April Leaves

The first round of the County Championship

The new season has begun, stupidly enough. It’s barely April, surely the cruellest month to begin the county season, especially so soon after Fool’s Day. This will be another summer in which every other competition has to budge up to make room for the Hundred. The county game is a pair of bookends in April and September. Still, the vexed topic of the politics of cricket is one to which we shall be forced to return but not today. We should mark the opening of the county season and the return of what we should now call England’s national spring sport. Here are some reflections a day and a half in.

Do some players not count?

At Lord’s, Sam Northeast scored 335 not out, the highest first-class innings ever made on the ground, beating Graham Gooch’s 333 against India in the First Test of 1990. Northeast has served three counties with distinction and over 17 years in the county game he has amassed 13,000 runs at an average of just over 40. Yet he has never really been in the frame for England’s middle-order. Is there really any reason to prefer Tom Westley, Joe Denly or Dan Lawrence to Northeast? All have had a run in the England side. Northeast is 34 years of age and he looks set to be, along with James Hildreth, the best player of his time who never won so much as a single cap. Look out too for Leus Du Plooy, Josh Bohannon (52 not out at the time of writing) and Joe Clarke (64 not out) who are all fine players yet to be favoured. It is hard not to conclude there is an element of randomness in this. Selectors like to pretend they have seen something important in the technique but nobody who has scored as many runs for as long as Northeast has can be said to be seriously deficient. What’s the reason he has never had a game? There isn’t one, really. He just hasn’t.

Rise and Fall

One player who has been granted preferment – not always merited – is Haseeb Hameed. This might be the crossroads of Hameed’s career, which is proof that not everyone improves with time. Some players explode and then fade and Hameed may be one of them. He looked every inch a Test batsman after a fine first season for Lancashire and won the admiration and endorsement of none other than Sunil Gavaskar after a fine 82 in the Test at Rajkot in 2016. But then Hameed fell away. His second season at Lancashire was disastrous and led to a move to Nottinghamshire where his first season was good and his second was moderate. With a first class average of 34 he looks to have landed in the pack of first-class batsmen. But is that who he is? Is the young Hameed the real him or is he a mixture of the inspired and the dreadful? Maybe this season will help us to know.

April Showers

The sheer folly of the scheduling was painfully obvious. During the longeurs of a play-free first day at Old Trafford, David Lloyd suggested to Paul Allott on Lancashire TV that maybe they should try playing cricket in the summer. Lancashire and Surrey started just before lunch on day two at Old Trafford. The first day was lost at Canterbury. There was no play at all on the first two days at Chester-le-Street and none at Derby either. Rain in April, in the North of England? Who could possibly have foreseen that?

Spin Cycle

It was good to see Tom Hartley out on the field for Lancashire alongside the new overseas player Nathan Lyon. Two spinners in Manchester in April might just be the dictionary definition of optimistic but good luck to them because there were reasonable fears that Hartley, who was an improbable debutant for England in India, would never get a game for Lancashire. There is, though, no sign of Shoaib Bashir at Somerset, nor Jack Leach. Rehan Ahmed batted, skittishly as usual, at number six for Leicestershire and the thought occurs that this is a big season for him in particular. His bowling, which was exposed in India, has not progressed and he may well play this season primarily as a batsman. Maybe Ahmed’s career will chart the same course as Scott Borthwick who was, if you remember, the first spin bowler to play for England after the sudden retirement of Graeme Swann but who – rather strangely I always thought – seemed determined to be a top-order batsman and occasional bowler. But maybe Ahmed might turn out like another potential all-rounder leg-spinner. There was a time when Adil Rashid’s batting looked more promising than his regressing bowling. One day cricket, which he hardly played for Yorkshire, saved Rashid and he has become one of England’s finest in the shorter formats. Maybe that’s where Rehan Ahmed is heading too.

Global Game

The golden age of the overseas player passed long ago and associations are more fleeting. It is unlikely that any modern overseas player will stay long enough, as the late, great Mike Procter did, that the county gets named after him. That said, there are some intriguing additions to the county game from overseas, some of whom are back for a return visit. Shan Masood is now the captain of Yorkshire, Matt Renshaw has come back to Somerset and Kemar Roach has returned to Surrey to warm up for the Test series against England. Jason Holder is doing the same at Warwickshire and watch out for Jaydon Seales at Sussex. Dean Elgar has replaced Alastair Cook at the top of the order for Essex, Karun Nair will probably make a lot of runs for Northants, as Pritvi Shaw did last year and, though hist stay will be short, it will be good to see Nathan Lyon at Old Trafford. It’s not Procter and Zaheer, Richards and Greenidge, Lloyd and Engineer, Kallicharan and Kanhai, but it’s not a bad crop of players.