by John Wisden
But the two sides who seized the early advantage retained it. Tables can mislead, for until the final round some teams have played more games than others; but, on the basis of points per completed match, Derbyshire led the promotion race from their third fixture to the finish, and Warwickshire led the title race from first to last.
Warwickshire were worthy champions. Many who had seen them in 2011 (though not the bookies) tipped them for the crown because they had players with the will and nous to respond when required. Four of their six successes had come by late May, with nine men, including Ian Bell during a rare release by England, contributing at least a match-winning performance. The title arrived five and a half playing days from the close, and Varun Chopra was the sole England-raised batsman to hit 1,000 Championship runs.
Nottinghamshire, their only real threat until mid-August, had also won four times by May 28, but would not prevail again in the wet. After their first ten games, the remarkable Andre Adams – who had played in nine – had 50 Championship wickets, 12 more than his nearest rival, and it seemed the title would rest on his private battle with the collective excellence of the Warwickshire attack. But Adams lost fitness, playing only three more games for four more wickets, and his side gave six men to England during the final quarter. When Nottinghamshire and Warwickshire met twice in the last three games, both proved to be draws – inevitably rain-affected.
Leapfrogging Nottinghamshire, who slipped back to fifth, Somerset won their last two matches in that belatedly bright September to take second place, and Middlesex, coming third, achieved their best finish for 17 years. Sussex, either side of the Twenty20 hiatus, eluded the showers to win four successive home games, in all of which they inserted their opponents in contests lasting fewer than 270 overs. They finished fourth.
Durham, ageing in 2011, were now simply aged. In each of their first five games, they fielded at least four players who had passed their 33rd birthdays. Half their first ten matches were lost, and another abandoned, before – with ranks refreshed by two young South Africans – they rousingly won five of their last six, thwarting relegation under Paul Collingwood, a new captain at 36. By then, three former Championship-winning stalwarts had either retired or gone out on loan. Of eight matches on questionable pitches in Chester-le-Street, six reached a result. Each came in the overs equivalent of under three days. In all, even discounting matches where declarations attempted to outwit bad weather, 35 victories (51% of the total) were similarly terse.
Having lost to Middlesex in April, Surrey bitterly castigated the Lord’s pitch – “awful” was one of the milder comments, but the word gained true weight two months later. Surrey’s season was overshadowed by the death of Tom Maynard at 23. It was the club’s third such bleak loss in two generations: Graham Kersey, the oldest at 25, had died in 1997, Ben Hollioake in spring 2002. Their bowling, on paper, had looked strong enough to win the title, but on spinning pitches at The Oval, Surrey needed to stir themselves to win their last two home games and stay in the first division.
Although one round remained, that second Surrey win condemned Worcestershire to relegation. But not for some three hours was Lancashire’s fate sealed over the river at Lord’s; needing victory, they went down blazing, in an impossible attempt to score 304 in 39 overs. They joined Yorkshire in 2002 and Nottinghamshire in 2006 by being demoted the year after taking the title. At least their failure to win any of six games in Liverpool buried the myth that they owed their 2011 triumph to Aigburth: their home and away records that summer were in fact identical. The simpler truth was that a team of largely unspectacular individuals could not again summon the energy to prevail by collective dedication, a reality illustrated by a return of 18 expensive wickets for Kyle Hogg, one of the surprise heroes of the previous season.
If the title race failed to match the drama of the preceding two years, the promotion race was still theoretically alive until the penultimate evening. Kent, a revamped side with enough veteran imports to make Durham look callow, remained unbeaten until August 5. They lost their nerve when set for victory at Derby, to be defeated in the division’s pivotal result. Shocked, they followed with a home loss to Essex, and humiliation came at Cardiff in the last game. It meant Derbyshire and Yorkshire were safely promoted. Both won on the campaign’s final afternoon, and Derbyshire became champions shortly before tea. Four of the team had emerged from their Academy.
It would have been a travesty had Yorkshire been denied. There is no definitive way of measuring the handicap of rain, but they surrendered a realistic possible maximum of 151 points; Essex, also severely hit, lost 142. By the same criteria, Sussex and Derbyshire missed only 57 points each. Of course there is no way of knowing how many of those points they would actually have collected. Until late on, Yorkshire’s attack – on benign home pitches – was statistically among the least penetrative in the country: two of their five wins came after Gloucestershire offered them targets. But with more time, they would clearly have won more matches. The same is true of Essex. Hampshire, however, squandered a real chance. From second place, ten points clear of Yorkshire, they lost their last three games, their attention perhaps deflected towards limited-overs glory.
The rest were never in it. Glamorgan continued to be predictably weaker since boardroom meddling in 2010; Leicestershire managed a better season, despite nine former players appearing for other counties in the Championship (and three for England); poachers still prowl at their gates. Northamptonshire discarded David Capel in July, with the chief executive’s comment that “every coach has his shelf-life in the modern game”, before their worst finish for 34 years. And spirited Gloucestershire, another club strapped for cash, merited more than a second wooden spoon in five summers.
The Championship itself merited far more. Tempting though it is, we cannot blame the ECB for climate change. But, like Albanian despots arranging revotes until they receive the mandate they want, the ECB tried to make clubs accept more Twenty20 in a plan already once rejected. They will get their way in 2014 but, crucially, not at the expense of the Championship. The counties refused any dilution of the competition, and also turned down a proposal to start the 2013 campaign on April 3, even though this meant forgoing participation in the Champions League. Yet that loud infant, Twenty20, still dictates too soon a start. In 2012, two matches were entirely abandoned in the same round for the first time in 25 years. They were scheduled to finish on April 29; in 1993, the inaugural season of a purely four-day Championship, that was the day when the first matches began.
More than half the 2012 Championship was over by June 9, part of the reason why patterns of play have become increasingly formulaic. Ignoring joke bowling, first division wickets fell once every 52 balls last year: in not one of the 20 seasons of four-day play has that strike-rate been bettered. Modern seamers have never had it so good. But for spin, a key element in Test cricket, the decline is profound. If three left-armers, Monty Panesar, Simon Kerrigan and David Wainwright, are removed from the equation, England-raised spinners took fewer than one Championship wicket in eight last year. Behind that leading trio, resources are worryingly diminished.
Of course the damp had much to do with this, but certain trends have been growing for years. Every one of the 16 wins for Warwickshire, Somerset and Sussex came after they batted second and, in terms of wins and losses, all but three teams (Lancashire, Nottinghamshire and Essex) had superior records at home to away, often markedly so. Astoundingly, only four of the 35 victories in Division One came after batting first on winning the toss, the historic choice in Tests; two of the four were at Old Trafford, the other two at The Oval. Pitches, tuned to home attacks, are penalising top-order batsmen and promoting seamers without the skill for international success. It is a process arguably encouraged by a points system that, with good motives, has gone marginally too far towards rewarding wins. Creating low-scoring results, even over three days, becomes all.
With the social base of English cricket quite criminally narrowed, a
quarter of Championship appearances last year were made by those who learned the game abroad. Keaton Jennings, the South Africa Under-19 captain in 2011, joined Durham last August, suddenly becoming English. His mother is Sunderland-born; father Ray, however, was formerly South Africa’s national coach, and is now their Under-19 coach. Nick Compton, who made his Test debut in November, and Gary Ballance, named in the England Performance squad, were natives of South Africa and Zimbabwe who came to Harrow at 16 to complete their cricketing educations. This in the context of government figures conceding that the sale of 31 state-school playing fields had been approved in 27 months since the coalition came to power. Visiting supporters at the Tests last year displayed T-shirts with the message: “Our South Africans are better than yours.” They, anyway, could afford to see the joke.
FRIENDS LIFE t20, 2012
REVIEW BY ALAN GARDNER
Nostalgia may not be what it was, but neither is cricket’s youngest format – at least in the country of its birth. This was the year in which concerns about the structure, presentation and economics of domestic Twenty20 in England came to the boil, as players, administrators and fans (if you listened hard enough) pondered the direction taken by an innovation that has been cast as saviour and envoy of the game, as well as its bête noire.
In its tenth year, and now branded as the Friends Life t20, the competition reverted from a two-season embonpoint to a leaner, ten-game group stage, divided into three regions. During a summer that was wetter than Jacques Cousteau’s shower cap, the rain clouds cast a long shadow over the tournament. But the scheduling was a further source of disgruntlement; four home matches in five days for Surrey was just one example of a problematic fixture list.
Poor weather bedevilled the four-week block for the group stage to the extent that several counties called for the tournament to be spread across the season, with matches on specific days of the week to encourage a sense of familiarity with the fixture list among the general public. This echoed the “appointment to view” mantra for Twenty20 espoused by the Morgan Review.
At the same time, the likes of Muttiah Muralitharan, representing Gloucestershire, and Eoin Morgan urged the creation of a franchise system in the mould of Twenty20’s prize peacock, the Indian Premier League, as well as the newly minted Big Bash League in Australia. Cricket’s format wars have never been as simple as Betamax v VHS, and now a significant split had emerged about the way forward for English Twenty20.
A PCA survey reinforced the players’ preference for a dedicated window in which to attract big-name signings and focus broadcaster interest (at a time of disdain for bankers’ bonuses, cynics noted the line that argued for “a significant increase in the prize money at stake”, including £1m for the winners rather than the current £200,000). But “appointment-to-view” would end up winning the day: once again the county game was characterised as being out of touch with the modern world. The move from forward-thinking pioneers to outdated protectorate in only nine years was quite something.
The IPL is cricket’s Lolita, a seductive “trip of three steps down the palate” bewitching those old enough to know better, and by any measure England’s Twenty20 tournament appeared to have faded badly. However, while the competitions do not bear much comparison, it was with a baleful synchronicity that the title sponsors of both – Friends Life and DLF – announced on the same day in August that they would not be renewing their contracts.
In all, 16 of the 90 group games were abandoned without a ball bowled, along with four no-results and ten fixtures shortened by rain. On Friday July 6, seven matches out of nine were washed out, a tidal-wave effect that began with Derbyshire’s game against Nottinghamshire being called off at 10.21am – more than eight and a half hours before the scheduled start – and finally claimed Hampshire v Sussex as it neared the innings break some 11 hours later.
With a third of the group matches affected by rain, debate was rife about the tournament’s structure. Since the availability of England players was almost non-existent, and numerous marquee overseas signings – including Chris Gayle, Lasith Malinga, Saeed Ajmal and Shahid Afridi – had pulled out of deals to play, some of the arguments against spreading the tournament throughout the season were undoubtedly weakened.
Surrey’s chief executive Richard Gould was the most vocal advocate of change, championing the ideas of “scheduling and local heroes” in an attempt to turn casual consumers into engaged fans. His county had already been dealt a difficult hand, with a fixture list that included three games at The Oval between July 3 and July 6, but the death of Tom Maynard meant the rearrangement of another home match, against Hampshire, to July 2. That sequence followed a seven-day gap at the height of the tournament in which Surrey didn’t play a game at all, home or away.
In tough economic times, it was difficult to market multiple home matches so close together, and Gould argued that fixtures in the early part of the week were a hard sell anyway: most counties preferred to play on Friday evenings (and, in London, Thursdays too, a good night for corporate clients) and at the weekend. A league structure played over a few months would be less likely to fall victim to a concentrated period of rainfall, as well as being easier for the punters to understand.
Glamorgan – who, with five of their ten group games washed out, suffered most – and Somerset expressed similar views, although there remained a group of chief executives convinced that a one-hit, short-burst focus on sixes and celebrity was still the way to go. Spectators, meanwhile, quietly questioned ticket prices and the wide variety of start times – 15 of them in the group stage. And all this was without the added headache of having to factor in hosting the ICC Champions Trophy, as 2013 would demand.
In the end, the reformists had their way. After further horse-trading with the counties on the future of the Championship and domestic one-day cricket, and following the results of a fan survey conducted by market researchers Populus, the ECB announced that from 2014 the Twenty20 competition would be played mostly on Fridays.
With the reduction in 2012 from 16 group games per team to ten, a fall in overall gates was to be expected. But the number of rain-affected matches made it difficult to assess the theory that sharpening up the fixture list would create more demand. Competing with football’s European Championship, and advance claims for money and attention from the Olympics, clearly did not help either.
The overall attendance was 313,215 from 90 games, compared with 633,957 from 144 in 2011 – but the average crowd (excluding abandonments) of around 4,500 remained roughly the same. A more useful contrast was with the last time the competition was played in the same structure, during the drier summer of 2009: the overall figure from the group stage that year (with only three abandoned games) was 450,172, and the average attendance 5,000.
Counties such as Essex and Somerset were still able to pack out smaller grounds, and spin atmosphere as well as money, while Nottinghamshire continued to make a success of staging Twenty20 at a Test venue. Trent Bridge has been recognised for providing one of the best spectator experiences on the circuit; the club’s strategy focused on finding the extra 1% off the field wherever they could, with free entry for members, family ticketing packages, live entertainment and imaginative use of their video replay screen. But the word most commonly used by county chairmen to describe attendances was “disappointing”.
The cricket that was played proved solid and competitive, if not spectacular. The average first-innings score (when all 20 overs were available) was a scratchy 151, not aided by slow and often damp pitches. But tension compensated to a degree for a lack of flair: around a third of all completed matches, including the final, were still realistically up for grabs in the last over.
Sussex, led by a gunslinging top order of Chris Nash, Luke Wright and Matt Prior, were the only team to score 200 more than once (they did so four times, including the group match at Hampshire, which was abandoned after 17.4 overs). Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire – who twice broke their own records for openin
g stands – also piled on the runs. The Midlands/Wales/West Group was the most keenly contested: none of its three quarter-finalists was guaranteed progression until the final round.
There were surprises too. Leicestershire, the defending champions, finished a sorry last in the North Group; Hampshire, the eventual winners, picked up one point (from an abandonment) from their first three South Group games, before going unbeaten through the rest of the competition; Gloucestershire, also-rans in the previous two seasons, reached the last eight, as did Worcestershire, for the first time since 2007; Yorkshire won their first Twenty20 semi-final – beating Sussex, one of the favourites – then lost their first final. More predictably, Northamptonshire won just once, to go with their two victories in 2011.
Tactically, it was a good year for southpaws. The three leading wicket-takers – Yorkshire’s Mitchell Starc, Chris Liddle of Sussex, and Essex’s Reece Topley – were left-arm seamers, as spinners generally struggled on tracks that weren’t for turning (although that didn’t stop Surrey from regularly fielding four). A lack of pace was still useful, however, as the success of Dimitri Mascarenhas, Rich Pyrah and Daryl Mitchell showed. Left-handers also led the way with the bat, with Phillip Hughes (who averaged 100 from eight innings) and David Miller (the sixiest hitter of the tournament, with 21) topping the run charts by some distance.
County culture has always been more underneath the mainstream than against it, so it was perhaps fitting that the majority of the overseas recruits who did end up making an impact were of the low-fi variety. Starc and Miller, both young and exciting but hardly names plucked from the firmament, were central to Yorkshire’s campaign, while Hampshire were inspired in going for the Australian Glenn Maxwell – then playing for South Wilts in the Southern Premier League – as cover for Shahid Afridi. Scott Styris, a nomad of the format, scored the joint-third-fastest hundred in Twenty20 history in Sussex’s quarter-final win over Gloucestershire. His 37-ball century was only the second of the tournament (the lowest number since the inaugural 2003 edition), but was all the more eye-catching for coming at the knockout stage. James Fuller suffered most, conceding 38 runs in one over to equal the record in professional cricket.