Glamorgan have been going in the right direction over the last couple of years and it seems a great pity that the Board there seem to wamt to risk derailing their progress. They don't have a team of stars but there's plenty of promise and they've gone from second bottom of Division 2 in 2008, to fifth in 2009 and then third last year.
At one point of course they were leading Division 2 and a promotion looked assured. That it didn't happen is massively disappointing, but the Board are acting like small children who haven't got their own way in going over the heads of their cricket manager Matthew Maynard, and their skipper, Jamie Dalrymple (who took a risk in coming to the second worst County in the country and has now been rewarded for helping them improve to leading promotion challengers by being sacked). They are replacing him with the South African Alviro Petersen, without consulting Maynard, if reports are to be believed.
Petersen could well be an international player for the next ten years but his stats are hardly awe-inspiring as he averages under 40 in both Tests and first-class cricket. Bringing in an international player could have been the little extra push that Glamorgan needed to get over the line and gain promotion next year, with Maynard and Dalrymple fully supportive and still leading, but the County's progress has now been thrown into confusion. Dalrymple would be well within his rights to leave having been royally stabbed in the back, and it will take an awesome display of loyalty from Matthew Maynard if he is to accept this extraordinary behaviour from the Board and continue as if nothing has happened. If he decides he can't forgive them - which would be entirely understandable - his son Tom, one of the Counties potential stars of the future will be put in a very tricky position.
I really struggle with many cricket administrators. Alan Hamer has done a brilliant job of improving Glamorgan's finances, but he needed to trust Matthew Maynard with the on and off-field strategy to ensure promotion, and support him by getting the business/financial side of the club right. He's taken a huge risk bringing in Petersen because Glamorgan would very likely have been promoted in 2011 without him interfering - now that progress has been risked. And Petersen is not showing early signs of working out in that he's so naive he thinks it's ok that he didn't speak to Maynard (or Dalrymple) until he'd taken the role. Fingers crossed they aren't totally destabilised - if they gain promotion next year it will be hats off to the players, including Petersen, to have pulled it off with such poor support from above.
In case you'd missed the inevitable fallout at Glamorgan, Jamie Dalrymple has resigned along with President Peter Walker. That Walker has felt he needs to resign shows how wrong the actions of Chairman Paul Russell and Chief Exec Alan Hamer were - the affected parties (Dalrymple and Maynard) were always going to feel stabbed in the back, but when others are also resigning it just shows crass authoritarian management.
