With autumn stepping into its strides – and conkers rolling fat and round outside the pavilion at Lord’s – cricket still has one hand to play in this eye-popping summer. A single round of the County Championship remains, the winner tantalisingly yet to be decided. The two contenders, Essex and Somerset, meet on Monday at Taunton to fight it out, with crowds expected to burst the gates, Sky sending a camera crew and a double-decker temporary press box for the media wheeled in for the occasion.
If Somerset, five times runners-up this century, win it will be their first championship title and romantics everywhere are knotting maroon ribbons to their hats. Because, in the season where England’s men gloriously won the World Cup for the first time and drew an absorbing Ashes series, raising the unfashionable, dog‑eared old championship pennant still matters.
It is the ultimate domestic prize, 14 games spread between April and September, hamstrung by the vagaries of injury, weather, form and international selection. Surrey won at a canter last year but have fallen to seventh this – the championship is a tricky beast to tame.
But how much longer it charges onwards in its current form is unknown as cricket gears up to introduce the new Hundred competition next summer, edging the four-day game further to the margins. After the departing England coach, Trevor Bayliss, and the BBC’s cricket correspondent, Jonathan Agnew, argued in the same week that the championship should be reduced to 10 counties, and Andrew Strauss, who has never seemed the greatest fan of the county game, made a welcome return to the England and Wales Cricket Board, as chair of the cricket committee, it is hard to believe that something revolutionary is not in the air.
The game’s administrators have long had a love-hate relationship with cricket’s 18 counties – seeing them as unwieldy cash guzzlers scattered in unglamorous, unhelpful places about the country. But if the axe is to be wielded, which counties are chopped? Presumably not the eight Hundred grounds – which saves Middlesex, Surrey, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Warwickshire, Glamorgan, Nottinghamshire and Hampshire.
That then means culling all but two of Durham, Somerset, Gloucestershire, Sussex, Worcestershire, Kent, Essex, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire or Derbyshire. Where does one start? No more cricket at lovely New Road, where Graeme Hick notched up endless runs under the unblinking eye of Worcester Cathedral? Pulling up the stumps at the Riverside after Durham’s long fight for first-class status, leaving the north-east shorn of cricket? Or would one scrub out Taunton, where Ian Botham and Marcus Trescothick wellied sixes for fun in the direction of the Quantocks? Surely not Kent? Club of the establishment, of EW Swanton, Colin Cowdrey and Ed Smith; so perhaps the bulldozers should be sent to ugly old Chelmsford, but one would have to pass Graham Gooch first. Hmmm. OK then, Gloucestershire, where the Cheltenham Festival has full houses every year, or the three unfashionable Midlands clubs: Leicestershire, with Leicester one of the UK’s most ethnically diverse cities, Graeme Swann’s Northamptonshire, the last great club of the elasticated waistband and a beer after play, or Derbyshire, who have just played in their first T20 finals day.
More awkwardly still, it seems the great unwashed do not know their place. One, possibly both, of Gloucestershire and Northamptonshire will join Lancashire in being promoted to Division One next year, while Nottinghamshire, chock-a-block with talent, a magnificent ground and great coach, have had a championship season that started to unravel in April and kept on spooling, relegated, probably without a win.
In a money-talking world the 18 counties do something more than just produce cricketers for an international treadmill. They are something broader, richer, the bonds that keep the game a genuinely national one. As has often been pointed out, sports do not generally grow by reducing the number of people who play at the top level.
County Championship games are their own little microcosms of communities, followed avidly online or through BBC broadcasts but populated on weekdays mostly by retired men, sometimes couples or in the summer holidays by children.
I have often thought the game should be on the NHS’s social prescribing list, much as doctors in Shetland have started to prescribe bird-watching and beach walks. Watching cricket brings fresh air, companionship – if a nod over the lunchtime scores is counted – purpose to the day and a shared experience, before even coming to the pleasures of the game.
At the out grounds – Arundel, Sedbergh – there is the bonus of sitting surrounded by greenery and being able to scan the sky for buzzards at lunchtime. The melancholy that hangs in the air at the end of the season can be seen in the fans I have watched this summer, sitting forlornly, on plastic seats at Guildford or Liverpool, waiting for the rain to stop.
In these time-poor days, accessibility is the key. By removing eight counties one immediately gets rid of the local footfall, the pensioner who gets the bus to the ground, the teenager who cycles up after the end of school.
Of course, not all clubs are equal. Some – Worcestershire, Leicestershire – seem destined to be feeder clubs to the wealthier. And maybe that is OK, to act as nurseries, with recompense, but still have the hair of a chance in the shorter T20 Blast, a competition that has attracted record crowds this summer.
Overflowing empathy is probably a bad thing in an administrator. But nor does one run a game by cutting out its heart and soul, something that will reside this coming week at Taunton – if only the rain stays away.