game, where there are concerns over the small advantage they provide the batsman - a lighter pick-up with more power.

There is also the possibility that manufacturers might hide other performance-enhancing material between the bits of wood, such as high-density foam. Short of sawing bats in two to verify their authenticity, this would be hard to police.

Non-wooden material remains up for discussion, too, though the sport has never quite got over the controversy caused by the aluminium bat used by Dennis Lillee during a Test against England at Perth in 1979.

And while some kind of metal would ease the strain on the willow industry, and make the game more affordable, it might also take cricket down a path it is reluctant to explore: as bowlers keep telling us, bats are already powerful enough.

Whatever happens next, and assuming the likes of JS Wright & Sons overcome the crisis, may depend on how successfully the sport can unite its disparate strands and produce an over-arching solution.

MCC, whose excellent work in the background has a habit of being overlooked, want to host an industry-wide conference in the next few months to explore options.

The crisis can be averted. But it is far from over.