A quiet month?

I have to confess to not keeping this blog as up to date as I might since the Loudon retirement. Rest assured that I was not so broken by the news that I found myself unable to continue writing the blog, it was merely that will no England cricket tours going on it is hard to stay focused on the goings on at Edgbaston.

The big issues of the past month are the confirmation that Dougie Brown is going to be involved in the coaching set-up as the academy director, which is a good bit of news. I'm not sure whether he is any good as a coach or not, but quite frankly he should be kept at Edgbaston even if he's pretty useless at everything post-playing; they could just build him a little flat in the prioy stand and he could live there with Dermot.

Ian Salisbury has to be a fairly big punt as a signing, I can't see him playing every game and he didn't have a fantastic year last year. It looks as though we'll be better off with out fancy boy Van Jaarsveld who has decided that he does like South Africa after all and seems to have refused to come back. He seems such a mercurial character that I'm not sure he will go on to develop into much anyway, he certainly seems to have a fairly good idea of his own worth and at the time of writing is reported as refusing to answer calls from Warwickshire.

Finally the membership prices have gone up for this year and may well price a few people out. I for one will have to very carefully decide whether to renew my membership. As new school cricket administrators are fond of labouring, cricket is a "product" and quite frankly that product was overpriced in its last offering to the marketplace, and your correspondent found it personally just about the same in price as individual tickets for last season. For myself and the missus it will involve going to two more games to "make our money back". Combined we will have to attend at least 20 days of cricket next year. As we both have full time jobs we may well not renew our membership and keep some flexibility about when we pay and when we don't.

Oh, and I have updated the playing squad post below with all the new news.

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