English T20 league can't compete with the IPL

The glam quotient of the IPL is tough to match

The fixtures are out and we have a cricket week at Chesterfield, more than a few games that look winnable on paper and a fifty-over game at Scarborough.

Oh, be still my beating heart! All things being equal, I hope to see our lads take on the Yorkies at my favourite ground outside of the county. I can close my eyes and hear the sea right now, the only thing to check being how the date ties in with the school calendar and whether it is a solo trip or a family one.

I think that game, together with the four-day fixture at the Cheltenham Festival, will see good Derbyshire away support and I’m pretty happy with the way its been drawn up. I’m still not convinced that counties will find it easy to get overseas stars for the drawn-out T20, but perhaps that will lead to a levelling of the playing field, if not an increase in the crowds to see the bigger names.

The more I have thought about it, the less I am convinced that the English T20 should try to compete with the IPL. It will never have the appeal of the latter, nor the mass audience to engender the atmosphere that the IPL alone manages to do. Even the capacity crowds against Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire last summer were on a different scale, akin to comparing the voices of Bjork and Maria Callas.

Our T20 is what it is; a harmless diversion for those who have neither the time nor inclination for the real thing, the proper game…the four-day game.

There’s plenty of time to discuss our chances in the respective competitions, but while I’d share in the general enthusiasm should we win another one-day title, nothing matches success in the four-day game. To come out on top after 64 days of championship cricket, you have to be a very good side playing fine cricket. You can’t win the one-days without doing that, but there are less stringent demands.

Never mind. The countdown starts now. By the weekend, there’ll be a countdown timer on the blog…