Mickey Arthur in a recent interview shared his thoughts on different issues.
With muddy puddles dotted around the outfield at The Incora County Ground, and heavy rain pouring from the darkest of clouds, the cricket season seemed some way off when Derbyshire’s Heritage Officer David Griffin, and Head of Cricket Mickey Arthur, sat down for their now-traditional pre-season chat.
But despite the prevailing weather, the season is just weeks away, and the squad will be shortly travelling to Spain for a brief period of warm weather training. So, with a glance back to the summer of 2023, the World Cup in India, a plethora of departures and arrivals, plus two new captains, there was much to discuss.
Casting our thoughts back to the end of last season, no sooner had the curtain come down on 2023 than you were off to India with Pakistan for the World Cup. While not the success you’d have hoped for, what was the experience like?
I enjoyed it. I felt there was some unfinished business with Pakistan and my driving force was to see another World Cup and to try and win it. I thought it was a really good tournament, and the quality of the cricket was outstanding, and it proved that fifty over cricket still has a place in the international calendar.
The grounds were brilliant. I hadn’t been back to India for four or five years and it was brilliant to see the development of the cricket grounds. Chennai, for example, is now a wonderful stadium.
A fifth-place finish for us probably reflected how we played. We didn’t hit our straps completely; the bowling attack – which I thought would be our strength – didn’t fire on all cylinders, and I guess it was disappointing in terms of the final outcome, but a wonderful experience.
Were you surprised by England’s performances?
Interestingly, when we played Afghanistan – who had just beaten England – their coach, Jonathan Trott, said to me that England were playing like a franchise team, not an international cricket team. It was an interesting assessment, and that’s no slight on England, it’s just that that’s what you can fall into. Your training methods, the way you prepare, are different in franchise cricket compared to an international cricket team. A lot of their players had just come out of playing a lot of Twenty20 cricket and hadn’t played much fifty over cricket and I think that exposed them.
Of course, with such quality players, they were always likely to catch up with the tempo of fifty over cricket, but by the time they did, the competition was over for them.
Returning to your work here; you’ve completed two full seasons now. We saw a massive improvement in 2022, but by your own admission, 2023 wasn’t as good. Can you put your finger on why that was?
In 2022 we got – and I said this in my interview with you last year – 100% in terms of growth and productivity out of the players we had, but it was impossible for the players to improve again that much, so that’s why I expected last year to be a stable year where we grew in different areas – and in some we did – but in others we didn’t. I was very disappointed, for example, not to win a first class match. I felt we got enough runs, although not really quickly enough to give ourselves the best chance to win games by taking twenty wickets. The result was that I felt we needed to regenerate our squad, but I had to wait until contractual positions allowed me to look for players to come in who will fit the brand of cricket that I want us to play.
We’ll return to recruitment shortly, but we did get to the position of an effective one game shootout in the final T20 group game against Worcestershire here at Derby. A win in that game would have seen Derbyshire in the quarter finals with the possibility of qualification for Finals Day. That must have been a disappointment, especially in front of a home crowd here at Derby.
That game was the most disappointing aspect of the season. Despite not winning a first class game, we competed in most. But the game against Worcestershire demonstrated why we needed to regenerate because I felt that in a game we needed to stand up in, we didn’t; everything was on the line with a quarter final as the prize, and we didn’t meet that challenge.
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