The end to a weird and wonderful cricket season
So this strangest of cricket seasons ends on the first of October with the T20 Finals day.
Given that High Summer came and went without a ball being bowled, we may count ourselves lucky to have had as much cricket as there has been, even if spectators were not admitted to grounds to watch. The Test matches against the West Indies and Pakistan were played in good spirits and miserable conditions.
The most pleasing feature of the season was the improvised Bob Willis Trophy, standing in as a substitute for the County Championship. The regional structure, devised partly in response to restrictions on travel, worked well. Even in the absence of spectators, matches between local rivals caught folks’ attention. One has no means of knowing how many people followed play by means of local radio, text, and over-by-over reporting on newspaper websites, but one has the impression that the number was high. There is interest in the county four-day game and an appetite for it, even if, in a normal season, spectators at most grounds are few.
Who knows? If, as we are told, working from home rather than commuting to the office becomes usual for at least two or three days in the week, attendances at the four-day game may improve. There’s quite a lot of work that could be done on a tablet or other device while lifting your eyes from time to time to watch the run-stealers flickering to and fro. Combining a day at the cricket with a few hours of home-style office work sounds like a good way of mixing work with pleasure.
The County Championship has a long history, dating back to 1864. There were only seven counties that first year, and one of them, Cambridgeshire, soon dropped out. The format and points scoring systems have changed repeatedly and will no doubt continue to do so. The split into two divisions dates only from 2000.
For a long time, most of its history indeed, there were strict regulations about player eligibility. Even if cricketers were not the wage-slaves professional footballers were described as being (even in the 1960s), it was difficult to move from one county to another if the one you were leaving objected. If a county chose to retain a disgruntled player’s registration he had to spend a year (at one time, I think, two years) qualifying by residence for another county. This was the experience of Tom Graveney when he left Gloucestershire for Worcestershire in his early thirties. Nowadays movement is so free and easy that players may be temporarily lent by one county to another, and overseas players fly in like Spring Swallows. Even if, unlike swallows, they remain for only a handful of matches, not the whole season.
The success of the regional structure for the Bob Willis (BW) may lead to another restructuring of the Championship. Though the BW final between Essex and Somerset attracted a deal of interest – more widespread interest, I would guess, than any County Championship match has for a long time – not everybody would be happy with the introduction of a play-off or play-offs to determine the Champion County. There is some reason in such an opinion. After all, a league is a league, played over several months. It may seem harsh that a club, which has proved itself the best over the season, should have the cup dashed from its lips because it loses a final against a rival who had finished some way behind on league points.
Nevertheless the League/play-offs arrangement has been adopted by other sports, notably the Rugby Union. Their English Premiership and the cross-Borders Pro 14 have followed the example of the French Top14, which has long had semi-finals and the final as the culmination of the club season. These knock-out matches have obvious public appeal. There is good justification for this system in rugby. During the international matches in November and the Six Nations in February and March, clubs which supply players to the national team regularly perform below-strength in league fixtures. Play-offs redress the balance.
In theory this might justify play-offs in cricket’s championship too, if there was any prospect of English Test players being made available to their counties for such matches. Given the plethora of ODIs and T20 internationals as well as Tests, this is improbable. It remains the case that the best way of winning the Championship is to have a good squad of players who don’t attract the attention of Ed Smith and his fellow England selectors.
Essex have been champions for the last two seasons, in which time they have been spared Smith’s attention. In contrast, counties like Surrey, Yorkshire, Kent, Lancashire and Warwickshire can rarely put what might be their strongest side in the field. Sussex don’t get much benefit from Joffra Archer or Durham from Mark Wood either.
The Bob Willis Trophy had other pleasing features. Covid-19 having mostly deprived counties of overseas and Kolpak –qualified players, an unusual number of opportunities were given to youngsters, many still in their teens. Then there was an equally unusual but gratifying willingness on the part of some captains to use spinners. Perhaps the success of Simon Harmer, Essex’s South African off-spinner, over the last few years may have persuaded more captains that slow bowlers aren’t a risky luxury. Look back over the history of county cricket and you will find that the highest wicket-takers have been spinners – and not only because they often have longer careers.
Still, speaking of the happy welcome given to youthful talent this season, it was a delightful to see that Kent’s 44 year-old medium-pacer Darren Stevens is still trundling successfully on. Only Harmer with 38 and Somerset’s Craig Overton with 30, took more wickets than his 29 – and, since Essex and Somerset contested the final, they played one more match than Kent. There seems no reason why Stevens shouldn’t carry on for a few years yet.
In its 1972 edition Wisden listed six bowlers who had taken a hundred wickets after their fiftieth birthday. Wilfred Rhodes was there, of course, with 230 at 18 runs a-piece. But the most remarkable was W G Quaife who took 303 wickets after he turned 50. Aged 54 in 1926 he took 78 wickets and scored more than a thousand runs. Now that’s a thought to keep Darren Stevens going for another ten years.