Loughborough do it right but there are plenty of other issues...

The editor of Cricket Statistician analyses recent events

We should perhaps salute Loughborough University (Loughborough MCCU to be precise). In three early season bun fights against county sides they drew all three and in fact took first innings lead in all of them: against Leicestershire, Northants (where the University scored 553) and Derbyshire (where they scored 388). The first two ranked as first-class matches. In the Leicester game they gave the county enough trouble that Charlie Shreck seems to have lost his cool and abused the batsman, so losing the county 16 points before they had bowled a ball in the County Championship. Leicestershire – like some others – are looking like lost souls already.

But it is a long time since a university side looked as if it could regularly give county sides (not the best of them and not their best teams, admittedly) a run for their money. Look at this year. Cambridge lost by 344 runs to Notts, scoring 123 and 79. They then scored 62 and 56 against Lancashire and lost by 340. Leeds/Bradford lost to Yorkshire by an innings and 224, conceding 543-5 declared.

Loughborough of course was known for sport long before it was a university, for many years a sportsoriented Teacher Training College, then a technology college. It has been rated as sports university of the year 2017 and hosts England’s central training hub.

It helps that most of the side have been playing for one or two years now, with eight of the eleven having played last year. Only two have played first-class cricket for anyone else, Nitish Kumar having played for Canada for some time in Intercontinental Cup matches and James Bracey having played once for Gloucestershire in 2016.

Of the others, five have played county 2nd XI cricket and four Minor County cricket and it is a safe bet that some of them will play county cricket. Graduates, especially from Loughborough and Durham, provide a fair proportion of home-grown county players.

What is much less likely is that any of them will make it to international level. These days nearly all England players have been through the U19s and/or the Lions. There is clearly, too, a feeling that runs and wickets in Division Two are not worth all that much (though Kent’s Sam Northeast may prove me wrong).

Of course there was a time when the gilded youth from Oxford or Cambridge came into the England side as of right, but that was when those universities concentrated on cricket rather more and academic work rather less, and took in the cream of public school cricketers who then, as now, enjoyed the cream of the facilities and the coaching. At one time there was even a fourth-class degree for those who had really not managed any academic work at all, and there were those who left without a degree having hung around for a few years playing cricket. But today we are all much more serious.