The August committee meeting had to be held over 2 evenings because there was so much to discuss.
Discipline
A disturbingly large number of disciplinary reports have been sent in, three being of serious enough nature to incur bans of 4 games or more (level 4 offences). The web site shows bans that have already taken effect. There will be more once club hearings and appeals processes have gone through.
Cam and Oldlands are congratulated on the exemplary manner with which they faced discipline problems. They met quickly and banned their players involved, fully backing up this league's stance against bad behaviour.
Umpire Training
Hatherley & Reddings are putting on a 2-hour evening umpire training session entitled "The 10 over stint" for their own players. We are having a look at this to see if it could be used more widely, and are wondering if it could be used in addition to the more thorough 4 evening training designed and presented by GACUS.
Headgear for youth players
A helmet with grille is mandatory for wicket keepers under 18 years old when they stand up to the stumps. We are restating this because there has been an instance of a young player in a game (not a County League game) wearing a hockey-type face mask. That is not sufficient to satisfy the ECB rules we follow for league games.
Incomplete or missing scorecards
We have, most of the time, been pointing out to clubs when the scorecard is missing or incomplete. We strongly believe it has added interest to the web results to see the detail of a scorecard. You are required by our rules to fill them in and some clubs have received warnings, but no one has been fined for failure to do so. We will use the web statistics (and only those) for the individual player awards at the end of the season. So if you think you are in contention for one of the awards, check your catches or runs or wickets are filled in. You can go back and put in missing details at any stage. Abandoned games also count.
Pitch and facilities marks
We have been ensuring we get all the away team's marks in, and as well as publishing the average marks, we shall be writing to clubs with persistent poor scores to ask for improvements for next season.
District Asociations
Our constitution states that all clubs in the league must be affiliated to ECB, GCB and a District Cricket Association. The normal route for the affiliation fees is that your District CA collects its affiliation fees plus those for the GCB and ECB. If the GCB or a District CA is aware that a club has avoided affiliation in some way, they will be telling us that the club is contravening the rules and asking us to take action. Warning!
Player Registration
The system we implemented this year has improved book-keeping on player affiliation and has meant that clubs have taken this more seriously than before. We are considering taking this a stage further, using a registration package built in to "Play-Cricket" which will mean players are listed as being registered with the league in your own club's "Play-Cricket" database and to register a player you will no longer have to download the database and send that off.
Divisional meetings
See the July newsletter and look for announcements on the web about when and where, and the agenda.