County Cricket - A Love Affair

Whilst much of my cricketing love is reserved for Somerset, a great deal of my affection remains concentrated upon the bigger picture, the structure which has supported Somerset and the other first-class counties since Victorian times. Whether as a supply line for the national teams or the stage for entertainment and competition in its own right, county cricket doesn’t get the recognition it deserves.

I remember once being at the first day of a Lord’s Test involving England and – I think – the West Indies. The tiers around me seemed filled by half of London’s market research community and indeed I was only there at the expense of the BBC, a very rare corporate ‘jolly’. I chatted to a colleague whom I considered a cricket fan. Remarking on the recent form of maybe Andrew Strauss or Darren Gough for Middlesex and Yorkshire I was struck by his reply: he had no knowledge of England players’ counties and, worse still, was completely uninterested. Would a football aficionado at Wembley be similarly ignorant about which clubs Harry Kane or Marcus Rashford represented in the Premier League?

This response got my hackles up but, even in the mid-Noughties, the writing had long been on the wall. The ECB’s central contract system severely weakened the link between England’s stars and the clubs that developed them into the biggest nations in cricket. Everything was geared to improving the chances of the national teams in the Ashes, World Cup or a tin-pot Twenty20 tournament, the counties receiving a few quid as a grudging compensatory ‘thank you’.

It’s the same with national media. Whereas in my younger days the centrepiece one-day final in September would generate genuine headlines, in these Ashes-dominated times any newspaper article would be relegated to the inside back pages beneath the angling and netball and – with the exception of Sky Sports - on TV there’d be nothing. I find that so sad.

For me, the County Championship remains the epitome of proper cricket. It’s not called ‘first-class’ for nothing. I’m not convinced about the value of a two-tier league system, though. If it was designed, like football’s PL, to make the rich richer and poor poorer, it’s not working. For example, in 2011, Lancashire clinched the title before spending the next four seasons in yo-yo mode. Despite the presence of Malan, Morgan, Finn, Robson et al even the rich men of Middlesex now languish in Division Two, just two years after finishing top of the tree.

Since the early Seventies, no county has displayed the all-important pennant for more than two consecutive seasons, although between 1979 and 1987 Essex and Middlesex almost made it a duopoly. Newcomers Durham were initially whipping boys in the Nineties but in the Noughties won two crowns on the trot. That made my frustration at Somerset’s lack of success even more acute. At least we are not alone; neither Northants and Gloucestershire have so far ended their drought.

Perhaps the two most compelling Championship chases occurred in 1981 and 2016. In a memorable summer of sport (and decent weather), while England were winning a memorable Ashes series, Sussex and Nottinghamshire were involved in a right old ding-dong. In the end, with Clive Rice and Richard Hadlee in top form, Notts narrowly nicked it. Just a few years ago, three sides went into the final day with a chance of success. Somerset had fulfilled their promise inside three days and hoped Middlesex and Yorkshire drew, a likely result. Then came a Toby Roland-Jones hat-trick and my hopes were dashed yet again.

The red-ball, white-flannelled game may be largely off even the Sky Sports  screens but at least it endures in Fantasy Cricket. Two decades ago Dad and I started participating in the Telegraph’s summer-long sister competition to its football one, and I have continued, albeit with an occasional hiatus, ever since. It keeps me grounded in the minutiae of the Championship. Where once it was necessary to assess the point-scoring potential of the Neil Lenhams, Adrian Dales or Alan Igglesdens, I now pore over the numbers for the Benny Howells, Tom Baileys and Billy Godlemans. Their faces may not be familiar but I have a fair feeling for whether they are good value for their Fantasy ‘price’!

I’ve written already about the role the John Player League played in the evolution of my relationship with cricket. With Dad I’d watch BBC2’s coverage on most Sunday afternoons and play in the garden afterwards. Furthermore it was the opening JPL fixture of the 1975 season which introduced me to the live experience at Chelmsford and the extraordinary batting of a 23 year-old Viv Richards.

Then there was the excitement of a knockout competition in the form of the 55-over Benson & Hedges (usually a July climax) and 60-over Gillette Cups (later the Nat West Trophy). In my mind, the Gillette final (before packed houses) and the following day’s Sunday League denouement (for instance, 1989) comprised the most electrifying weekend in the entire sporting calendar. Unlike the Championship, these benefited from network TV coverage and, for the decisive overs in the early evenings, healthy audiences way above anything Sky can generate nowadays in spite of the vast array of cameras and commentators employed.

The knockouts also offered the leading Minor Counties like Cornwall or Buckinghamshire and other outfits such as Scotland and even the Netherlands the opportunity to spring a surprise against the professionals. These days, the only new names in the domestic cricket pages of the Guardian or ESPN Cricinfo website are associated with whatever sponsor-friendly suffix counties adopt for the new T20 Blast campaign. With Warwickshire ditching the county name in preference for the Birmingham Bears, I fear the move to a city franchise system is looming ever closer.

That would be a calamity, but that’s what is earmarked for the forthcoming ‘Hundred’. I’ve not been immune to the charms of the Blast, even attending in person the 2012 Finals Day in Cardiff, but surely it’s important to harness the exuberance of short formats to county cricket rather than divorce the two permanently.

Whether a match lasts four hours or four days, county games deliver just as much drama, tension and enjoyment as anything served up by a Test or IPL clash; it’s just that the crowds are thinner, and TV cameras don’t like empty seats. County cricket has given me so much pleasure that it merits a much longer life, alongside the bigger bang of the five-day events. In any case, I don’t think England can manage without it.