Don't dress it up, take it out

Atmosphere? © Getty Images

The decline and fall of county cricket, like the Strange Death of Liberal England, has been going on for years. It just seems to be gaining momentum in these days of central contracts, media attention on Test matches and the apparent indifference of the England and Wales Cricket Board. I say "apparent indifference" because the people who sit on committees at Lord's and cogitate on matters relating to the county game must have cricket's best interests at heart. There are, happily, few bad guys in cricket. It is not that sort of world.

So how can the county game be saved and made to work in a way that retains the interest of performers and the loyalty of punters? It is hard to argue that the splitting of the Championship into two divisions has produced better cricket. It is unclear how withholding England players from county duties has made them sharper, which is not to contest the evident good sense in resting some players some of the time. But surely, if county cricket is to mean anything, instead of simply supplying the clay for England coaches to mould into patterns of their own design, it must, begging Kant's pardon, represent a ding an sich. Is it really that dishonourable to play county cricket for a living or to take pleasure from watching it?

Yet how many young people come to the game through county cricket these days? Everything they see on television, hear on the wireless and read in their newspapers refers to Test cricket. To some newspapers (most daily papers, sadly) the Championship makes fewer headlines than crown green bowls. If those young people develop a love of the game through internationals and the noisy, colourful one-day shoot-outs so beloved of the game's PR men, they may, in time, come to savour the less obvious qualities of the four-day county game. But not many will because that kind of cricket, the proper kind so far as traditionalists are concerned, runs counter to the spirit of our restless age.

I cannot offer easy remedies for there are none. It is impossible to dress county cricket in dazzling colours or to make claims for its "relevance" and "accessibility" (revolting words!) because that sort of talk demeans it. Either you like cricket or you don't. I cannot be alone when I say that I often find greater pleasure in watching cricket in the company of a thousand like-minded people than I do at a well-attended Test match when thousands of spectators are roaring imbecilities and we are encouraged to believe - not least by the otherwise sound Jonathan Agnew on Test Match Special - that this low-grade audience "participation" lends something to the "atmosphere". At such times there is a good case for bringing back the stocks.

The best way to improve county cricket would be to emphasise the county part of it. Take the Championship away from Headingley and back to Hull, Huddersfield and Halifax. Take it to all those outgrounds with their tents, bookstalls, deckchairs and beer gardens. Make the Championship a daisy-chain of festivals, to accompany the 101 music festivals that make the English summer what it is. Forget this guff about "yoof", with coloured hair and amplified muzak. Remember, instead, what the Bard told us: "Youth's a stuff will not endure".

Contrary to what people have argued, there are not too many counties in the Championship. And, even if they were, how would you get rid of them? How could you say to Derbyshire, a club reported at least twice a year "to face ruin", that they would have to go in the interests of a bright and beautiful future? Derbyshire, even as I write, are transforming their ground, which Lancashire, for one, are not. Admittedly the two clubs are different but it just goes to show. County cricket should not be looking to exclude its members but to make every garden grow.

There are, however, too many players. It should be apparent to everybody by now that there is no future in employing a staff of more than 20 professionals, particularly when half a dozen of those pros, sometimes more, are not eligible to play for England. The second teams can always be staffed by fringe players, promising colts and decent club players. They are out there somewhere. The counties should go and find them, instead of importing second-raters from abroad to "do a job" for a month or two.

But, as for saving county cricket, I don't know. With me, as with countless others, it is a personal thing, a retreat from the excesses of so much of modern sport and modern life. There is a lot to be said for falling asleep in a deckchair with a pork pie, a good book and a view of the scoreboard.