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Chris Adams was yesterday granted his freedom from Derbyshire by the England and Wales Cricket Board’s Registrations Committee. The highly rated batsman, released from his contract with the Midlands county after a stormy relationship with their committee over the past two seasons, successfully fought to be downgraded from a List One to a List Two player at yesterday’s meeting at Lord’s.
It gives the 27-year-old, believed to have been offered a pounds 100,000 contract by Sussex, total freedom of movement, rather than be restricted to just a handful of prospective new counties if he had kept his List One registration.The regulations state that only two List One players can be signed by a county in a five-year period – a rule designed to protect the wealthier counties recruiting all the best talent. Accordingly, Skip Away will in 1998 contest only those races exceeding half a million dollars in value.. “It is 10 years since we last reviewed the situation and medical opinion has moved on,” Jockey Club chief medical adviser Dr Michael Turner, said.. Skip Away, brilliant winner of Saturday’s Breeders’ Cup Classic in California, has arrived in Florida for a rest before being aimed at the Gulfstream Park Handicap in February.

Skip Away is in good shape after his Hollywood Park victory according to Sonny Hine, who trains the colt for his wife, Carolyn.
The couple hope that the grey can eventually lower the all-time earnings record held by Cigar. Experts on sports head injuries from Britain, Australia and America are to take part in a Jockey Club seminar. The two-day conference entitled “Concussion and Head Injury in Sport” is being held in London on 30-31 January in conjunction with the Medical Advisers of Professional Sports.
Administrators and medical staff of sports where head injuries are a hazard will attend. In 1597 Joseph Hall published Virgidemiae, in which he identified the author of “Venus and Adonis” and other early works as someone he called “Labeo”, who passed them off as someone else’s.
A year later in his Pigmalion’s Image and Certain Satires John Marston identified “Labeo” as “mediocria firma”, which was Francis Bacon’s family motto. Even H N Gibson, who accepts the orthodox theory, acknowledges that “Marston believed that Hall meant Bacon as the author and `Venus and Adonis’ as the poem”.Incidentally, the Baconian theory was first directly suggested by the Rev James Wilmot about 1785, which is still less than 200 years.BRIAN McCLINTONLisburn, Co Antrim. Sir: Nicholas Schoon’s defence of beardies (11 November) seems to miss the point that some people look good wearing a beard, others do not. Wild, unkempt fur is fine on eccentric university professors and trawler skippers but perhaps not so on a neuro-surgeon.
All my female friends agree that Sean Connery looks even more rugged and handsome behind a coating of grey fuzz Bad beards are those fussy, manicured affairs.

Take a close look at Jeremy Beadle if you disagree.SEAN MALYONStamford, Lincolnshire. Business everywhere is becoming more important, so how should we make sure that the voice of business is conveyed accurately to government?

Two equally unsatisfactory approaches to this problem are on display this week One is the Formula One model. Here the politicians accept a lot of money from the business in question, trim their policies to suit its interests while insisting that there is utterly no connection between the dosh and the policy – and then give the money back in case anyone thinks there was.
The other is the CBI model. Here the key grandees of business get together and decide on a policy, in this case that European Monetary Union is basically a good idea. They then stand up at a grand annual conference and say so, only to find that other key grandees think it isn’t a such good idea at all, and they also stand up and put the opposite line. The disagreement then stirs up a string of anti-CBI comment, with people pointing out that it happens to be German and Irish grandees that think it is great idea for Britain to join EMU, while the British ones are altogether more circumspect.There is a deeper problem here, which is that the business world has become much more fragmented than it was even 10 years ago, so that creating a mechanism to represent its interests is virtually impossible.

We have the CBI which is competently run and does as a good job as it can representing big business. But the big companies that dominate it are becoming less and less important as a source of employment in this country. Companies such as British Airways or Barclays Bank are busy cutting their labour- forces. That is not a criticism; merely an observation that big business everywhere is involved in a ferocious drive to cut costs and that means killing jobs.By contrast net job creation in this country comes entirely from tiny companies, the sort of companies that make Formula One cars or supply services to the business. If you run a firm with half a dozen employees you are not going to want to spend time on a CBI committee, even if that was your idea of fun.There are other organisations that represent small business. There is the Institute of Directors, for example, which usually takes the opposite line to the CBI.