A slightly new direction

I've always wondered about moving UC from international style cricket to club cricket and increasing the number of skills to cover indirect cricket areas.

Using an example from my club is a player who managed over 500 games in 40+ years with a batting average of 7.5 and a highest score of 44 and 6 wickets in total. On the surface a pretty poor cricketer, but during that time he has and continues to be an excellent recruiter for the club, always first to the bar after a game and helps out at the ground all the time.

So my idea would be to move from the current system to one where player personalities count and have to be balanced with the playing side.

I'd also suggest an end to the draft with players coming into your playing squad based on the recruiting skill of the current squad and players retiring themselves due to age, injury, family commitments and lack of playing opportunities.

Things I'd like to see in this context: Skilful players with low availability; low skill players that off the club a benefit off the pitch; players who complain about being left out.

This is perhaps a too large departure from what people think UC should be, but I hope it sparks some discussion

I think there is a middle ground Bedders. Tim has suggested something along these lines before, and Dugal Ure had a left-field idea also very similar.

Dugal's idea was that you could nominate a player in your team as Non-playing (N). E.g. if you have an age 7 batsman, still around 85-90 skill... you might be able to keep him on for a season more. But if you make him (N) then he stays in the squad as a kind of batting coach. Earning TPs, or the effect of TPs, would be increased if you had (N)s on your list. And of course you could train your Non-players... very handy if it's an old spinner, it'd be like having Warney on the squad instructing the youngsters.

Tim's idea was that TP and DP allocations could be influenced by the overall skill level of your team. This would go against teams with narrow squads of 20, and benefit broad squads. One interesting effect could be teams using spare TPs on older players, especially to keep them above a minimum skill cap (like the auto-retirement when all skills drop below 20).

Not sure I'd want to formalise some of those off-field roles my players have - do we really need to know if someone doubles as a recruiter, marketing manager, team doctor, bartender, groundsman, third umpire et al? Hmmm... there's an idea... if a player is nominated as Umpire then your players get more favourable decisions...