Martyn Moxon: “We spend a lot of money on a flawed system”

Recent Rose Bowl pitches have drawn attention to an ongoing problem in domestic cricket, although it would be wrong to target Hampshire because in my view a few counties have been treading fine lines.

Hampshire needed to win against Nottinghamshire and produced a pitch which was deemed to favour the spinners too heavily and they had eight points deducted. Once that happens counties think twice about producing result pitches. By all accounts it was a really exciting game against Nottinghamshire, but then came our bore draw at the Rose Bowl on a pitch which looked as though it would deteriorate but just got flatter.

Then Hampshire reverted to something favouring spin for the Friends Life t20 quarter-final against Durham. That raises questions about how a showpiece event in front of a 12,000 crowd and the Sky cameras should be staged. Should it be all about the toss or should it be played on the best surface possible?

With the amount of Twenty20 games we've had in the last two years they tend to get played on tired pitches because most grounds don't have enough strips. There is a danger that spinners become more important in this form of cricket than in the four-day game.

The majority of wickets are taken by seamers in the County Championship because pitches generally don't favour spinners, who need to bowl a lot of overs to develop. It's frustrating for us at Yorkshire because we would like to play two spinners all the time and have tried to encourage spin at Headingley, but it hasn't worked.

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