Are the margins of the season all that bad? I'm not so sure

PAUL EDWARDS: April is certainly colder than high summer and September is a little wetter but as someone who’s covered every round of the County Championship or BWT for four years, I've not noticed these variations to be a grave handicap

Extremities have been on my mind this week.

Not surprising, you may say, given the average temperature in April and the need to preserve one’s exposed portions from the cold. That requirement was made very evident during the game between Durham and Warwickshire at Chester-le-Street where umpires Russell Warren and Michael Gough’s thin black gloves gave their raised fingers a vaguely Gothic aspect.

As it happens, though, my thoughts centred rather more on the temporal perimeters of the season, specifically April and September and the fact of our playing County Championship cricket throughout those months.

There was a time when we didn’t. You don’t have to look back too far to find seasons when first-class cricket began in May and ended in September with the monstrous piss-up known as the Scarborough Festival. Batsmen would make plucky efforts to hit the middle of the three balls they could see coming towards them and that would be that.

In 2021 four-day cricket began on April 8 and the final first-class game, in which the two leading counties will contest the Bob Willis Trophy over five days at Lord’s, is due to end on October 1.

“The County Championship has been pushed to the margins of the season,” many people, myself included, have written, with the clear implication that this is an altogether dreadful development. Well I’m by no means so sure it is.

^{Paul Edwards has enjoyed watching the likes of Jack Carson of Sussex so far this season}

Maybe I should make it very plain that my ideal preference is for a season in which there are two or three Championship matches in each of six months, thus making it more likely that the eventual champions will have been tested in a variety of conditions from spring to early autumn. But I am perfectly reconciled to the extreme unlikelihood of that happening.

For one thing coaches like their teams to play their cricket in blocks: it helps organise their training routines and it makes it easier to engage overseas players for specific formats. That’s surely fair enough. For another, the ECB and the counties want to play as much short-form cricket as possible in the school holidays when revenues can be maximised. So for the foreseeable future the English season will have to accommodate something close to its current variety and that will apply whether the Hundred is the hottest ticket in Hampshire or goes tits up deluxe.

Given these considerations, I really think there is no great problem about playing in April and September. April is certainly colder than high summer and September is a little wetter but as someone who’s covered every round of the County Championship or BWT for four years, I’ve not noticed these variations to be a grave handicap. More prosaically, they are the reasons why spectators wear thick coats and cricketers own warm sweaters. If you want to watch cricket in a settled climate for six months, you should probably emigrate.

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It would be very different, of course, if the cricket played in April and September was of low quality or meaningless. But quite apart from domestic priorities, the first month of the campaign offers players a chance to stake a claim for a place in one of England’s teams while the last gives us a proper climax to the season in which the County Championship is decided. And however much one or two ECB officials scribble on their flip-charts, winning the Championship remains the main domestic goal of a large majority of county chairmen. (By the way, I’m fairly sure that few sentences I shall write this summer will give me greater pleasure than that last one.)

Playing cricket in April can also be justified by more than the fulfilment of the county’s international obligations, important as these are. Most obviously the number of people watching games on the live streams suggests that the domestic game attracts more interest, albeit remote, than was commonly supposed. April is also plainly available as a month in which a solid block of four-day games can be played and in which we are given our first sight of how young players have developed after winter nets or a season overseas.

But absolutely none of the reasons I have offered so far would be valid if the cricket we have seen so far this year had been made pointless by wet pitches or had been a series of four-day endurance tests in absurdly unpleasant conditions. Instead, we have seen some terrific games between highly-motivated counties, all of whose players are spurred by the prospect of winning the title.

The argument that April has rarely offered ideal conditions for spin bowling is perfectly fair. But global warming, which I pray will be reversed in my lifetime, has given us two successive dry springs. So over the last month I have seen Simon Kerrigan continue to revive his career, Jack Carson confirm his growing reputation and Matthew Parkinson produce what may yet be the ball of the season to dismiss Northamptonshire’s Adam Rossington. (Catch it on YouTube if you haven’t already done so.)

Nor has the argument that early spring regularly sees bemused batsmen groping for the ball against nagging seamers on damp tracks been justified by the cricket we have watched to date. I’m fairly confident that both David Bedingham and Tom Haines are fans of playing in April and I’m certain Haseeb Hameed is in favour of it.

And to judge from results, more or less everybody in Gloucestershire has enjoyed themselves hugely. Two of the three groups in the reorganised championship are tightly contested but there remains the delicious prospect of the title being won for the first time by one of the two West Country counties. It would be the loveliest story of the summer.

Either way it will be the greatest fun to see how the season unfolds. But none of the enjoyment we have so far derived from our cricket would have been possible had we not started the season in April and shrugged off the heavy snow showers that gave the photographers work at Emirates Old Trafford and Emerald Headingley.

Yes, it’s been cold at times, but it’s also been warm in the sun at Worcester and Chester-le-Street and the cricket we have seen has been purposeful, intriguing and of high mark.

As ever, the intention of my column is to prompt and sustain a debate rather than close one with brutish pronouncements regarding what “everybody knows”. (The problem with pubs reopening is that they still let in pub bores.)

But I’m absolutely firm about one issue: for all that we have enjoyed our cricket, our season will not truly begin until crowds return to grounds on May 20.

The absence of spectators has been vastly more noticeable than the chilly weather this April: you can wear a jumper and a fleece when it’s cold but nothing can protect you against a lack of human warmth.

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