England’s cricketers would do well to prioritise their county as well as country
The County Championship begins this week, ridiculously early, some may say. It will conclude in the first days of October; ridiculously late. The middle of what should be high summer will see cricketing days devoted to The Hundred, otherwise known to aged and ageing devotees of the first-class game as “the ECB’s latest abomination”. Still, we better not to complain too loudly, and instead recognise that ever since what is recognised as first-class cricket came into being, not long after Napoleon was dispatched to St Helena, the one thing constant in cricket has been change. Naturally, there have always been many dolefully denouncing any innovation as likely to sound the death-knell of the game they loved. Cricket conservative though I am, I have come to recognise the extraordinary skills developed in the Indian Premier League (IPL) and T20 cricket in general.
The short form of cricket can be exhilarating, very exciting and, in its somewhat different way, quite remarkably inventive. What it lacks is charm. For the spectator following the first-class county game, part of that charm rests in its leisurely nature. No doubt it isn’t leisurely for the players on the field, but for the spectator, a day at the cricket is relaxing. It doesn’t demand complete concentration. It is an occasion for conversation. There are agreeable slow patches when you may not even watch, when the cricket is a sort of back-cloth. It’s a day or an afternoon away from work or study. If the sun was shining in my days at university, I spent more time at Fenner’s idly watching “the run-stealers flicker to and fro” (Francis Thompson’s lovely line) than I did in the library. Quite often, there wasn’t much flickering run-stealing from the Cambridge batsmen, but it didn’t really matter.
The County Championship matters for itself of course. There is a new format this season which I suppose many of us haven’t quite fathomed yet. But then regulations relating to it have always kept changing. There was a time – wasn’t there? – when the first innings of either side was limited to a hundred overs. Then, two or three years ago, they got rid of the toss, allowing the visiting captain to choose whether to bat or field. This was supposed to deter the home side from encouraging the groundsman to prepare a pitch suited to their own attack. I don’t know if it made much difference.
Yet the championship is also seen as a proving-ground for Test match aspirants. It has always been that of course. Now the demands of the short forms of the game and the granting of central contracts to England’s squad of Test players mean that it is less of a proving-ground that it used to be. Established Test cricketers play almost no first-class county cricket. It was big news when Yorkshire were able to announce that Joe Root would play for them in at least two four-day games in April or May. Good for the club and a nice challenge for the bowlers he will face. Still, it’s been pleasing that in the last few years a few players, Rory Burns and Dom Sibley for example, have forced their way into the England side by their performances in the County Championship. But even while one is pleased to recognise this, one wonders if playing so little four-day cricket for their county may have damaged some players, retarded the development of others.
Take Jonny Bairstow, for example. As the recent ODI series in India has shown, Bairstow is a master of the white ball game, as good just now as anyone in the world. Yet his decline as a Test batsman has run in parallel with his rise as a one-day and T20 one. He has scored six Test hundreds, but not one for more than three years and his recent Test record is wretched. He might benefit from playing a number of games for Yorkshire in the championship. But, of course, he isn’t available; he’s off to the IPL. You can’t blame him. That’s where the money is.
Then there is Sam Curran, a wonderfully talented and likeable all-rounder, still only twenty-two and now established in all three England teams – Test, ODI, T20, also in demand for the IPL. His bold 95 not out in the last ODI against India was quite marvellous, but in the Test team his bowling has been more valuable than his batting, which indeed has been disappointing recently. When he first came on the scene, the word was that his coaches at Surrey thought more of his batting than his bowling. If his batting hasn’t, despite that almost match-winning innings, come on as expected, it is surely, in part anyway, because he has had so few opportunities to play a long innings. Mightn’t it be good for his development if he played six or seven county games for Surrey batting at 5 or 6, learning to build an innings? To bat for four hours rather than forty minutes? But there seems little chance of this happening. He too will be at the IPL for the first half of the county season and then his England central contract will kick in and one can’t see when, if ever, he will be available for Surrey.
Back in the 1950s and 60s, there was county cricket six days a week from May to September, twenty-eight championship matches and only five or, sometimes, six Tests. You could win championships, as Surrey did in the fifties and Yorkshire in the sixties, even while providing three or four players for England. Test players were there often enough to make the difference. This isn’t the case now. Until they dropped out of white ball cricket, James Anderson was scarcely ever available for Lancashire or Stuart Broad for Notts. Anderson has taken twice as many Test wickets as county championship ones. Brian Statham, his only rival as Lancashire’s finest bowler of the last seventy years, took eight or nine times as many for his county than his country.
Last year’s county championship was of course truncated, Essex won the improvised Bob Willis trophy, just as they had won the championship in 2019. They had the perfect formula for success: nobody required by England, good fast-medium bowlers to exploit early-season green wickets and the best spin bowler in the championship, Simon Harmer, a South African ineligible for England.
This season’s new format with a five-day play-off final offers some variety which may sustain interest for more counties for longer. Actually, the evidence is that interest in the championship remains high, the BBC finding it worthwhile to broadcast commentary on local radio. There will, one assumes, be no spectators in the early weeks, but liberation from lockdown might mean more than usual will attend when allowed. Even so, one can’t help thinking that attendances would be greater if England players were sometimes available for their counties. In 2019 when, admittedly, there was the ODI World Cup as well as an Ashes series, Ben Stokes didn’t play a single game for Durham. Will he be able to turn out for the County this year? Don’t bet on it.
Squeezed as it is, beginning as the trees are coming into leaf and extending till the first winds of autumn are tearing them off, it remains, for traditionalists at least, the most important and enjoyable domestic tournament. There is the pleasure too of seeing new stars emerge and old ones, like the seemingly ageless Darren Stevens, still shining brightly. County matches are doubtless hard fought, but there’s a friendliness about the County Championship, a sense of companionship rare in professional sport; and this, among much else, makes it lovable.