Afternoon all,
The committee and I understand that there have been many questions and concerns regarding the continued delay in the publication of fixtures for the 2024 season.
I recently wrote to you all to explain some of the issues, and that we have been trialing a new system that should assist with fixture generation in the future. This, along with the delays that we had around the end of 2023, due to issues with clubs and a new Full Member needing to be voted in, meant that we were always up against it to complete what is an extremely complicated set of fixtures.
We have also since discovered that the output we were receiving from the new tech was not to the standard that we were after, or that you as clubs would expect. We still think this tech will be useful in future seasons, but it needs more tweaking.
We have therefore had to go back to a more manual way of inputting the fixtures. This is currently taking place, but it is a very labour-intensive process.
We have a deadline for clubs of March 31st for when clubs will be able to withdraw XIs from the league season without penalty, and this is the new deadline we are working towards to get the fixtures completed.
I realise that this is very late, and I would like to apologise to everyone for this, we hope that any issues you are currently facing due to the delay can be resolved.
I would also like to mention that due to the amount of time it is taking to resolve the fixtures, I am struggling to reply to every message as quickly as I usually would. If you are waiting on a reply from me, or need a question to be answered then please feel free to drop me a reminder email.
If you are waiting on Play Cricket registrations then please be patient with these, the team is working through them as quickly as they can.
Will update you all again soon.
Tom Clarke
HFEL Chairman