County Cricket Matters

What is cricket’s greatest rivalry? The Ashes? India and Pakistan? The Roses match? Aleem Dar’s beautiful hair versus all that’s unnatural and wrong in the world? Bob Willis trying to smile the viewing public into submission? You know the smile I mean. You’ve seen it. You’ve described it to your therapist.

Me, I go back to the fundamentals. Bat against ball. Batsman against bowlers. Given my lifelong attempt to master the inswinger it’s not hard to work out where my sympathies lie. I’ve always regarded bowlers as the game’s heavy lifters; putting in hours of hard toil while batsmen get to stand there, knock the ball around a bit, then disappear into the night to sip champagne from a supermodel’s navel.

Realistically it’s probably only Chris Gayle who gets to live like that and I’ve created a vast oversimplification of cricket’s workload that bears little relation to reality. Well you know what? I don’t care. Go down the route of reality and you end up throwing yourself under a train or enjoying the novels of Milan Kundera. And frankly I’m too young to read Kundera for enjoyment.

So for those of us who like to see bowlers given the edge for once and who find low-scoring games are often the most entertaining, the start of this county season, with its bowler-friendly conditions, has been manna from heaven/Richard Dawkins’ dark infinite void.

According to the recent BBC series The 70’s, my formative years were played out in a country enjoying an enormous Space Hopper bounce forward in socio-economic progress. A kind of Generation Game era second enlightenment that gave us anti-discrimination legislation, foreign holidays for the masses and Brut’s ‘Splash it all over’ campaign inventing the metrosexual man. I can’t say that it made much of an impression on me at the time. My childhood memories have more clarity about TISWAS, my uncle’s Reliant Robin and the weird kid at junior school who liked to pretend he was a cat.

But I also remember Sunday afternoons spent watching cricket on TV with my grandfather. And there I witnessed one of the true highlights of the 1970’s - the heyday of the county cricket overseas player. The proper overseas pro, I mean. The mutton chop sporting, chain smoking, barmaid chasing, wake up with a hangover in the penguin enclosure at Flamingo Land but still manage to put in a match winning performance, global superstar. I miss those guys. They rampaged through the county circuit like white flannel-wearing Velociraptors.

Not quite the same now is it? Take Somerset. Once they could rely on Viv Richards and Joel Garner turning up in time for the first game of the season, then spending all summer as fixtures at Taunton. Year in, year out, there they’d be; winning games, making friends, part of the furniture. Till they got booted out, anyway.

We’re the smart ones aren’t we? The intelligentsia of spectators. As out of the whole, wide, wide, world of sports, it’s cricket that has the lowest proportion of mouth-breathers amongst its support.

Seriously, do you think anyone has ever taken a copy of Middlemarch with them to Wrestlemania? How often does a debate about Co Stompé’s footwork break out at Lakeside? Would anyone write the equivalent of Beyond a Boundary about women’s beach volleyball?

Ok, on the flip side, the chances of multiple Pink Panthers being spotted in the stands during this summer’s Olympic dressage are pretty slim. But that’s just a lack of whimsy in the world of equine poncing about. “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are dressed like Thelma from Scooby-Doo,” as Oscar Wilde might have said as he watched on from a packed Radcliffe Road Stand.

Yup, cricket is definitely the sport for those of us who are smarter than the average bear.

Hell yeah! The first England Lions squad of the year has been announced! You’re cheering, right? Punching the air as you sit behind your keyboard? Mentally giving humanity a group hug? Ok, perhaps not.

For county supporters, Lions games tend to illicit an emotional response somewhere in the range of indifference through to dread, with isolated feelings of arousal from that weird bloke in the main stand that everyone prays goes and sits next to someone else; you know the one I mean.

But while the matches themselves are viewed with the same level of interest as an audio book of the telephone directory narrated by Bob Willis, the actual make up of the squad is always a talking point. Which counties are producing potential England players, which counties aren’t and more importantly, which of your side’s best players will be stopped from appearing in the championship this time?

The problem is that Lions selections can feel like a county is being punished for success, as when you get your season off to a good start like Kent, you find your most in-form player, Matt Coles, gets taken away from you.

I am becoming increasingly concerned that Team England is failing in its duty to develop batsmen who can succeed in county cricket.

The combined contribution of 40 runs from four completed innings made by Andrew Strauss and Ian Bell during the latest round of Championship matches is just the tip of the iceberg. How many runs has Eoin Morgan scored for Middlesex since the end of the Sri Lanka tour? How far back would your regression therapy have to take you before suppressed memories emerged of Kevin Pietersen playing match-winning innings for whichever county he was contracted to at the time?

Let us be clear on this: enormous amounts of time, money and specialised coaching have been made available to the national set-up, yet we fail to see a consistent return on that investment when international players are asked to make the step up to Championship cricket.

I can, of course, appreciate the difficulty in adjusting from conditions found on a tour of the sub-continent to those when you play in England during monsoon season. In Sri Lanka, the intense humidity demands prolonged periods of concentration from batsmen as they try to spell out the full names of opposition players for their forthcoming tour diaries. By contrast, a game against Durham leaves you facing highly experienced opening bowlers who are rendered immune to sledging by years of mentally disintegrating encounters with the hen parties that terrorise Newcastle’s Bigg Market on a Friday evening.

I am a chastened man. A mirror of truth has been held up before me and I want to make a confession.

As a county cricket fan I have been guilty of not showing enough interest in the IPL. Of treating it like just another Twenty20 tournament. Of only dipping in and out to watch games that catch my eye. Of comparing it unfavourably to the championship.

But thanks to the wisdom of Kevin Pietersen, I have come to realise I am acting out of jealously. I have come to realise the truth: that the Indian Premier League is world cricket’s Samantha Brick.

I have survived the opening game of the season. More importantly, county cricket has survived its earliest ever start. Fears that I might get sunstroke digging my car out of a snowdrift proved groundless and the rain relented to allow a positive result in all but one of the seven Championship games.

The cricket was good. The company was great. Unless a bitter turf war between rival gangs suddenly breaks out over control of the Ladies Pavilion at New Road, it looks like a very English oasis of calm remains ensconced in the world.

Not that calm always describes the journey to and from a game. Those of us who live a distance from our local county ground are faced with the unpalatable choice of either using public transport or driving there.

Put your trust in the rail network and an opportunity to have a beer or three has to be balanced with the possibility that your return home will be delayed until midway through the reign of King Charles III. Car pool and someone will claim to know “a spot nearby, where you can park for free,” a space that will have inevitably become "resident permits only" during the winter, leading to endless circling of the area as you search for a street that looks slightly more secure than downtown Kabul, while quietly cursing whichever of your party is dragging their heels over splitting the cost of an NCP all-day ticket.

My name is Kenny Shovel and I'm determined to have my say ...

I hate winter, with its interminable months of feigning interest in New Zealand v Sri Lanka, failing to find pattern or logic in the coming summer’s fixture list, and wondering which players will need to take a long hard look at themselves after only giving 109% during pre-season training. With no live cricket to watch, the closest you get to a day at the county ground is drinking beer on a deserted park bench. Although without the threat of somebody in a high visibility tabard insisting you move out of the family friendly seating, it’s just not the same.

Fortunately you can always rely on the ECB to prepare you for summer, as their ability to bend the light of common sense round the gravity well of modern sports administration has long since turned English cricket’s regular bouts of domestic restructuring madness into an unwanted New Year surprise.

Their latest attempt to herd 18 cats towards water, the Morgan Review, has proved as welcome with supporters as a postal order from Allen Stanford. I forget the exact small print - something about umpires dressing as the Banana Splits during T20 games and leg-side boundaries scoring Pi, I think – but the headline change was the proposed reduction in first-class matches. Given the Championship is the one part of the English season that spectators around the county circuit believe works well, it’s little wonder plans to change it were greeted with the enthusiasm normally reserved for a dentist who’s offered to mend your bridging work by punching you in the face.