"Brown enjoys t20 debut";

Date: 16th June 2011

A Paul Edwards copyright exclusive for L&DCC Official Website.

You could have got good odds against Karl Brown even playing in last Friday's Friends Life t20 game against Yorkshire at Old Trafford, so a winning wager on him being Lancashire's equal top scorer would have returned the handsomest of profits. It needed last minute niggles for both Glen Chapple and Kyle Hogg to give Brown the chance to show what he could do in short format cricket, and he proved once again that good luck is often no more than opportunity.

Twenty20 matches merge into one another; it is the game's most unmemorable format. But recollections of Brown's 60-run partnership with Luke Procter for the seventh wicket will take longer than most to fade. Procter was playing only his fifth t20 game and Brown was making his debut, yet the pair nearly doubled Lancashire's score and it required two pieces of inventive wizardry from Azeem Rafiq to prevent the journalists attaching the adjective "match-winning" to the stand.

"If Hoggy hadn't gone down, we mightn't have found out how good a t20 player Brownie was," said Lancashire's stand-in skipper Steven Croft. "He's picked up his one-day cricket in the second team over the last few years and he was dying to get a game in t20, so this will be a real boost to his confidence."

Of Lancashire's six boundaries, Brown hit two, and he also thrashed a splendid six in Rafiq's last over. He scored 34 not out off 29 balls and later pouched two catches at mid-off to get rid of Andrew Gale and Gary Ballance. None of which could makeup for the errors of Lancashire's earlier batsmen, but it might have provided a little salve for the wound.

Less than 24 hours later three of Lancashire's t20 XI were playing in the Premier League of the Briiging Finance Solutions Liverpool Competition. Stephen Parry was making 133 for Bootle, who nevertheless lost to Newton-le-Willows in one of the matches of the day. Karl Brown and Simon Kerrigan were pitted against each other as Leigh took on Ormskirk at Brook Lane. "Brown bowled Kerrigan 10" reads the scorecard, and one imagines that Lancashire's dressing room knew all about that dismissal as the rain fell at Worcester on Sunday.

While Kerrigan, Brown and Parry were playing their cricket on Saturday, I was talking to the experienced St Helens Recs slow left-armer Gary Freeman. (Incidentally, I'm sorry if this is turning into Recs week on this website, but when people as knowledgeable and shrewd as Freeman and David Heyes take the trouble to talk to me, I try to take the trouble to listen.)

Among his many interesting observations on Liverpool Competition cricket, Freeman pointed out that while many Lancashire cricketers have played in our league, relatively few - Paul Horton being the obvious exception - can be said to have learned their cricket at our clubs. Maybe so, but I still think it significant that you could now almost get a Comp XI - Horton, Brown, Chilton, Smith, Cross, Parry, Newby, Cheetham, Mahmood, Kerrigan - from the first team squad at Old Trafford.

For a number of Lancashire cricketers - and yes, for a variety of reasons, including financial ones - it seems that the Comp has become a league of choice. We may reflect on the causes and effects of this trend, but it can hardly harm the development of highly promising young players like Matty McKiernan, Joe Davies and Gavin Griffiths, all of whom were playing at Brook Lane on Saturday, as they seek to develop their cricket careers. As for Brown, if Chapple and Hogg are available, he may well not even play in Friday's return t20 Roses match at Headingley. Then again, if the weather forecast is to be believed, neither will anyone else.