Derbyshire season review: Much room for improvement in shorter formats

It remains a puzzle why Derbyshire rarely play well in the one-day games.

We have batsmen in Wes Durston and Chesney Hughes, one-day cricket is whose forte, while others have the ability to score steadily and well.

That Chanderpaul bloke can bat a bit too, despite what the West Indian selectors think, while this year the T20 side was augmented by a specialist, the most experienced player in the format in world cricket, Albie Morkel. Still we flopped, though with slightly less style and innovation than Dick Fosbury.

Albie Morkel

The problem is largely that we struggle to combine success in both facets of the game. We can bat beautifully, as we did at The Oval in the YB40, but still lose after an undisciplined bowling display. We can bowl well, but toss the win away by careless strokeplay, bad running and an overall lack of common sense as we did against Yorkshire in the T20.

Madsen, Chanderpaul and Chesney Hughes had decent YB40 campaigns, but no one set the tournament alight. Paul Borrington did better than most and showed a greater willingness and ability to rotate the strike than most.

Too often, the ‘strategy’ appeared to be to block four balls, and then hit a boundary. That’s fine for MS Dhoni, but for lesser players, is rarely a route to success.

A need to rest key bowlers for the championship saw others being given opportunities, but the feeling remained among supporters that both Tom Knight and Tony Palladino should have had greater first team exposure in the one-day tournaments. Knight especially appeared hard done by and should have played more T20 cricket than he did.

To be fair, as I try to be, the T20 campaign started as if this might be our year, Albie Morkel’s early influence with the new ball being backed up by good batting from a solid-looking top four. Yet, when they failed, there was an alarming lack of runs down the order, Morkel’s blitz at Chesterfield and Clare’s late composure at Headingley being exceptions.

The hamstring injury to Chanderpaul at Old Trafford saw the start of an alarming slide that saw only one more game won after three straight wins. Extraordinary batting by Durston and Hughes at Trent Bridge set a daunting total that Nottinghamshire couldn’t get close to in a ten-over slog, but the end, when it came, was in a dreadfully inept display against Leicestershire, hardly the format force of their pomp and perhaps surprised themselves at the ease of their win.

Perhaps a longer competition and a change of opponents might be the fillip we need. The playing field is likely to be more level in 2014, with overseas players in short supply given the new scheduling, but we need to bat with more common sense and work the ball around far more than has been evident of late.

Allowing a third of the available deliveries to pass without scoring, as we did in what should have been a routine run chase against Yorkshire in the T20, was careless to the point of unprofessional and the side is better than that.

My hopes are high that 2014 will see a strong challenge in the county championship. I’m less sure about our one-day skills at this stage, at least until I’ve seen winter recruitment and our squad isn’t strong enough nor sufficiently experienced to challenge on all fronts.

It’s a pity, as T20 is still the money-spinner, as capacity home games in glorious weather against Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire showed.

If we could produce a top display in such circumstances, it would go some way towards boosting attendances. As it was, our efforts in those games merely confirmed that this is still very much a work in progress.