'I will always love the County Championship, come what may'

HUW TURBERVILL: One of the biggest gripes our readers have is the lack of Championship cricket in high summer. Did you know there is not a single Championship game in London in the whole of June?

With the County Championship now top and tailing the summer like dilapidated bookends, administrators have clearly prioritised money from T20 gate receipts over the need to produce Test cricketers. 

It has gone – or is certainly going – from being the only show in town (up to 1962) to the warm-up act – like the short film before the main feature… the Wile E Coyote and Road Runner cartoons ahead of Star Wars, for instance, followed by the bus journey home. Yep, there is no point denying it, “fings ain’t what they used to t’be”, as Max Bygraves sang.

Yet despite all that, and in spite of me starting to appreciate T20 a little more now, I have to say… I still love the County Championship! And we know from reading your Cricketer survey entries, that view is shared by many.

One of the biggest gripes our readers have is the lack of Championship cricket in high summer. Did you know there is not a single Championship game in London in the whole of June? (I am not including Surrey v Somerset at Guildford).

The ECB’s latest plan is to play 50-over One-Day Cup games at the same time as the new city T20 from 2020. County cricket fans – I summise – would rather the Championship played at this time. The big grounds would be occupied, but this would bring the fans’ beloved outgrounds into play – Tunbridge Wells, Blackpool, Aigburth, Colchester, Arundel and so on…

^{Arundel: A sublime setting for an afternoon of cricket}

Why don't we also have all the 50-over stuff overseas (three groups of six) in March/April in, say, Barbados, with quarters, semis and final back in England over one week? I tweeted that and Richard Gould, Surrey’s chief executive, replied: "Sounds like a decent idea.” 

Test cricket is something worth fighting for, so we need the four-day game to feed that, and no one can credibly deny T20 is not the future. I know 50-over cricket is having a bit of a renaissance (and England are currently rather good at it), but something has to give…

Outside my work commitments, I may only go to about two or three of Surrey’s Championship games at The Oval, plus one or two at Lord’s and Essex, and very occasionally a trip to Hove, each summer. But I still follow the scores avidly on websites. Occasionally I listen to the BBC commentaries. I still lament the absence of a Championship scoreboard in the Metro newspaper on my train journey into work.

Is that ‘interest’ enough to keep it alive? I am not sure. As the BBC’s Ben Dirs tweeted recently: “First-class cricket is like Woolworths. People were up in arms that it was under threat, but when you asked how often they shopped there, they’d usually say ‘never’.”

A year after I moved to London, and before I qualified for a press pass, I was a Surrey member, in 1999. I sat at The Oval pinching myself, watching Mark Butcher, Graham Thorpe, Alec Stewart and the Hollioakes bat, or Martin Bicknell, Alex Tudor, Saqlain Mushtaq and Ian Salisbury bowl in the Championship, for a measly sum and with a whole stand to myself sometimes. It was like something out of The Secret Garden. 

You don’t know what you have until it’s gone...