SUNNY cricket seasons are happy cricket seasons. Few summers can have had so many glorious days as 2003. To make the most of it, England won one Test series, drew another, despite successive double hundreds by Graeme Smith, by beating South Africa after they had scored 484 in the first innings at the Oval and, with a fresh young side, won two one-day tournaments against three other countries. Meanwhile, refusing to bow to those who would bury them, the counties contrived a romantic ending to the championship and a resounding popular success with the Twenty20 Cup.
Of course, the breathless succession of matches at the professional end of the game has to be seen in the context of England’s humiliating defeat in the first three Tests in Australia last winter and the subsequent failure to reach the final stages of the World Cup. It is, however, truly strange after a season of such riches that the game should once again be searching its soul.
It is still too fragmented and until the ECB ceases to make the size of its turnover the only genuine priority, nothing will be done to stop the inevitable disintegration of the plan devised in Raising The Standard, the supposed blueprint for the game produced under the influence of Ian MacLaurin in 1997. Some historical perspective, however, would do no harm to those despairing of the quality of the England team and even of the game’s future. Cricket, after all, has been going to the dogs ever since A. G. Steel pronounced in Wisden in 1900 that “it is in the very direst peril of degenerating from the finest of summer games into an exhibition of dullness and weariness”.
Pick up almost any subsequent edition of the almanack and you will see schemes to make the game faster, or more entertaining, or to root out some pernicious new development. Even the long-sought recovery of the Ashes would bring only a temporary lull before calls for reform were renewed. Witness the Editor’s Notes in 1954: “It is a great pleasure to record in this issue the return of the Ashes to England during the Coronation Year of our Queen but our joy turned to sorrow all too soon at the pitiable displays of our batsmen in the West Indies.”
Already there is talk of a less advantageous deal with television companies next time but the present contract still has two years to run and much could happen between now and the end of the 2005 season, especially if it were to include a change to the official ownership of the Ashes. It is not impossible if James Anderson matures as rapidly as he has in the past year and Steve Harmison and Simon Jones come to the boil at the right time, but it is unlikely because of Australia’s strength in depth.
That was demonstrated once more this season by the performances of Michael Hussey, Michael Kasprowicz, Ian Harvey, Stuart Law and many others. Michael Di Venuto was confirmed yesterday as Derbyshire’s new captain in 2004, while Damien Martyn, no more than a brief late-season visitor and unable in the end to secure Yorkshire’s return to the first division, won AON’s £5,000 prize and the Walter Lawrence Trophy for the fastest century, made from 65 balls against Gloucestershire at Headingley last week. A level below, for Horsham in the Sussex League, a single-minded young New South Welshman, Michael Bright, scored 928 runs and took 24 wickets with leg breaks but has not broken into his State squad at home.
Achieving this sort of quality from the bottom of the pyramid to the top must remain the ECB’s primary purpose. Root-and-branch reform of the present system is fanciful but no one would disagree that this year’s even bigger profits from well attended matches in both international and county cricket should be ploughed back into the game in Britain, not going into the pockets of any more than a small minority of players from overseas. Martyn’s late recruitment by Yorkshire, after Stephen Fleming and Yuvraj Singh had been recalled for national duty, was typical of a worrying trend. He was one of 55 overseas cricketers to play in the Frizzell County Championship this year.
Another 29 were ineligible for England, playing here under passports of convenience, making 84 players out of 379, or 22 per cent. Whatever else comes out of the round of meetings that start with the consultations of the ECB’s management board next Thursday, a decision to cut the number of overseas players back to one per county in 2005 is certain, preferably with a stipulation that replacements will be allowed only if the chosen man is selected for his country.
Mushtaq Ahmed’s 103 wickets and his part in the first championship in Sussex’s history showed the true value of the committed overseas professional to the county game. Sometimes, however, we undersell our own talent. Andrew Flintoff has at last become a world-class all-rounder and a cricketer of true charisma. Michael Vaughan quickly learnt lessons as the new England captain and will soon be scoring Test hundreds again. Marcus Trescothick was the hero of the epic Oval Test. Ian Blackwell’s double hundred for Somerset against Derbyshire at Taunton was one of many individual highlights in a programme that kept most counties interested until the last day of the season.
Nor, except in spin bowling, is the cupboard bare of talent lower down. At Wellesley House prep school in Kent, to give but one example, Sam Northeast, 13, broke the records set by Chris and Graham Cowdrey in the 1970s, scoring 11 centuries in the season. Such extreme precocity seldom fails to mature into something special, provided his mentors pay as much attention to the boy’s character and mental approach as to the technical aspects of his batting.
Capturing and holding the interest of as many young cricketers as possible is the key to the game’s future health and since television is the biggest influence on their lives, there is clear danger in the ECB’s latest policy of devoting the prime of the summer to one-day matches that cannot be seen on a terrestrial channel. Highlights were shown at a prohibitively late hour on Channel 4.
England are off to Bangladesh next month. It would be a pleasant surprise if Sri Lanka, beaten here last year, do not win against Vaughan’s team at home before Christmas but the series in the Caribbean in the new year should be close.
Meanwhile, the National Academy’s first year on home premises at Loughborough offers hope that young players with the talent, but not yet the strength or the know-how, to play international cricket successfully, will in future be brought to maturity more swiftly.
