City makes Atkins unavailable for Hawke Cup decider

City Cricket Club have taken the unusual step of requiring English all rounder Richard Atkins to play club cricket for City this weekend - making him unavailable for Northland's important Hawke Cup decider against Waikato.
City have contracted Atkins - bringing him to New Zealand to play for the club and to help organise cricket at the club - and are well within their rights to make him unavailable.
The club's captain Brett Robinson said the club's playing resources have already been stretched with Chris Page and Rory Darkins unavailable for tomorrow's Mark Cromie Holden One-Day match against Maungakaramea.
"We just feel that we brought him out to play cricket and we've got a crunch match against Maungakaramea this week - and they're always hard to beat out there - so we've talked to Richard and he understands our decision," he said.
Atkins has played in all of Northland's matches to date this season, earning a regular place in the side and a position of responsibility in the team, but City have decided that now he should concentrate on what he was brought over to do.
"We feel we've done the right thing by Northland Cricket, obviously we allowed him to play the earlier matches even though we didn't have to ... and we've explained our position to Northland and they accepted it."
He said the club remained very supportive of Northland Cricket, but Atkins needed to concentrate on club cricket - and as they had gone to the trouble and expense of bringing a player like Atkins to Northland they may as well use him.
Northland captain Brett Hood was struggling to be diplomatic about City's decision to withdraw Atkins for the game but it wasn't hard to read between the lines.
"City have decided they don't want to release him to play for Northland and I guess they have their reasons - top amongst them I suppose is trying to win some club games - it's frustrating from our point of view because arguably it's the biggest game of the last two seasons and to pull him at this late stage is pretty inconvenient," he said.
Northland Cricket CEO Gary Bell said the decision had been not taken lightly and had been worked through between Northland Cricket and the City club and with Atkins.
"There's a huge difference between Richard and the pros we employ, Tas (Satti), Ben Williams and Dean Williams are the Northland pros and we allocate them out, but City have contracted Richard themselves," he said.
He said in the past Northland had been able to contract a professional for every club but that wasn't the case this year.
"City recognised that they might not have got a pro this year to play for them, so to their credit, they've gone out and got their own - they still get coaching services from Northland - but they don't have a Northland coaching pro, so really Richard's got very little to do with us," Bell said.
Robinson said he hoped both City and Northland both had wins then no-one would be put out by the decision.