Our Club Captain Chris Read has familiarised himself with the 2017 fixtures and penned his initial thoughts in the latest edition of Ready’s Digest.

Specsavers County Championship

When the new fixtures are released, everybody naturally looks at the matches that fall right at the beginning of the season.

But, although it’s very important to start well, we have to focus on playing consistent cricket for the whole six months of the season.

We’ll go to Leicestershire first up in the Specsavers County Championship and try to put some big points on the board.

You need to build a foundation and getting off to a good start is obviously ideal, but it’s a long competition, even with it being two games less than last year.

The last game is well into the back end of September so it’s how you perform throughout the campaign.

You never know how the conditions are going to play at that time of year, whether there’s going to be rain around.

But you need to be prepared to put a marker down. The way to do that is to get some wins under your belt early on.

Royal London One-Day Cup

Following three four-day games at the start, we’re straight into eight successive 50-over matches in the Royal London One-Day Cup, including one at Welbeck which is a ground I really enjoy.

The support we’ve enjoyed up there in the north of the county has been wonderful. A crowd of over 4,500 last time we played there against Derbyshire was a pleasant surprise for everyone.

Fifty over cricket on the whole is less well supported than T20 cricket, but it’s an important competition for us because we know the prize at the end of it is a Lord’s final.

It was a brilliant day out for the fans in 2013 and a real career highlight to lift the trophy. That day remains very fresh in the memory.

There’s obviously a long way to go before getting there; group stages, quarter-finals and semi-finals, but the final is mid-season so it’s all going to unfold quite quickly in that competition.

We underperformed last year in the 50 over competition not to get out the group after a fantastic start so we need to put that right – and we’d all love to get back to Lord’s.

NatWest T20 Blast

The NatWest T20 Blast competition is starting much later than we’ve all been used to.

When the wait is over and we play against our rivals the Derbyshire Falcons first up on Friday 21 July, it will be a cracking atmosphere and a great night.

Our support for T20 has been growing and growing in recent years. Last season, averaging over 11,000 was phenomenal.

Friday nights have become very popular, so it’s great that we will have three of those within the new schedule – and moving it into a block makes perfect sense from a player’s point of view.

Less chopping-and-changing between formats means you can get into a good rhythm, and we should attract high profile players for more matches, so the standard of the cricket will certainly benefit. Hopefully we’ll see some really big names.

The fact that so many of our home matches are in the summer holidays will allow more youngsters to cut their teeth for cricket by watching T20, then maybe progressing to watch longer forms of the game later on.

Certainly for families, T20 is a wonderful evening’s entertainment and we absolutely love playing at Trent Bridge because there’s always such a great atmosphere. Hopefully, during that period where the home matches come thick and fast, we can get on a bit of a roll.

It’s been a competition where we’ve had great success in the group stages but not in the knockout rounds.

It was a good achievement to get through to the knockout rounds last year, but we had a strong enough side to go further than the semi-final.

The squad next season will be broadly similar, so I’d like to think we’ll go far in that competition.

View the full 2017 fixture schedule here...

 

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