There's always weird stuff happening at Derbyshire. Whether it's play being stopped because it was too sunny, or Tom Poynton missing the entire season because he crashed the chairman's sports car, or Shiv Thakor being convicted of exposing himself to strangers, or Peter Burgoyne leaving the county in undisclosed but allegedly similar circumstances, or... well I'll leave it there for now.
The key thing is, Derbyshire is being weird again. With barely a month until the pre-season starts, they currently have only eighteen players on their books, not all of whom are on full-time contracts:
So, eighteen is already a small enough playing squad, but taking from that the three seventeen-year-olds (who surely cannot be expected to play regularly) and that leaves you with fifteen players, including three Kolpaks in addition to Wilson and Madsen. I honestly don't understand what they're trying to do here.
The first eleven doesn't look too bad, though there are a couple of places I'm scratching around for a player:
- Ben Slater
- Luis Reece
- Billy Godleman
- Wayne Madsen
- Daryn Smit
- Gary Wilson
- Alex Hughes
- Tony Palladino
- Hardus Viljoen
- Ravi Rampaul
- Will Davis
But if a couple of guys get injured they've got precisely no back-up. They also have no proper spinner, but that seems to be something most counties aren't bothering with nowadays