Spring To Autumn

The cricket season just gone

Seven Reflections on the Season

Philip Collins

1.     The Winter Of Our Discontent

The first point to make when reflecting on the season is to question which season it was. Certainly not summer as England and Australia tried to squeeze 100 overs out of a gloomy and cold day at the tail-end of September. The season begin in the early spring and ended in the autumn. For all those in their hats and coats in Bristol it must have felt like winter. But not the winter of their discontent because there is plenty more to come. Next season the Test matches against India will be done before August and the County Championship will once again be a book-end competition, starting in April and ending just before October. The reason, of course, is the Hundred which might have fewer critics if it were not so conspicuously scheduled to make everything else absurd.

2.     England Evolve

England’s approach to Test cricket was refined a little from the harum-scarum starts. The team, too, changed shape this year. Jimmy Anderson took his leave, Jonny Bairstow was left out and Ollie Robinson is on the naughty step. Ben Duckett, Ollie Pope and Harry Brook had solid, rather than wonderful, seasons but their places are secure. The emerging talents were behind the stumps where Jamie Smith settled the Bairstow or Foakes argument by being neither. He is a batsman who keeps rather than the new Alan Knott but he does look like a real player and he comes over as a young man whose talent has not cost him his modesty. Among the bowlers, Gus Atkinson announced himself like few who have gone before, and not just with the ball. It was good to see Olly Stone back on a cricket field and Matthew Potts looks resilient and strong, two rare virtues among the crop of England bowlers. Archer, Tongue, Pennington, Wood and Mahmood were among the favoured fast bowlers who spent all, or most of, the summer doing something other than playing cricket.

3.     Champions of the Counties

In the first division the leading batsmen, with more than a thousand runs each and in order of how many, were David Bedlingham, Dean Elgar, Alex Davies, Haseeb Hameed, Rory Burns, Will Rhodes and Keaton Jennings. Three discarded England openers there should there ever arise a vacancy. Also two players Lancashire allowed to leave. James Vince, Ben Slater, Tom Lammonby, Alex Lees, Jordan Cox and Joe Clarke were not far behind.

Among the bowlers, Jamie Porter, Kyle Abbott. Dan Worrall and Oliver Hannon-Dalby all took more than 50 wickets. Jack Leach was the best spinner in the country, with 45 wickets at 22.77 each and Sam Cook has a claim to be the best seam bowler with 43 wickets at a remarkable 17.30 each.

But the player of the season is none of those. Surely it is the strangely overlooked Liam Dawson who made 956 runs, with 3 hundreds, at an average of 59.75 and came third in the bowling ranks with 54 wickets at 25 each one. Quite a season but England do not regard him as one of their top three or four spin bowlers.

In division two, Colin Ingram was the best batsman with well over 1000 runs at over 90. Adam Lyth, John Simpson, Ryan Higgins, James Bracey, Wayne Madsen and Sam Northeast all made more than 1000 runs and all of them at an average in excess of 50. Max Holden and Leus du Plooy were just below.

Ben Coad was the best bowler with 56 wickets at 15.80. Coad, like Cook, is one of those bowlers who are just dismissed as not quick enough for Test cricket. Yet if they played at home, against the West Indies or Sri Lanka, does anyone seriously doubt they would take wickets? Toby Roland-Jones and Jack Carson also took more than 50 wickets. Carson, a tall off-break bowler, can also feel aggrieved that he has so far not been contacted by the national selectors.

As there was in the first division there was one outstanding all-round performance. Ryan Higgins scored over 1000 runs at 70.81 and took 30 wickets at 28.60.

Team of the Season

Elgar

Hameed

Vince

Ingram

Bedlingham

Higgins

Simpson

Dawson

Porter

Cook

Coad

4.     The decline of the rest and the Test

It’s true, of course, that this has been the English cricket season and that’s not the case everywhere else. Still, it is notable how much England are dominating Test cricket these days. Between April and late September there have been 11 Test matches and England have played in 6 of them. The West Indies were a sorry shadow of what they have been. Sri Lanka were a little tougher but, despite a good victory at The Oval, they were never really in the series. Home advantage these days is formidable, excepts perhaps in the series in which England, India and Australia play one another, which they will soon.

5.     India Out of Sight

In cricket, demography might prove to be destiny. The largest cricket playing nation is obsessed with the game to the exclusion of all others. It is also, belatedly and as it gets richer, starting to recruit its players from social classes beyond the monied bourgeoisie. India might emerge not just as the best team in the world across all of cricket’s formats but out-of-sight better than the rest. The T20 World Cup, in which India were never really under pressure as they cruised to victory, is the omen of what is to come.

6.     Impact

The Indian Premier League continued to reshape the way cricket is played.  In their excellent book Hitting Against The Spin Nathan Leamon and Ben Jones show that the biggest changes in one day cricket are almost always attributable to changes in the format and the rules. Allowing an “impact substitute” – which in effect means teams often have an extra batsman – contributed to the vast totals which either made the game more exciting or even duller (delete as appropriate).

7.     Moment of the Season

Sadly, it is fourth day at Lords when there was nobody there. The cause was high prices but only in part. Surely it was also low cricket. Although the game was, in theory, alive on the fourth day, England’s victory had felt processional from the start of the game. Test cricket is not exciting when England thrash lots of runs. It is exciting when it is competitive and this summer’s Test cricket wasn’t competitive. That’s the underlying reason that Lord’s was empty.

Autumn Leaves

Michael Henderson 

‘Australia are here, and I care not a jot’.  

The message came from a well-known cricket writer, recently retired. He wasn’t angry, merely resigned to the fact that the world turns, and people take their pleasures in many ways. Watching England play five one-day matches against Australia in late September held little appeal. Another well-known cricket writer left a similar message last month. ‘I watch my local cub, and my old county’, he said. The rest he was happy to avoid. It’s not the same game any more, was the gist. It’s been sold to the men of business, who have moulded the game into ‘product’.  

How true. Hampshire, it has been revealed, will soon be governed by the GMR Group, owners of Delhi Capitals in the Indian Premier League. Rod Bransgrove, the club’s outgoing chairman, referred to ‘the fulfilment of a dream’. No doubt it was a dream shared by John Arlott, and those players of yesteryear. ‘One day, if we put our minds to it, we may be the courtiers of Indian billionaires!’ 

A decade from now, what will be left? England will still be playing Test matches against Australia and India, and possibly South Africa, but only when a calendar weighted towards one-day cricket permits. Next summer the series with India has been shoe-horned into five weeks, so that everybody can toddle off in August for the delights of The Hundred. 

Will there be county cricket? After a fashion, though it is unlikely there will be 18 first-class clubs. Perhaps the England Cricket Board will ask the counties which survive the likely pruning to observe their strange rituals behind closed doors, so as not to embarrass the new masters. There will be T20, of course, to occupy those who can spare five minutes. ‘Infinity pleased our parents’, wrote ee cummings. ‘One inch looks good to us’. 

What has this got to do with BBC? you may wonder. More than you might think. Jonathan Agnew stands down as cricket correspondent at the end of the year, and though he will carry on as the main commentator on Test Match Special for three more years there will be a new person in the chair next summer.  

As you may have noticed, coverage of sport on the BBC has changed significantly. Traditional qualities, like talent, are considered incidental.  Former players have always made their way into the press and commentary boxes. Readers, viewers and listeners have been informed by many sportsmen granted a second career, and some have succeeded, particularly in cricket. Nobody resents the appearance of Michael Atherton and Nasser Hussain on Sky. They are top-notchers. Mark Butcher is excellent – the BBC missed a trick there. Stuart Broad, the latest recruit, may flower. 

The BBC job, though, carries particular weight. Its holder becomes, by tradition if not formal recognition, the sport’s main conduit to the public. Agnew, who has done it for 33 years, succeeded Christopher Martin-Jenkins, who took over from Brian Johnston. The new person will inherit a journalistic goldmine.  

Who will it be? 

Nobody appears to have been groomed for the role, which suggests selection could be, as Wodehouse might have said, a P in a P. But it is reasonable to assume the cultural commissars at Langham Place will look first for a woman, then a non-white person. Alison Mitchell, a decent human being, is not up to the task. She has been at TMS for a decade, and still cannot describe adequately what happens when a batsman has been dismissed. Those silences as the batsman departs have become increasingly awkward, for a commentator who freezes at such moments is a liability. Isa Guha and Alex Hartley, being former players, will have their advocates. But Guha has other irons in the fire. Hartley has a charmless voice, and an off-putting faux-matey manner. Her pieces to camera during the recent one-day series were minor masterpieces of inanity. Ebony Rainford-Brent is well-liked, and has an unaffected manner. Cricket certainly has need of people like her, and she has a future. With the best will in the world, however, she is not correspondent material. 

Will they recruit from the press box? Lawrence Booth, the editor of Wisden, has used his voice wisely. But he has just succeeded Paul Newman as cricket correspondent of the Daily Mail, a paper that covers Test cricket extremely well, and breaks big stories. He already has a powerful voice.  

Somewhere, in the boondocks, there may be young men and women dreaming of green fields, and nursing a desire to report on events in far-flung places. Wish them well. The game remains great, however much those who administer it have buggered it up.  Think of a trouper like Joe Leach, wandering into retirement after serving Worcestershire for 13 years, through thick and thin; mainly thin. Or James Wharton, who made 285 in the final innings of the season, as Yorkshire were promoted to the first division of the county championship. They don’t think they have wasted their days. 

But the landscape has changed. Australia were here last week, and some of us cared not a jot.