Association of Cricket Officials
County Performance Officer Report – Annual Report 2013
Summary of 2013 Season
As a result of the Appointments and Captains Reports for the 2013 Season John Wiltshire and Peter Marshall have been invited to join the WEPL Premier League Division One Panel for 2014, joining Nick Wheatley thus giving WACO 3 umpires in that Panel. Roger Barker has been invited to join the WEPL Premier 2 Division Panel thus joining Steve Fortune, Peter Marks. Kris Boulton and Steve Smith have been invited to join the WEPL Development Panel.
Throughout the season, when not umpiring myself, I would visit as many as four matches every Saturday and watch a game for at least 15 overs. The objective was to see as many of you as possible in action and compare what I saw with the Captains Report that would appear on WTU later.
In this my first season as the CPO it has been interesting to see how the Captains Reports vary, and trying to find an alternative means to supplement the Captains Report that is acceptable to all the WEPL participating ACO’s is proving elusive.
We floated the idea of peer assessment during the Regional Officers meeting in November but the other countyACOsdid not view the idea as favourably as we hoped. So we may decide to do introduce the Peer Observation as a county on our own but that is a decision for all the membership; so please be prepared to discussduring the AGM meeting itself
As you may or may not be aware the post of CPO is the one responsible to the ECB ACO for the grading of Officials. Gradings were introduced into the ECB ACO so that the ECB would be able to identify umpiring talent that could be considered for further elevation to MCCA and/or D list appointments and is meant to be restricted to either League matches of ECB County Age group matches. So the catchment area ECB are really looking at, in terms of Umpires, is the Premier 1 and Premier 2 panels umpires younger than 60. As the process has been modified gradings have been developed to go down to Tier 6 (newly qualified umpires at Level). Within WACO the Grading as done by a Gradings Board comprising the Chairman, the CAO and the CPO.
A drawback to grading is that the ECB ACO guidance requires an umpire to be appointed to a minimum of 6 matches at a specific tier either to retain his current grading to be elevated into the next higher grade. Within the WEPL Pyramid structure that causes a problem for each county at the tier 3 level and below, for WACO members I am talking of the Gloucestershire and Wiltshire Leagues and lower, because the CAO cannot guarantee to give each member the requisite number of matches.
We are proposing that as the main objective of grading is to identify officials suitable for elevation to MCCA and the D List, that the grading of and prerequisite for C1 and C2 should remain, but below that CPO have the flexibility to grade C3 to C6 based on all types of matches.
Michael Cornwell
County Performance Officer