Extract
Introduction
I was born in Portsmouth in 1949. Ten years later, during the glorious summer of 1959, I played my first game of organised cricket (at school) and went for the first time to see Hampshire’s cricketers play at the United Services Officers’ Ground in the city centre. Hampshire, runners up in the County Championship the previous year, met the great but ageing Surrey side, who after seven consecutive County Championship titles, were about to relinquish their crown to Yorkshire.
I understood very little about that particular match when I watched it then, but in the decades since I have followed cricket – in particular county cricket – very closely. This book will argue that the county competition I first encountered, which had changed very little over the previous 50 years or more, has since then been subject to endless changes, some good, some bad, but forever changes – with more looming. In addition, the English game I first encountered, despite facing significant economic problems at county level, was more deeply embedded in English culture than it is today. Over those years it has become a fully professional participant in a global domestic and international game, dealing often in huge sums of money. In some parts of the world, particularly the Asian sub-continent, cricket plays a central role in society, but in England it has become an increasingly niche activity, played, watched and followed by an often devoted yet diminishing percentage of the population.
I did not grow up in a cricketing family, although by the late 1950s we would sometimes watch Test Matches when they appeared on our newly installed television. My mum was increasingly aware of my fondness for cricket, and in late August 1959 she was quite happy to pack me off for the day to the ground just a few hundred yards from my school. I went on my own with no clear idea what I was watching, although by the start of the following season I was ready and willing to watch regularly, and in 1961 I became a junior member, celebrating my team win its first County Championship title.
My mum had been a librarian, and keen to encourage me to read, would often find books about cricket for my birthday and at Christmas. As a consequence, I very soon encountered the writing and broadcasting of John Arlott and HS (Harry) Altham. Altham was the President of my county club but also, with Arlott, one of the authors of Hampshire’s history in 1957, which came to me as one of those presents. It did not take long to discover that he had also written a major history of the game. In the years since then some of the best cricket historians have challenged aspects of Altham’s histories, but he remains a figure worthy of respect for so many contributions to the game throughout his life, as a player, writer, administrator and, crucially, for his encouragement of young cricketers. Given their natural Hampshire ‘bias’, he and Arlott became ‘mentors’ to this boy who very quickly discovered a fondness for the history of the game, alongside the playing and the watching. I read and re-read Arlott’s writing and Altham’s histories during those formative years and I am grateful to them for starting me on this path.
This is not however, merely a history of the 50-plus years of English county and Test Match cricket since that first visit, for the specific motivation to write it was the latest set of proposals that emerged in 2015 to cut the County Championship again. These proposals are seen as ‘progressive’ while those of us who love the Championship are seen as impeding progress but as we shall see, change is not necessarily synonymous with progress. During the 2015 season I took a number of opportunities to argue against a further dismantling of the four-day game and found considerable support from fellow supporters. I do not presume to write on their behalf but this book is for all those who share my love of County Championship cricket.
There is I hope a second and perhaps more important audience. Reflecting on my first visits to cricket and the valuable role of the early publications I encountered, I decided to write for a similar audience of young people coming to cricket for the first time. This is a fairly long book, packed with all kinds of facts, ideas and opinions and I do not assume that younger readers will immediately engage with, or understand, everything that is written here. Rather, I hope they might return to it from time-to-time as a point of reference, while searching out other accounts to learn more of how we have arrived where we are, which if history is any judge will probably be a brief stay! Perhaps in 50 years time, one or two of my readers will be ‘writing’ their updated histories of the game, although what form publishing might take in 2065 I hesitate to speculate.
That first trip to watch county cricket was on Monday 17 August 1959. As I was beginning to plan this book, I realised that Hampshire were due to play a home 50-over match v Lancashire on the precise anniversary – Monday 17 August 2015 – although not, sadly, in Portsmouth. Rather than write this book for an imaginary ten-year-old – an ‘everyboy’ or ‘everygirl’ – I thought I might find a particular individual to have in mind while working on it. On my first visit in 1959, I had paid my ‘shilling’, sat on the grass by the boundary and was ignored by everybody for the rest of the day. Nobody bothered to check whether I was enjoying myself, or perhaps more importantly whether I might come back. I did, of course, and they have had more than their money’s worth from me since then, but it was all a matter of luck. On the other hand, in August 2015, Hampshire Cricket’s community wing invited, as usual, a couple of the county’s club sides to bring their Colts to play on the outfield before the match and then watch the professionals in action, so it was easy for me to ask Greig Stewart, who heads up that organisation, to find someone to bear in mind while I was writing.
Having requested a boy or girl around 10 years of age and preferably one who had never seen a county game before, I was taken to meet the adults from East Woodhay Cricket Club from the north of the county. In turn, they were happy to help, and immediately identified a boy called Spencer as the ideal candidate. So, there he is, on that day in August 2015, on the front cover. I required nothing special of him or his parents, who were with him on that day, beyond the willingness to let Spencer be my imagined focus. I think they were intrigued by my idea, seemed entirely happy to agree to my proposal, and after I met Spencer, his father confirmed this visit was his first county match and wrote down a few details, including his date of birth.
That was an extraordinary moment, because entirely by ‘chance’, it transpired that Spencer and I shared precisely the same birthday, so on his visit to the Ageas Bowl in 2015 he was, exactly, to the day, the same age that I was on my first visit in 1959. I suspect that Carl Jung might have a view of such a ‘coincidence’, but suffice it to say I was clear that the cricketing gods had conspired to enable this meeting and that the book was a project I must pursue. So I did, and I have, and here it is, specifically for Spencer and his peers, my fellow members and supporters and everyone else who loves English county cricket, and cares for its future.
1959 was one of the warm and sunny English summers of the 20th century, ranked eighth by Philip Eden in his Wisden survey (2000). There was a certain irony in the fine weather that summer since, for the first time, the English County Championship experimented with the covering of pitches. Almost inevitably, the covers were rarely used and batsmen flourished as they rarely had during that decade, although the first significant event I saw was Surrey’s John Edrich trapped lbw for nought by Derek Shackleton, the leading bowler in the County Championship throughout the 1950s and 1960s. As a Hampshire boy, ‘Shack’ became my first great hero – the archetypal English craftsman cricketer of what is now a bygone era. He took 100 first-class wickets over 20 consecutive seasons. No other bowler has ever done that, and now none ever will.
Apart from an occasional adjustment of the points for first innings lead, the covering of pitches was the first significant change in English county cricket since it had resumed after the war in 1946, when Yorkshire had also won the title. Indeed the County Championship was in many respects much the same as it had been at the start of the 20th century when Yorkshire had also succeeded Surrey as County Champions. I knew absolutely nothing of the history of cricket on that first visit in 1959 but it was my introduction to a great English sporting tradition, which unlike many other city-based sports was still rooted in the counties, which had once been the political and social power-centres of the country. Despite English cricket being a county competition however, it was increasingly played in city and town centres, which were best able to provide the paying audiences that could keep the game alive. Most of the counties’ main grounds were in towns and cities and at the higher level, every Test Match in England in 1959 was played in one of its major cities: London, Manchester, Nottingham, and Leeds, while in 1960 Birmingham would have its turn.
Despite that concentration in the urban areas, we shall see that first-class cricket in the 1950s had strong links across the counties at other levels, with professional cricketers often drawn from their counties’ schools and clubs and in their early years appearing frequently at the local club grounds representing the county’s Club & Ground and beneficiary’s sides. County Championship matches too, would take place at a number of grounds within their borders taking cricket to their supporters, as Hampshire did in Portsmouth on that hugely influential day in my life.
One thing I had no idea about in 1959 was that it was the first season of a brief experiment with covering pitches against the elements. Variations in cricket’s playing surfaces have an impact on the performance and outcome of every cricket match far in excess of any other professional sport. As I write this in late 2015, we have just learned that in next year’s County Championship the visiting side will be allowed to choose to bowl first, and only if they decline will a traditional toss take place. This is entirely to do with negating the preparation of pitches to suit home sides – particularly their quicker bowlers – and as such, is the latest attempt to improve the lot of the county spin bowler, an endangered species in county cricket. It might work, and it might not. If it does not, we can be sure that something else will be tried. That is the theme of this book; that the one constant in English cricket since the year I started watching it, has been change.
Across the years since 1946, indeed to a large extent since 1895 when my county Hampshire were first admitted to the expanded County Championship, the counties had played each other with teams consisting mostly of Englishmen, over three days on uncovered wickets. The number of games they played varied, the number of balls in an over did not settle on six for a few years and the points awarded for winning and taking first innings lead changed every now and then. Apart from that and a much-discussed new lbw law in the 1930s, things seemed to be much as they had always been until 1959. But since then, change has been pretty well constant and that seems likely to be the case in the near future.
But if continuity was the case in English county cricket prior to 1959, the world-at-large was a rather less certain place. Two world wars had wreaked havoc showing seeds of uncertainty, now compounded by the ‘Cold War’ and the threat of a nuclear holocaust. Britain was granting independence to the former colonies and was said to have lost its Empire in the fiasco of Suez in 1956, while a young American, Elvis Presley was getting younger people ‘All Shook Up’. Cinema and variety audiences were in decline as television became a fixture in many households; the motorcar took families to previously unexpected locations, and further afield, two weeks of Mediterranean sun was an enticing alternative to a Blackpool boarding house. Everything was changing, for better or for worse, and as if to acknowledge this, from 1959, English cricket started changing, too.
There is a view that sport reflects the culture and society it inhabits, locally and globally. The story is more complex. Sport is not merely a mirror to society; it is a part of it. It participates in the culture. If everything was changing, it was reflected in English cricket but it was also in some small way because English cricket began changing too. This change may have been less immediate or apparent than in for example, television, popular music or technology, but it was certainly at a greater rate than in most other spectator sports. On the surface at least the reason for that was almost entirely economic. In 2015, Stephen Chalke published a marvellous history of the County Championship, and he reported on one season when it was “deep in the doldrums” with rumours that a number of the counties might go under. As a consequence, “the reformers” came up with a variety of solutions about the length of games, the pitches, and the days best suited to attract spectators. That season was not 2015, but 1911. It was ever thus.
County cricket has always led a precarious existence, and almost every major change by these reformers is an attempt to make the game more ‘exciting’ in the hope of attracting its ‘potential’ audience. Sometimes those changes are wholly for the best and to be celebrated, but too often the pursuit of people who might come and watch takes for granted cricket’s more loyal and committed supporters. Sometimes the changes go further, dismantling the forms of the game of which they are particularly fond.
Given these thoughts, this might seem likely to be a book written by an old bloke about the ‘Good Old Days’, and it will most certainly offer an argument against the further dismantling of the County Championship. Indeed it will go farther, arguing that a degree of reinstatement is long overdue because all those who run cricket have a duty to preserve the great traditions of the game as custodians for future generations. It is not however a polemic against the various forms of limited-overs cricket which have varied in length from 20–65 overs and which have certainly reinvigorated the game over the past half-century. Also, while setting out to describe and challenge the endless obsession with change in English cricket, it will acknowledge that the period when I first encountered county and Test Match cricket was in many respects a depressing and worrying one, both in economic and playing terms.
When I first watched county cricket it was certainly no new ‘golden age’ in English cricket, while many of the changes since then have been for the good of the game. But that is not true of them all, and we now find ourselves in a situation where globally, Test Match crowds seem to be shrinking, where the County Championship is dominated by batsmen and medium pacers, where county spectators rarely see the best English or overseas cricketers, where Test Match cricket is no longer seen live on British terrestrial television, and where very few English state school or inner city children encounter cricket in the kind of sustained way that leads them to play it and follow it into adult life. There are many other points to be made, no least about the global governance of the game, but this book will examine principally the way the English game has been transformed over the years since 1959.
