The tumult of this extraordinary sporting summer has momentarily died away. Suddenly the remnants of an ancient civilisation have reappeared, like the outlines of a flooded village reappearing amid the caked mud of a parched reservoir.
First-class cricket is being played in the land, in agreeable places with perfect weather. Days of wine and Roses matches. I have been watching with good companions, sometimes discussing events as they unfolded, sometimes talking about life, which is the way cricket should be watched.
A young man called Hammond scored a century at Cheltenham, glistening with extra-cover drives, which last happened in 1937 (this one is called Miles not Wally). Selectors were being nudged at Worcester, where a duel between Jamie Overton and Moeen Ali ended with Overton’s pace triumphant.
At Chesterfield Ben Duckett came out and struck the ball with an authority that marked him out from everyone else on view. However, he made only 16 and Northamptonshire needed 314 to win, so that was not much help. Duckett risks ending in that grim niche of cricket history reserved for the brilliant wastrel. Yet it was somehow all part of the joy. I had forgotten how much I loved this stuff. And the 2019 season looks enticing, including both the World Cup (the only modern competition that has acquired any patina of tradition and credibility) and the Ashes.
“But at my back I always hear/time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near.” 2019 threatens to be the last summer. The background noise to this blissful week was a series of conflicting leaks emerging from that hotbed of fuckwittery, the England and Wales Cricket Board offices at Lord’s.
The year 2020 has, appropriately, long been designated as the year English cricket would be transformed by the introduction of a new city-based Twenty20 competition to run alongside the existing county-based Twenty20 (founded 2003) known this year as the Vitality Blast, which sounds like a rival to either cornflakes or Red Bull. But Twenty20 was not enough for English cricket’s ruling duumvirate, chairman Colin Graves and chief executive Tom Harrison. All week Lord’s has been leaking. Five-ball overs! 15-a-side! No, 12-a-side! Abolish lbw! Hey, let’s make it 10 overs! No, a hundred balls! That’s it!
One keeps wondering whether all this is a sign of a brilliantly malevolent strategy that I think of as calculated outrage, or King’s Suttonism. In the 1980s the M40 was under construction and heading towards King’s Sutton, near Banbury. Three possible routes were offered: one just west of the village, one just east and one straight through. All the opposition focused on the last option, which would have wrecked the place. So when the westerly option was chosen – irritating rather than destructive – it was greeted with delight instead of the fury it would otherwise have generated. Machiavelli would have been proud.
If Graves and Harrison were now to abandon all their own gimmickry and go back humbly to the old gimmickry of Twenty20, the traditionalists would wallow contentedly in their victory. Are they that clever? There is no sign of it.
But that misses the point. The whole concept is disastrous. English cricket’s fundamental problem, as I have argued before, is that it has lost the plot by having far too many different simultaneous plots, making the whole thing incomprehensible. Creating yet another, with completely different teams, is insane.
Furthermore the plan is to stage it in a 38-day block, which is an outrageous risk of the kind now associated with bankers. Now and again England has a 38-day drought. Other years it rains for 38 days. Cricket is totally weather-dependent. A bad month and this competition – and thus the sport’s economy – is screwed. Thus what works in Australia and India, with their more predictable (if changing) climates is meaningless here. Thirdly Graves and Harrison are creating a new, expensive and unnecessary structure, which will inevitably weaken the existing county-based one which, for all its flaws, has proved durable and resilient.
And the idea that a handful of short games on BBC2 or 4 or something can somehow undo the catastrophic decision to leave terrestrial TV in 2005 is a fantasy. Cricket is still addicted to evading its audience: Cheltenham and Chesterfield (and Canterbury and Taunton and …) are too far from any of the eight grounds selected for the new event for a practical and affordable evening out.
Ever since the Gillette Cup began in 1963 each new innovation/ gimmick has been a huge success for about a decade and then superseded and allowed to wither. The Gillette final, under various names, was the high point of the domestic season for nearly 40 years. Henceforth it is not even to be played at Lord’s. And each new development has created something that has less and less connection with the game of cricket.
Of course, cricket must adapt to changing times. But every cultural organisation – an art gallery, a theatre, a publishing house, a quality newspaper, a sport – has to strike a balance between intellectual integrity and showbiz. Cricket is not Nokia, which once made wellington boots and then made telephones, a wildly successful move until it wasn’t. It has to find a balance. If cricket, allegedly the most traditional of sports, just flails around trying to find new markets without regard to the one it has, it really is doomed.
My delight in sunlit days in the company of two thousand like-minded souls at Cheltenham, has to be supported by the razzmatazz. That is fine. But it has to complement the old ways, not cannibalise them. The Hundred is actually 180 degrees in the wrong direction.
English cricket needs to consolidate its different formats into a much simpler structure. A separate committee, under Wasim Khan, the chief executive of Leicestershire, is considering the future of the existing county competitions, possibly abolishing divisions and replacing them with “conferences”. Meaningless.
I believe we should merge the existing four-day and one-day competitions into one, producing a single champion. It can work: a previous such committee (one of umpteen in my memory) considered it favourably years ago before it was rejected by the county chairmen. In time it could even expand to include Twenty20 or Ten10 or Five5 or The Hundred. Women’s cricket too, perhaps. It would give the domestic game a single storyline, which it desperately needs.
But cricket is in thrall to two more fashionable notions. That Businessmen Know Best. And that strong leaders should trump (or Orbánise) democratic control. Graves and Harrison must go – and take their wretched scheme with them.