My last look at Chelmsford in 2018
September 13, The Cricket Paper
For all but two counties, the red-ball season is now over.
Call me a silly old soul but, for decades, I have always endeavoured to make a special trip to Chelmsford for our final game. With the embers dying on another Essex campaign, I would leave by the exit at the Hayes Close End then stop and turn to take in one last moment on the spot I watched cricket with my late father. Then, often with eyes moistening, I’d head off towards winter.
Such sentimentality is the most minuscule casualty of the 2020 pandemic but the emotions came flooding back this week on the final day of Conference games in the Bob Willis Trophy.
I posted a picture on Twitter of my ‘last look’ in 2018. It showed eight men in the Autumn of their lives sitting chatting about the game going on in front of them and, in all probability, the season just gone. I added the caption “County cricket is the most wonderful waste of time ever invented”. Those of us who love the serenity of the four-day game knew exactly what I meant.
Some of us mourn for the Championship when it passes each September. It underpins our summer. We check-in during work breaks and spend idle weekends in the garden with the commentary in the background. It is rarely insistent on our lives but it is always there.
And then, all of sudden, it is not.
Therefore it was bittersweet that the same feeling came over me this week, even though my Essex have still to play the final against Somerset at Lord’s at the end of the month. The pandemic struck with teams deep into pre-season so I did not expect much county cricket in 2020, especially the red-ball version that loses money the domestic sport can ill-afford to forego. But I got one and, you know what? It was great. Three competitive, storyful regional conferences and a showpiece final to cap an event named after a recently-lost English cricket hero.
Then there were the tales - Derbyshire’s come-from-nowhere bid for glory, the outgrounds at Arundel and Aigburgh, the success of the live streams, the community created by the BBC commentators, Darren Stevens still being Darren Stevens, the Twitter chatter from the teams and the very diversion it all served to create.
The ECB have been pilloried by traditional county fans such as myself over recent years for their brazen, bombastic and ill-considered introduction of The Hundred. But the Bob Willis Trophy has been executed with care and precision. We hear that the groundswell of support from all parts of the game is such that the format may become permanent. Even then, there is an eye on ensuring the fixture list does not become monotonous, with competitive games to the end and every county will have a shot at the title.
Frankly, many traditionalists felt, despite bluff and bluster to the contrary, The Hundred maybe the end of ‘our cricket’ - the red-ball version played in whites. We were dying out and digesting a full four days would be too much for upcoming generations who had only been fed the fast-food version of the game. However, it seems something much more palatable has emerged from a potential disaster.
To my mind, there seems little reason to change from two divisions but 2020 may have provided sufficient ‘proof of concept’ for the three-conference format. It is another set of new clothes from the Emperors for a competition that alters its identity more than it should. But I sense that the county members, who were labelled as myopic misanthropes in the past few years, seem happy to embrace this radical change.
As it turns out, the season that so nearly never was may provide positive change and welcome unity for the red-ball game in the years to come.
* Read The Grumbler column The Cricket Paper, every Sunday during the season
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