PAUL EDWARDS: Almost regardless of how well young cricketers have done, some look out of their depth in county cricket while others are plain petrified. Bean, by contrast, looked as he was enjoying grafting away against Lancashire
Sport is a matter of thresholds. More accurately, more cruelly too, it is a matter of filters. Nothing like all the young players who perform decently in the club handicap will be able to cut it in the world of semi-professional golf. A midfielder who struts around the local leagues will suddenly find himself by-passed when he plays fourth-team football on a bigger stage. And as for a 20-year-old left-handed opener from York…well, yes, why don't we talk about Finlay Joseph Bean for a while?
We'll begin with some facts. Fin Bean made his first-class debut for Yorkshire, the county of his birth, in the Roses match that ended on Thursday evening. That followed three Royal London Cup games in which he had made 61, 3 and 10.
Against Lancashire, though, he notched 42 runs in the first innings before being nailed leg before by a fine yorker from Tom Bailey and had added 25 in the second dig when he pushed forward at a ball from Tom Hartley that bounced and turned out of the rough to give George Lavelle a tricky catch behind the stumps.
Those figures tell coaches something but nothing like enough. For example, they don't reveal the fluency of Bean's strokes, including the defensive ones, against Lancashire's high-quality bowlers. They don't tell you how long he batted: 153 minutes in the first innings and 120 in the second. They don't inform you that Bean made one run off his first 27 balls in first-class cricket before driving Will Williams past mid-on and through the covers in the same over to collect his first boundaries in the big time.
Above all, though, they don't tell you that Fin Bean looked as if he belonged in the first-class game. That's a subjective judgement, of course, but a vital one, given that he is on a one-year rookie contract at Headingley.
Bean only has a rookie contract at Yorkshire until October 2023 (Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)
Almost regardless of how well young cricketers have done in age-group or second-team cricket, some players look out of their depth in county cricket; others are plain petrified. Quite quickly, one way or another, they are filtered out of the first-class game.
By contrast, Bean looked as he was enjoying grafting away in an environment that he hopes will become his workplace and his contribution to Yorkshire securing a vital draw was appreciated by his head coach, Ottis Gibson.
"Even though he [Bean] didn't go on and get a hundred or a fifty, he faced a lot of balls and spent a lot of time in the middle," he said. "Those innings will do the world for him going forwards into the rest of the season."
Well, there are only three matches left in Yorkshire’s season, but the coaches and Bean’s team-mates will know more about their new colleague after the home games against Essex and Warwickshire and the visit to Surrey.
At the same time, even if Bean does well, Gibson will be careful not to praise him too much too soon. It is the trickiest of judgements. Even players who have a good first season can have their games dissected six months later and their careers destroyed. And folk wonder why I become impatient with people who tell me that county cricket is soft. Overseas players, even those with burgeoning Test careers don't seem to think so.
Bean is already on England's radar (Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)
But let's have a last look at Fin Bean's record.
The indispensable Cricket Archive first records him playing for Yorkshire Under-14s against Derbyshire Under 14s at New Rover Cricket Club, Richmond Oval, in Leeds on June 5, 2016. Sadly, though, it won’t tell you much else because these things are dependent on the information fed into them and although Yorkshire won that match by eight wickets and Bean was not out, we have no information as to how many runs he scored.
Delve deeper and you will find hundreds of matches, many of them for Yorkshire's age-group sides, a few for England Under-19s and 76 games for York in the Northern Premier League – but then they say club cricket is soft, too.
Most spectacularly of all, you will find the match played at the Nottinghamshire Sports Ground this June in which Bean made 441, the highest individual score ever recorded in the Second XI Championship, for Yorkshire against Nottinghamshire.
By the time he was bowled by Calvin Harrison, he had batted 712 minutes, faced 518 balls and hit 52 fours plus three sixes. It is the sort of achievement that will get into next year’s Wisden but it does not mean that Bean will make it as a professional.
A lot of guff is talked about at the end of the cricket season. Yes, there is a certain sadness about the game in England ending for six months – already I'm wondering where I'll be in the last week of September – but I'm also looking forward to reading and thinking about other things, in addition to my winter writing schedule.
For how much longer with county cricket accommodate young players trying to make their way? (Nathan Stirk/Getty Images)
Somehow, my summers on the circuit have always been enriched by my life away from the game. And how many of you would like to spend an entire year watching four-day cricket or anything else come to that?
Yet one of the sweetest things about the final few games of the season is seeing a young player make a good debut and wondering where his cricket will have taken him by the time the leaves on the trees are green once more. The sight of such cricketers in early autumn should seem ironic but instead, it is fitting. It serves as a reassurance that there will be another season – when other young Yorkshire cricketers will be challenging for places in the team.
And once again, without really intending to do so or even mentioning his name until now, I find that I have written a response to much that Andrew Strauss has been proposing over the past few weeks.
If the number of first-class games is reduced and if county cricket becomes nothing more than a laboratory in which England players can be tested, the number of contracts available for players like Bean will be more limited. No doubt I'll return to this theme over the next month, so for the moment all I'd like to do is wish Fin Bean the very best as he tries to cut it in professional cricket. I hope even Lancastrians would join me in that.
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