The former Pakistan coach and Derbyshire’s new director of cricket, Mickey Arthur, has said that the England Cricket Board (ECB) should stop allowing the players to play in the Indian Premier League (IPL) and rather ask them to play in county cricket in the early parts of the English summer.
According to Arthur, most of the England players take part in the IPL and when they return to play test cricket back home, they have no preparation at all because they don’t have any county cricket behind them and they directly make the switch from IPL to test cricket in England and it’s because of the lack of preparation that their performance suffers in the longest format of the game.
What Arthur is saying is very surprising because not all of England’s test match players play in the IPL. Most of their premier fast bowlers James Anderson, Stuart Broad, Ollie Robinson and Mark Wood were not a part of any team in last year’s IPL and even most of their batsmen, the likes of Joe Root, Ollie Pope, Zak Crawley, Dan Lawrence and Haseeb Hameed, were not picked by any of the IPL teams.
It’s only a couple of England’s test match cricketers who play in the IPL and the bulk of them don’t get IPL contracts. They have the opportunity to play for their counties and they do so before every season. But, Mickey Arthur is of the view that it’s the IPL which has played a role in the decline of England’s test cricket.
County cricket has always produced quality cricketers: Mickey Arthur
Having an exclusive conversation with The Times, Mickey Arthur said that county cricket has always produced high quality players and there is no reason why it can’t do that again. It’s just that the players need to be stopped from playing in the IPL and need to be asked to play in county cricket before the start of the international home summer.
Arthur has coached four international cricket teams, South Africa, Australia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, before taking the Derbyshire role. He had a decent bit of success with all teams, but with Pakistan, he won the Champions Trophy of 2017 where Pakistan beat India in the final.
