In the second part of the Q&A with Chief Executive Hugh Morris, he talks about the development of young players, Glamorgan community programmes, plus future T20 developments and international cricket.
There were some new young faces in the team last year, were you pleased to see these players coming through from the Academy?
“We’re really pleased that by the end of last season we had tried out a number of young players at first team level. It was great to see Kiran Carlson scoring a first class hundred, Owen Morgan scoring a hundred, Aneurin Donald had a really good year last year and promised a lot, so we’ve got a lot of good young players coming through our system.
Our Academy has just been audited by the ECB and it looks like we are in the top 4 or 5 Academies in the country, so that’s been really encouraging and there are one or two cricketers there that we believe in the long term are going to have good futures with Glamorgan.
It’s been great to see the growth of women’s cricket in recent years. We’ve had girls on the Glamorgan Academy for the last three years. Three of the players who have really shown a good deal of ability are now training in the Western Storm Academy so they are getting really good experiences there with one of the franchises and we have high hopes.
How about the development of wider community programmes?
Our whole community programme is something we’ve spent time and effort focusing on in recent years. Mark Frost, our former player, has taken up that role, which is combined with Cricket Wales and he’s done a brilliant job.
We want to make sure we open up the gates of The SSE SWALEC to all our communities. We’ve 6,000 come through our Museum last year and thousands more who played cricket through our programmes here and away from the ground.
Our BME community programme is really important to us. We won a national ECB award for it last year and we believe we’re getting some really talented cricketers through the system. Muji Ilyas who is on our programme looks a real talent and there are one or two others who we feel could make a real impact at Glamorgan.
Last year there was hot debate about T20 cricket from 2020, are city based teams likely to be the future?
“There are one or two hurdles (still to cross), but I firmly believe it's the way to go.
When you introduce a very new concept with a lot of stakeholders then not everybody is going to be happy.
Good progress has been made but by the early part of the summer, some pretty critical decisions have to be made by the 18 first-class counties. I really hope they embrace the idea of city-based teams, with people being able to see the best players in the world playing in our domestic programme.
The growth and development of the game in Wales could be driven by this new competition.
How sure are you Glamorgan may host a franchise or share one with the West?
We're going to fight really hard. We are the 'Wales' in the 'England and Wales Cricket Board'.
We have over three million people in the country and we feel there are audiences not engaged with cricket that we can entice into the game and it’s a great opportunity for the club, the city of Cardiff and the country of Wales. We want to host one here.
With the Champions Trophy here is 2017 going to be a positive year?
The Champions Trophy this year is a very major ICC event and presents some great opportunities, with four games here with some of the best players in the world playing and we’ve also got an International T20 match with South Africa just afterwards. Plus it’s going to be really interesting to see how the domestic NatWest T20 Blast competition goes, it is going to be further into the summer, in the school holidays, hopefully with a bit of sunshine and that will help attract more people.
Where are Glamorgan on the allocation of future international fixtures?
We know our international programme until 2019, as does every other Category A ground and we believe ECB will look to allocate matches from 2020 probably to through to 2024 - hand in hand with a broadcast deal as the current one ends in 2019.
We set ourselves up as a Test match ground here, particularly the two Ashes Test matches we've held here have been great successes, so we'll see what the ECB has on offer.
The world beyond 2020 may have shifted a little bit by then, but we want to bring the best players here and to hold the biggest events, we've done it successfully in the past and we fully intend to do so in the future.
Glamorgan 2017 membership and T20 Season Tickets are on sale, so you can secure your tickets for the new campaign. Early bird T20 Season Tickets priced £60 before the end of February (£70 thereafter) guarantee entry to all 7 home fixtures. CLICK HERE for more information regarding season tickets.