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Paul Hardcastle was not one of those unfamiliar names in the Sussex side for the Championship game with Worcestershire this week. In fact, I doubt he even plays cricket.

However, he immediately came to mind when I perused the team-sheet from the game at Hove.

Sussex had named the youngest line-up in Championship history with six teenagers, no capped players and a skipper barely into his twenties. Their average age was 19.6.

Or n-n-n-n-nineteen point six, as Hardcastle’s 1985 smash hit would put it.

That number referred to the average age of a combat soldier in the Vietnam war and, with due reverence to the Joe Leach, Dillon Pennington and the rest of the Worcestershire bowling ‘attack’, it is hardly the same sort of enemy. However, both figures did reveal that boys were doing a man’s job.

After a breakthrough campaign in white-ball cricket, Archie Lenham was making his first-class debut against Worcestershire. Earlier this season, Dan Ibrahim hit the Championship's youngest half-century and, on September 6 last year, James Coles had become the youngest first-class player for Sussex at 16 years 157 days.

Clearly, they are breeding them young on the south coast these days. But it is a trend we have been seeing elsewhere during the 2021 county season. Over 100 players made their List-A debuts in the Royal London Cup last month, many of them born this millennium.

The overwhelming reason for this was the Hundred, who pilfered their squads from the counties to such an extent that there was talk of the 50-over competition being rendered so meaningless that it would be cancelled this year.

In fact, for legacy fans such as myself, the Royal London Cup was something of a silver lining to the tournament that so clouded our season. But such a disruptive event is bound to have numerous unintended consequences, especially when you toss in the effect of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic.

Back in March, research from Sheffield University suggested that the effects of Covid had left a £120m hole in the finances of the county game. One of the smaller counties, Leicestershire, estimated their shortfall was £1.5m but bigger organisations with the overheads of hotels and conferencing businesses would be likely to suffer much greater losses.

When lockdown meant fans were shut out of last season, staffs at counties were cut or furloughed, thousands of members donated their annual fees and, to their credit, the ECB stepped in swiftly with a financial package. Given the gravity of the situation, it seems incredible that we kept the lights on at all 18 first-class counties.

The maskless masses in your local supermarket suggests that much of the UK thinks it is through the worst of Covid. This is wrong. Just wait for the spikes in the next few months after the schools and universities return. The success of the vaccine roll-out has not stymied the infection rate, merely the seriousness of its effects.

But we can all agree that the bill for the pandemic has yet to be paid. The furlough scheme does not end until September 30 and yet the Office for Budget Responsibility estimates the cost to be around £66bn. Hopefully, everyone, even those rich tax-dodging multi-nationals, will be paying their share when it is passed on.

The critical events of the last two years – the Hundred and the pandemic – have combined to make the first-class counties even more dependent than before on central funding. To add insult to financial injury, the extension to the stupidly-named “Freedom Day” saw restrictions come down at midnight on Monday, July 19, less than six hours after the group games of the Vitality Blast had concluded. So most counties missed out on their biggest money-spinner for the second season in succession.

A limited number of fans had been allowed in before that but restrictions were stringent, especially at the smaller grounds, and costs could be high. Essex estimated an additional £80,000 was needed to cover the Covid-related regulations of a four-day game at Chelmsford with 600 in attendance.

Therefore, perhaps it is no wonder that the two most experienced players not figuring in the first-team, Matt Quinn and Varun Chopra, were loaned to Kent and Middlesex respectively, in the middle of this season. Elsewhere, seasoned players like Sam Northeast, Nick Gubbins, Mark Stoneman and Alex Thomson have all moved permanently or on loan. Late season moves happen every year but 2021 seems to be have been particularly busy.

Getting them off the wage bill and playing younger, cheaper players makes financial sense in this climate. Especially as Royal London Cup sides were expected to be young and, when the Championship returned in August, two-thirds of the teams had nothing to play for.

That’s why Somerset, Warwickshire and Hampshire have added the likes of Azhar Ali, Chemar Holder and Mohammed Abbas as they go for the title while Travis Head (Sussex) and Peter Siddle (Essex) have not been replaced after returning to Australia.

As I said, there is an upside to all this, county fans love seeing youngsters given a go and the Sussex v Worcestershire game saw both sides field 10 players brought through their academies.

But the wider concern for county cricket is precisely the same as that of UK society. Namely that the pandemic will provide a convenient cover to accelerate a process that has been going on for some time.

The concentration of money and resources not to the many but the few.

* This article first appeared in The Cricket Paper, get it every Sunday or subscribe here

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