Unable to field a full team & can't play because too many players

I've been thinking about this recently having not had a game last week because the opposition wasn't able to field a team - the answer is to become a cricket mercenary or just a whole lot more flexible about who you play for with the support of the league and other leagues in your area...

If like me you play club cricket at the lower levels, we all know that feeling of wanting to play and then looking at the club website to find either...

(a) It's not your turn this week for selection as your club has so many players it has to rotate some of the lower XI players and therefore can't give them a game every weekend.

(b) You look at your squad sheet on the clubs website for the coming weekend and by Friday it's still looking pretty much as though you're probably going to be playing with less than XI players.

(c) Thursday morning you get a text, phone call and or email saying that the game has been cancelled due to either club not being able to field even 8 players for a game.



There's nothing quite as demoralising when playing cricket as not having any chance of being competitive due to having to play with 8 blokes or any number less than 11. The games hard enough when you have a weak side of 11 men, let alone a weakened side with less than 11 blokes and when this happens it's pretty much a recipe for blokes leaving and not playing in the future. So every weekend across your region these scenarios are being played out at clubs that might be struggling to keep themselves alive.

Surely in these scenarios there should be some way of at least using the blokes in (a) or (c) to go and play in the games where the teams are short? This is only ever going to affect the weaker sides at the club, because all of the better players are shifted up the pyramid to the 1st, 2nd and 3rd teams. There's a lot of discussion in cricket at the moment about the loss of young players from the game and some of this might be due to the fact that they get fed up with being in situation (a) and (c), so, perhaps if something like this was adopted, teams would field 11 players more frequently and end up being more competitive and that might reduce the flood of young players from the game? Additionally those younger players need to play at the lower XI level as a part of their development.

Maybe something could be arranged by the leagues along the lines of the Club Cricket Conference which works to match friendly teams up so that they can play? Surely for the sake of the future of cricket a webpage could be created by the area leagues that would allow for players to find games at short notice?

Update...

All is not lost...
Shortly after writing this I had another look around and found this...

https://play-cricket.ecb.co.uk/hc/en-us/articles/115003501945-Find-A-Fixture