The Championship must find its niche again and Mason Crane must not ruin my Spag Bol again

The Championship must find its niche again and Mason Crane must not ruin my Spag Bol again

Rich Clarke
CricketPaper
The exciting finale to the Championship game between Lancashire and Hampshire

The exciting finale to the Championship game between Lancashire and Hampshire

He does not know it yet but Mason Crane will be receiving a bill from me this week.

The Hampshire leg-spinner’s five wickets and stunning run out created the Lancashire collapse that enthralled every county fan in the early evening on Thursday.

This was sport at its best, with the destination of the Championship title drifting in four different directions before Dane Vilas smeared the winning boundary, and the Spaghetti Bolognese I had been cooking succumbed to its charms. The pasta boiled over on to my hob and hot water seeped down into the kitchen cabinets while Mrs C believes one of her favourite pans will never recover from the baked-on mince and tomato sauce that resulted from my distraction. But, as those ambulance-chasing adverts tell us: “where there’s blame, there’s a claim” and Mr Crane is in my cross-hairs right now.

Only joking!

Along with 3,000 others, I had kept an eye on the YouTube stream from Aigburth all day. When Crane hoisted Hampshire back into the game after tea on day three, that figure rose to almost 18,000. Another 2,000 were in the ground. These are not eye-catching numbers but we must start seeing them as evidence that the County Championship can be a viable sporting event.

My first column of this campaign suggested that, by September, we would know if the traditional game had been ‘outgunned’. Such was the spectre of The Hundred that I feared the red-ball format may suffer a slow yet mortal blow from its very appearance. Now, in my last column, it seems sensible to reassess this assertion.

The Hundred came and went with great fanfare. It was certainly no failure but any realistic understanding of its true impact is impossible because its supporters were so hell-bent on calling it a success, often bending the truth in their haste.

My own KPI was its ability to grow interest in the wider game, a crucial component of which was connecting it with county cricket. I have seen no evidence of this. The now-deleted social media post on The Hundred account suggesting devotees had nothing to do until next year’s competition was perhaps the clearest sign that the event sees itself as an island, not a major country within a continent.

I fear that Ross Whiteley’s move to the county that plays host to his Hundred franchise and Sussex’s semi-abandonment of red-ball cricket may become trends. This season’s calendar was an omnishambles and we do not even know the format for next year’s Championship yet.

But despite it all, the Royal London Cup was an unexpected joy thanks to its Dads and Lads feel, the Blast just gets better and better while the Championship enjoyed one of its best finales ever. And that is saying something if you remember the circumstances that saw Middlesex lift the trophy in 2016 and Essex pip Somerset in 2019.

So it might be tempting to shake your head and smile once again at the fortitude of the old county game. Many obituaries have been written and perhaps that pre-season pessimism was misplaced.

Unfortunately, it is quite the opposite.

Like many in middle age, I have reached the stage where everything that is sold to me is clearly not worth buying. My sporting holy grail has quality, meaning, tradition, easy accessibility, a convivial crowd and a decent pint. County cricket ticks all these boxes.

The morality of this sport is like no other, that is why I always walked if I knicked one behind and now clap the opposition’s achievements at Chelmsford. For football, it was the opposite so these qualities (both playing and watching) so clearly belong to the culture of the game, not me.

Like a bear preparing for hibernation, this season has left me with enough sustenance for my sporting soul to get through winter. But I will wince at every headline between now and April. Not because I fear change but because I fear the motives of those making them. The sport’s administrators are clearly not interested in my kind and their values.

If you can leave Pakistan in the lurch after their presence in England last season bailed you out of a financial hole then you will have no issue quietly suffocating a few penniless counties who are seen as a drain on the game.

We cannot hide behind the defence that county cricket is a conveyor belt of talent for the England team because this job does not take 18 first-class counties. Ten super teams would do the job just as well and, in a staggering coincidence, this is the number of Hundred franchises we may see in a few years.

That is why the County Championship must somehow wrestle back its significance and re-position itself as a viable competition in its own right. If it acts like a feeder league it will be treated as one, especially when its governing body appears to have little interest in its ongoing health.

The decay of the county game will not be perceptible every September. But, like a middle-age beauty queen looking in the morning mirror, we will all reconvene one April and find domestic cricket’s mortality staring back at us

I do not want to end a fine county campaign on a down note. In many ways it has been a wonderful six months. But the events of this much-feared season must make us redouble our vigilance.

The threat to the county game is greater than ever before. We legacy fans must spend the winter thinking of solutions.

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

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