The academy of cricket

Essex are riding high in Division Two of the County Championship, with their latest batch of homegrown talents alerting the England selectors. After a rocky few years of underachievement amid the fallout from the spot-fixing scandal, is the club about to return to its natural state of winning trophies and punching above its weight?

It's a short walk from Chelmsford train station, where a huge image of Alastair Cook welcomes you on the stairs from platform 2, to the Essex County Ground. Past the stretch of estate agents and what's left of Dukes nightclub, across the market beneath the multi-storey car park, under the underpass and then along the edge of the River Can, Gooch's river, from where, if you squint, you can still catch slivers of action through the gaps in the old Tom Pearce Stand.

This river has been gobbling cricket balls since 1967, when the club finally abandoned the nomadic life to settle here in the heart of Essex's county town. The New Writtle Street ground, capacity 5,000, will bring up its half-century next year. But the party will only kick in if the club are back in the Championship's top tier. Getting up there and staying up there has become something of an obsession. An institution that prides itself on upward mobility and hard-won gumption isn't used to kicking its heels on the sidelines. "We may be small," says club legend Graham Napier, "but we punch above our weight."

Essex has never been a rich club. Nor, until 'The Gnome of Essex', Keith Fletcher, kicked it into shape in the Seventies, was it a successful one. For much of the first half of its existence the county played wherever it could, utilising its sprawling catchment area - running from the edge of the Anglian coast to the north-eastern corner of London - to make ends meet with fixtures here and festivals there.

The Gnome changed everything. From 1979, when Essex won both the B&H Cup and the County Championship - their first honours - Fletcher's band trampled all over county cricket's manicured lawns, winning six Championships and five one-day titles across 14 seasons of extravagant one-upmanship. It helped that Fletcher could call on the best opening batsman in the country, Fletcher and Gooch combining for over 60,000 runs for the club. Today, both sit on the club's cricket committee.

And they've seen some players. The rivers of talent flowing through these estuaries into the professional game are the stuff of legend. "Year in, year out, we produce homegrown players," Napier says. "It's the eye for talent that Essex has always had, and for drawing that talent out of people."

Still, the new century has yet to deliver much silverware for the good denizens of New Writtle Street. A brace of 40-over titles claimed over a decade ago, coupled with just three seasons spent in Division One since 2000, is only partially offset by claiming the first-ever Englishman to 10,000 Test runs as one of their own. Change was due; some felt overdue.

Towards the end of last season, when it became evident that Essex would finish third in Division Two for the third year running, Paul Grayson lost his job as head coach. The subsequent appointment of the former Yorkshire and England bowler Chris Silverwood - who had been Grayson's assistant and the club's bowling coach - failed to appease those who wanted an outsider, but it was consistent with the club's style to look at what's already there. In the same vein, a new captaincy hybrid of club stalwarts Ryan ten Doeschate (four-day) and Ravi Bopara (one-day) is now in place. Some would say it's verging on the parochial, continually looking within. Others that it's the best way to foster unity.

The club also has a new chairman. John Faragher is Essex man in excelsis. Made his name at Ford, man and boy; son of former Essex player Harold Faragher, who in 1957 opened the legendary - and still flourishing - Ilford Cricket School with Trevor Bailey; 25 years on the Essex committee, 14 as deputy chairman, and now the top job. "Negativity is so destroying!" he tells AOC. "You need to surround people with positivity. Keep 'em energised! I had 35 years at Ford. You try and bring to the role: 'This is business now'. It could be motor cars, but our business is cricket."

And business is good. Derek Bowden is now into his fourth year as chief executive, having moved from the same post at Ipswich Town. "Financially we're very sound," he says. "Whilst we're a small club with a small ground - with a turnover of plus-and-minus four million a year, we're not a big business - financially we're sound because we have no debt. And we have sizeable reserves, which is prudent. Any members club ought to have reserves."

While the much-trailed ground redevelopment is, says Bowden, "between phases" following the completion of the new block in the car park behind the pavilion, there is a cautious belief that the latest plan, which involves building three new apartment blocks, a new pavilion and a new media centre in one go, will eventually get the green light. "We're still working with the developer on the maths. It's quite advanced, but we're not quite ready to press the green button yet." And then, of course, there's the story of the Olympic Stadium, and Essex's evident destiny to one day host cricket in it.

"We're frustrated," he adds, "in that on the pitch we've been nearly men. Off the pitch we're not nearly men. Off the pitch we do really well. But finishing third in three successive years is irritating. We've been close, but we haven't quite had that thing that takes us over the line. That's why last year we made the changes on the cricket side of things."

The new head coach ambles into the chairman's office and pulls up a chair. It's been a good start to 2016. Essex won two of their first three Championship matches and, as the season moves into one-day mode, sit top of the division. "We've done well," Silverwood says softly. "We're posting big totals now. But equally we've bolstered the bowling attack, so we can play a better standard of cricket, a better form of cricket, to stand us in good stead in the first division." What style of cricket does that look like? "It's attritional. Attritional cricket."

Four-day cricket. Four-day success. Getting up to Div One. Staying in Div One. One day winning Div One. Talk to anyone round here and within seconds it's repeated. It's a club-wide mantra. But while the red ball is Essex's route back to parity with the big boys and renewed self-respect as a club, the white ball must also play its part. "Chris buys into the objectives of wanting to get into Division One and remaining there, and the strategy of succeeding in T20 in order to fund it. We've got a clear plan, which is youth development and building on the academy and the region of East Anglia, and augmenting that with talent from somewhere else - and funding that through T20. Because while we're a small business - albeit a stable one - we make our money on white-ball cricket and we spend it on red-ball cricket. Our ambition is red-ball driven, but it requires success in T20, so the two things come together."

Cohesiveness and Essex have not always gone together. Faragher may be right to describe the place as "a club of individuals, with lots of different characters in there, going right back to the days of [celebrated prankster] Ray East and all those guys". But with big personalities can come big clashes. Around the turn of the century, the Australian Stuart Law and the northern-expat captain Ronnie Irani were ensconced as Chelmsfordian alphas, and the two did not get along. Despite Law's 1,300 Championship runs, the 2001 summer was so rancorous that when the club were relegated he wasn't asked back. "They couldn't even say thank you for my services," Law said at the time. Irani, meanwhile, has stayed involved with the club, assuming the role of chairman of the cricket committee in the shake-up that saw Grayson depart.

Of course, there isn't a county dressing room in the land which hasn't staged some version of the Law-Irani cold war. The fallout around the spot-fixing scandal, however, hit the club hard. Mervyn Westfield and Danish Kaneria were teammates in 2009 when Kaneria, an experienced Pakistan Test cricketer, persuaded Westfield, a greenhorn fast bowler, to bowl badly during a televised one-day match in return for £6,000 in cash. It took the intervention of the Essex seamer Tony Palladino, who had been shown the money by Westfield after a night out, to finally blow the whistle on a saga that cut right to the soul of the English game. Westfield got four months inside and a lifetime ban, Kaneria too was banned for life (although he continues to claim his innocence in the face of overwhelming evidence). Nobody escaped censure, club included.

"That was a learning curve for us," Faragher admits. "I do regret that it happened. I was disappointed that a young cricketer was sucked in, and I'm disappointed that we didn't spot that he was being pulled in. At the time, rightly or wrongly, it never got to the attention of the chairman or myself that something was wrong. When it kicked off it was like, 'Wow!' As a club, you ask yourself questions. Why didn't it get to us? Why didn't anyone feel like they had the confidence or the bravery to come forward?"

The judders were felt throughout the club. Napier recalls being in India when he was told the news. "You feel like you've been let down. No one teaches you how to deal with it. They're your teammates and they've effectively been sold out. And it's tough. I don't know why people make those decisions. It's sad for cricket and everybody else, and it does affect a side, and it did. We didn't really perform as a side as we should have done.

"At least now a system is properly in place. There's no mobile communications whatsoever. You hand your mobile phones in. It's our duty to hand our phone in, and anyone caught using their phone during a match is in breach of regulations."

All that's gone now. These days there's an outbreak of optimism spreading about the place, much of it generated from the chairman. "There is something unique and special here! Even Colin Graves will tell you. He said to me, 'John, don't ever lose what Essex has got. I don't know what it is, but whatever it is, you keep it.' Those were some of his first words to me."

There are still some hefty challenges to face down, chiefly holding on to their star homegrown talents in the face of big cash offers from richer clubs elsewhere. "You can become a feeder county," warns Faragher. "Because people recognise the talent that we've brought on here, and they know that we're limited with what we can pay our players. We are. That's a fact. We're not gonna break the bank for anybody."

But there are reasons to be cheerful. New attack leader Jamie Porter signed a three-year contract at the end of last season. The brilliant young opener Nick Browne has just penned a new two-year deal, citing his belief in a side "that can get up to Division One and win Division One in the next few years", while Tom Westley signed his own two-year extension in February. All are squarely on England's radar.

Some will leave, others will stay, and more will emerge. "We can't keep them all!" says Napier, who himself is hanging up the boots in September. This remarkably fertile nursery of cricket just keeps on churning out the talent. "Nasser, Fletcher, Gooch, Cook!" the chairman declares. "It's not a bad throw from Essex County Cricket Club, what we've done for English cricket over the years." And there is more to come. There always is.