Phil Edmonds, independent thinker, entrepreneur, Cambridge graduate and the most gifted of left-arm spinners, once declared that he would like to circumvent county cricket. Of course he would like to play Test matches for England and he proposed that he would prepare for that by bowling, not for Middlesex, but in club cricket in London. It was a neat idea but even the arch-manipulator Edmonds could not persuade the men that matter this plan was feasible.
Now it is possible Adil Rashid, a less manipulative soul one imagines, may be able to achieve the Edmonds dream. In the winter Rashid decided to withdraw from red-ball county cricket to concentrate on the white-ball game, a choice he could take because he had established himself as an England regular in the two short forms of the game. They were unimpressed at Yorkshire but there was a certain logic to Rashid’s decision: he had been dropped from the Test team and he had recently been more successful with a white ball. There was scope for lucrative overseas contracts in the T20 leagues, which did not really materialise; and there was always England, for whom he was increasingly regarded as a key weapon in pursuit of the World Cup in 2019.
Related: Inner-city cricket: fighting for new blood
Continue reading...