Cricinfo has this interview with ECB "Performance Director" Mo Bobat. Bobat makes an interesting claim about county cricket, "Take something like county batting average. We know that a county batting average does not significantly predict an international batting average, so a lot of the conventional things that are looked at as being indicators of success - they don't really stand true in a predictive sense." And later in the article there is a graph, showing county averages plotted against test averages for 13 English test batsmen. This is reproduced below. better than random? raw data suggests no meaningful link between championship and test averages 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Test County Championship Sam Curran England players' batting averages
The 2022 Bentley Forbes Consulting rankings for financial stability of English county cricket clubs has now been completed. Since their inception in 2018 the rankings and the highly complex* financial algorithm** behind them has provided a definitive insight into the financial position of 17 of the 18 English first class cricket counties***. The 2021 rankings are here and the first set of rankings, which includes a bit more detail on how on the calculations, here . In summary the 2022 accounts for each county**** are used to rank, profit, (based on an average of profitability for the last three years), and balance sheet strength. The overall balance sheet measure is a blend of three different measures: liabilities compared to assets that can easily be converted to cash, liabilities compared to total assets and liabilities falling due in the next five years compared to total assets. From the profit and balance sheet rankings I then come up with a blended ranking and a table - t