S Hughes: Dissatisfaction is spreading fast in clapped out game (22 Sep 1998)

22 September 1998

Dissatisfaction is spreading fast in clapped out game

By Simon Hughes

THE denouement ended tamely and Leicestershire have carried the spoils back to Grace Road. Last weekend's top-of-the-table clash was billed in the sponsors' literature as the thrilling climax of the season. The destination of the County Championship was at stake and with it £100,000, enough to warrant live coverage on (satellite) television. The public were anything but thrilled. "What you going to the Oval for guv?" my taxi driver inquired, "nothing going on there mate."

His assumption was shared by 99.99 per cent of the metropolis. After an hour's play on the first day only 674 paying spectators had filed into the ground. With the considerable help of Surrey and Leicestershire members, this number had swelled to around 3,000 by mid-afternoon, the sort of attendance Third Division Halifax or Darlington might expect on an average day. The hospitality boxes were empty. Next year's competition is without a sponsor.

This is not, however, another attempt to sound county cricket's death knell. It will survive just as neglected churches do. The word 'crowd' has not been used in association with the County Championship since the late Fifties. Post-war support dwindled with the emergence of television and lower unemployment, and has remained paltry ever since.

I played for Middlesex in five title deciders during the last decade and none was watched by anything other than a smattering of diehards. The "ground full" signs rotted long ago.

In spite of large subsidies from the governing body, now running into millions per club, few counties ever manage much of a profit and most will make a loss this year. But significantly, players drawn from this unique professional system to represent England have won just one major Test series in 12 years, and that by the skin of their teeth.

The first-class forum meet next month to plot the path of the professional game. Radical change for the year 2000 is on the agenda. Will it happen? Is Rupert Murdoch the tooth fairy? Still, what is county cricket's role and how can it be enhanced?

You can draw an analogy with a local branch railway line. It exists to get people from A to B and as a service to the community. The fact that, say, the Peterborough to Norwich line does not make money is irrelevant - it is a crucial regional link.

Professional cricket's purpose is not only to move players from A (county) to B (country) but also to nurture the game in outlying districts, servicing interest among players and spectators.

But the county train is not running properly. Firstly, not everyone is able to board. Only cricketers who are contracted employees of the England and Wales Cricket Board are allowed on the platform, excluding a huge number of talented amateurs.

Secondly, the climb from A to B is too arduous and many 'passengers' fall off along the way (witness all the one-Test wonders.) The track up-country is too steep. That is why the England locomotive is not so much a sleek express as a piece of unreliable rolling stock constantly in need of repairs. County cricket is clapped out.

Don't believe me? OK, here is a body of evidence gleaned from players, umpires, coaches, administrators and spectators in the last two weeks. Perhaps the most damning is from a 21-year-old with a double first from Cambridge currently playing for Kent.

Ed Smith is in his third season of county cricket and has built up a vivid impression of what is wrong with it. "I think there's a crisis of confidence in the game, we don't respect ourselves. Players like Steve James or Andrew Caddick perform consistently well for their counties yet aren't picked for England, because what they achieve at county level is regarded as almost worthless. That communicates a depressing message.

"When young players come into the game they're usually keen and hard working, but initially they struggle. The more ambitious you are, the more people tend to try and knock you down. More experienced players don't work as hard but they've learnt to do certain little things to get by and avoid the pitfalls. Gradually the younger player learns that these short cuts are the best way to survive."

The height of ambition becomes getting a benefit. Instead of counties being centres of excellence they are dispensers of mediocrity.

Why? "Too much cricket," says the esteemed Australian coach John Buchanan, whose experience with Middlesex this season he will largely want to forget. "Players are hardly ever physically, mentally, technically or tactically fresh, proper preparation just isn't in the culture and the journeymen become role models. And I've rarely seen a decent pitch all summer, even at Lord's."

Umpire Bob White, who first played for Middlesex in 1955, would concur with the latter. "The pitches have been generally poor for a while, and subtlety in the game seems to have largely disappeared," he says. "There are very few flair players around - Paul Johnson, of Notts, is about the only one that comes to mind."

You have to go back a dozen years or so to find the source of this. With the departure of artful, imaginative leaders such as Brearley, Barclay and Fletcher, the game entered a more regimented era, directed by the likes of Gatting, Gooch and Micky Stewart. It was blow-the-whistle-and-out-of-the-trench command.

They were hard working and disciplined and they meant well, but the general approach - batting and bowling styles, field settings - was stereotyped. Demand for success outweighed scope for self-expression and teams sought the safest route, sticking inflexibly to the middle lane rather than trying a bit of chicanery. Line and length was believed to be the only way forward through the corridor of uncertainty. Uniformity resulted and has largely remained.

A series of overseas coaches have tried to buck this trend, and failed. Attitudes are too deeply rooted. Buchanan, the strategist who guided Queensland to their first Sheffield Shield title in 1994/95 and followed it with a second two years later, tried to bring his scientific methods to Middlesex, but became powerless to stop them going into freefall.

"What I wanted to do and what was already in place were never going to merge," he says. He was appalled by the concept of 'Naughty Boy Nets' - the familiar "punishment" to a heavily defeated team.

"I'd never heard that term before, it's a negative image of nets. In Australia, players look forward to practice, use it constructively." Buchanan is "disappointed" with his performance but was prepared to return in 1999. However, after a fabulous playing career, Gatting is likely to be announced as Middlesex's new director of coaching in the next few days.

Buchanan's outline for progress includes reducing the number of championship games to 12, probably using a two-conference system, allowing more time for recovery and preparation. "But this time must be utilised properly." He was also adamant that pitches should improve. (Few matches have lasted the full four days this year and Gloucestershire's strips are so tailored to their seam bowlers, their coach congratulates a home batsman if he makes 25.)

Elsewhere among officials and observers, there is growing support for a regional tournament superimposed on the County Championship in May and June. This has much to recommend it. While leaving the existing framework untouched, it would provide a crucial ledge between the plateau of county cricket and the pinnacle of the Test arena.

The 18 counties divide neatly into six regions, and though some of their names - Home Counties South (Sussex, Hants, Kent), East Midlands Trent (Northants, Leics, Notts) - sound more synonymous with Come Dancing, matches between them would provide a stiffer challenge for Test aspirants.

Followers of the first-class game could not really complain about it. The 125,000 county members would still see their beloved team as often as now, getting astonishing value for their £60 subs, and pay-on-the-day spectators do not have a voice. Only 21 dipped into their pockets to watch the third day of Northants v Sussex last week, two of whom declared they "didn't like the noise" at one-day matches. They had come to the right place. You would not blame Mal Loye, voted Cricketer of the Year, if he accepted a lucrative offer from a more popular county, in spite of Northants' spanking new indoor school.

While Loye jets off to Western Australia for some specialist tuition with the old South African batsman Peter Carlstein, domestic dissatisfaction rumbles on. The incessant dismissal of county coaches (12 departures in two years) and captains (Paul Prichard, appointed in 1995, is the longest serving) only deflects attention from the fact that it is the system that needs shaking up, and soon. If you can't get better engines to improve the service, try modernising the track.

Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)