LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
A sedate experience
BY MIKE MARQUSEE
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County cricket is a casual and contemplative experience where the players acquire a human dimension absent from the gladiatorial international arenas.
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Photo: AP
Different priorities: Sussex and Kent cricket players before a County Championship match. Photo: AP
MAY BE it’s just a nostalgic taste for cricket played in classic white. Maybe it’s a perverse desire to preserve a harmless relic, an aged child orphaned by a rootless modern economy. But it seems to me that the market-conscious mandarins
of English cricket persistently undersell one of the game’s most enduring assets — the first-class county championship.
This summer, the 18 first-class counties are taking part in four separate competitions: Twenty-20, 50- and 40-over one-dayers, plus the venerable four-day, two-innings version, organised nowadays in two divisions of nine teams, in which each side plays the others once in a season. That means there will be 146 first-class county matches this summer — far more than are played in any other cricketing nation.
A minority taste
Most of them, of course, will be played before sparse crowds. County cricket is decidedly a minority taste, and even in its brief mid-summer heyday, when for a few weeks football takes a low profile, it’s rare to find a crowd of more than a thousand at a mid-week four-dayer.
There’s an eerie charm in watching a county match in one of the great international arenas, Lord’s or Edgbaston, with the players’ voices echoing across acres of empty seats. But the county game really comes into its own in the venues that never see international cricket: Hove, Taunton, Chelmsford, Worcester, Canterbury, Cardiff. And even more so on grounds which host a professional match only once a year, the so-called “festival” grounds: Scarborough, Chesterfield, Cheltenham.
Some of these grounds enjoy lovely settings — views of green hills and church spires — and some boast intriguing architectural remnants. Most importantly, they are the right size for county cricket. A small number of spectators can generate an atmosphere. Apart from major one-day games, you won’t find the boisterousness of football, but there’s dedication to the team and passion for the game. It’s a sedate, casual and contemplative experience. The players acquire a human dimension absent from the gladiatorial international arenas. The weather, as always in England, sets the tone, and dictates the style — from blankets and flasks of hot tea to sun-hats and chilled lagers. And is there another sporting event regularly graced by second-hand bookstalls?
The 18 first-class counties employ some 360 cricketers, which means there are more professional cricketers in England and Wales than in any other country. But it’s not a glamour profession. The average annual wage is less than £40,000 (about the same as the U.K. average wage for a professional worker). Youngsters starting out can earn as little as £13,000. In contrast, the average basic salary of a footballer in the English Premiership (not including sponsorships, etc.) is £6,76,000 a year.
The overseas presence
When I first began following county cricket in the 1970s, you could watch Viv Richards and Joel Garner turn out for Somerset in a local derby against a Gloucestershire team featuring Zaheer Abbas and Mike Procter. Today’s packed international schedule makes that kind of dream encounter a rarity, but English domestic cricket this year will still offer cricket-lovers a chance to watch, among others, Shane Warne, Justin Langer, Mushtaq Ahmad, Kumar Sangakkara, Muttiah Muralitharan, Younis Khan and Jason Gillespie (whose early season performances for Yorkshire are beginning to erase memories of his atrocious Ashes series of 2005).
The overseas presence in county cricket has been the subject of grumbling since the 1970s. Next year, the limit will be reduced from two to one per team. However, that has not calmed media agitation concerning the number of “Kolpak” players signed by the counties over and above their overseas quota. Maros Kolpak was a Slovak handball player whose case resulted in a European Court ruling that citizens of countries with Associate Agreements with the EU must be treated, for purposes of employment, as EU residents. In English cricket, that means they qualify as domestic, not overseas players, even though they cannot play for England. And since South Africa and Zimbabwe have Associate Agreements with the EU, the gates of county cricket have opened for cricketers from those countries, including Jacques Rudolph, Grant Flower, Heath Streak and Lance Klusener.
The argument that foreigners are occupying places in county teams that should be given to England hopefuls is a curious one. Even with the Kolpak additions, there are still several hundred professional berths open to England-qualified players, more than in any other country, and if the England hopefuls are not good enough to displace a Kolpak player from a county line-up, then they’re unlikely to be good enough to succeed in international cricket. Participation by overseas players raises the standard of competition, which ought to benefit English players and help close the very wide gap between first class and test cricket. Surely every England-qualified batsman who faces Warne or Murali this summer will benefit from the experience.
Handy scapegoat
Unlike football clubs, county cricket clubs are not privately owned; they are open membership associations in which ultimate power rests, in theory, with the people who pay the annual subscription. Membership numbers range from as low as 2,000 (Derbyshire) to more than 14,000 (Lancashire). Membership is unrepresentative and mostly inactive, and in recent years all the counties have acquired a more corporate cast. Still, the counties embody a distinct interest, separate from both “England” and “the market” — which is one reason they come under fire.
County cricket has long provided a handy scapegoat for England’s cricketing failures. An influential school of modernisers would like to do away with it altogether, and slim down English cricket to some half a dozen sides. The argument is that the comfort zone in county cricket is too great. What’s needed is fewer and more competitive games. But that would require un-doing a great deal of history and up-rooting long-established loyalties. It also presumes that the principal function of domestic cricket is to act as a nursery for the England squad.
Agrarian legacy
Britain was the first predominantly urban society and is today, more than ever, a nation of city-dwellers. Yet, cricket in England carries legacies of an earlier, agrarian era, some inscribed in the names of the first-class teams, which, significantly, represent counties, not cities. The historic entities of Yorkshire and Lancashire, for example, are today institutionally preserved exclusively through their county cricket clubs. That background helps explain why county cricket, however modest the attendances, attracts more interest, more fan loyalty, than domestic cricket in any other country.
English pitches and conditions are as variable as English summers. To succeed in a competition spanning five months, a team has to have the resources to cover all occasions. Players rightly regard first-class cricket as the most demanding form of the game, and prize the county championship above all other domestic accolades — even though it may well be clinched in front of a desultory crowd on a rainy day.
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