The stand out players from the first round of the cricket County Championship
Despite some three-sweater days and play on several grounds being interrupted by snow showers and a blizzard at Headingley, the first round of the new-form County Championship gave us some good and very enjoyable cricket last week.
The new Conference format, which delays a split into a first and second division until halfway through the season, has already justified itself, Gloucestershire beating Surrey; Glamorgan having had the better of a drawn match with Yorkshire, and Worcestershire holding the champions Essex to a high-scoring draw. That game also justified the decision to award seven rather than three points for a draw since this offers an incentive to keep going even when there is no chance of victory.
Test and international cricket aren’t everything. This week was notable for performances by batsmen who have been tried in Test matches and discarded. Two County captains, Tom Westley of Essex and James Vince of Hampshire, made double centuries. Westley’s exclusion may be permanent. I still hope that Vince, who is such a delight to watch, may come again. His career might even take shape as the great Tom Graveney’s; he was in and out of the England team for years until, recalled at the age of thirty-six, he had a late glorious flowering.
Middlesex’s Sam Robson and Yorkshire’s Adam Lyth made fine centuries this week. Both, of course, were among the six or seven openers tried as partners for Alastair Cook after Andrew Strauss retired. Each has a Test hundred to his credit; both exhausted the selectors’ patience.
Current England batsman started the season somewhat worse. Joe Root failed to reach 20 in either innings for Yorkshire, instead put in the shade by his younger brother, Billy, who went to a hundred for Glamorgan with a flick off Joe’s bowling. Rory Burns made a fifty for Surrey and Dan Lawrence forty for Essex, but Dom Sibley, Zac Crawley, and Ollie Pope didn’t, as old-style reporters used to write, “trouble the scorers “, not for long anyway. Coming from Sri Lanka and India’s heat to an English April offers what you might fairly call a culture shock.
Other notable centuries were made by Liam Dawson, another whose Test days may be over, for Hampshire, Jack Libby and Ed Barnard for Gloucestershire and the splendid Darren Stevens, a few weeks short of his forty-fifth birthday, for Kent. It was his 35th First-Class hundred, and I would guess that at least twenty of them have been made since he was in his middle thirties. He goes on and on, better and better. Jack Libby’s was an innings of admirably old-fashioned monumental patience. His long partnership with Ed Barnard, who scored his first championship hundred, kept Essex in the field for almost two days, compelling the outstanding South African off-spinner, Simon Harmer, to bowl 61 overs.
A reporter noted that spinners took only two wickets on the first day of the season. Happily, things got better later. The young Hampshire wrist-spinner Mason Crane took six in the match, which, I would surmise, is something no English leg-spinner has done in any but a very distant memory, while Jack Leach had four for Somerset at Lord’s.
That was unquestionably the match of the week, for Somerset looked in deep trouble when they collapsed to 89 for 9 in their first innings reply to Middlesex’s 313. Then a last wicket stand of 83 between Marchant de Lange and Leach got them back in the game. Leach is rapidly becoming the top or at least most celebrated number 11 in the business.
Nevertheless, Middlesex were still on top and cruising in their second innings at 113 for 3, when they collapsed to be all out for 143, with Leach taking 3 for 18 and the Aberdonian Josh Davey 3 for 16. Even so, with Somerset needing 285 to win, the odds were on Middlesex and they remained that way, despite an accomplished 84 from Somerset’s captain Tom Abell. Until, with George Bartlett firm at one end, a dashing 62 from Lewis Gregory at almost a run a ball, saw Somerset win by four wickets, with no need of odds-defying heroics from the celebrated number 11.
So it’s a start for Somerset, a victory which has wiped out the deplorable points-deducted-handicap imposed on them for the heinous crime of preparing a wicket which helped spinners rather than seamers as so many acceptable green wickets do.
A good start then for Tom Abell’s mostly young side, good enough to encourage the hope that at long last this may be their year to do what the club never managed even in the halcyon days of Botham, Richards and Garner – win the title. No county, one feels, deserves it more. They will, however, be uncomfortably aware that, come August and September, when the ball turns even on pitches far away from Taunton, they will probably be without Jack Leach, called up for Test match duty.
Not only a good start but for traditionalists like me – old fogeys, if you prefer – a comforting one. Not everything can be what it was, of course. The universities – Oxford and Cambridge that is – have lost their first-class status, deservedly alas, though sad for those of us old enough to remember watching future Test match captains bat at Fenner’s or The Parks, Ted Dexter in my case, the Nawab of Pataudi at Oxford a few years later.” Labuntur anni” and all that, but let us be grateful for what survives.
Darren Stevens incidentally is the oldest player to have scored a championship hundred since Chris Balderstone did so in 1986 at forty-six. Pretty good, but Jack Hobbs and George Gunn were still stroking centuries past their fiftieth birthday. Even Darren Stevens may be hard put to manage that.