NICK FRIEND AT THE AGEAS BOWL: Yes, a first List A final victory would be a glorious exit. But don't you just want to find out how much longer this remarkable sporting career could sustain if it runs its natural course?
"Get the contract out, put it on the table."
Rio Ferdinand, March 2019.
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Kent have announced their intention to release Darren Stevens once before. His response then was to make a double hundred against Yorkshire and claim a five-wicket haul in the same game.
This time, he slog-swept Scott Currie for six and smote his next ball through extra cover for four, stood in the middle of the pitch and wondered what he'd done: 85 runs, 64 balls. That's what he'd done, leading Kent into the Royal London Cup final to set up his latest last hurrah.
He led the players off, helmet in one hand, bat waving and saluting in all directions as he conducted his one-man parade. Hampshire followed, somewhat dumbstruck. "You know, well played, Darren Stevens," was the verdict of Nick Gubbins, whose young side actually played really well.
As asks the meme, this is a regular day of Darren Stevens. None of it makes sense, but then none of it has made sense for the last decade. Over the first 13 years of his career, he'd taken 140 wickets across all formats. Over the last 13, he's taken 738.
At the Ageas Bowl, just as at Leicester in the quarter-finals, he trundled in for 10 straight overs. Once again, there was hardly a bad ball to speak of, hardly the suggestion from the press gantry many miles away from the action that you were watching a man old enough to be the father of Hampshire's six players under the age of 22. He was simply a quality allrounder going quietly about his business. At one stage, he dropped a slip catch just to prove his own cricketing mortality.
Stevens embraces umpire David Millns after hitting him with a straight drive (Charlie Crowhurst/Getty Images)
It's hard to know what an away game looks like for Kent at the moment, such is the universal support for a phenomenon in the dying embers of his cricket-span. While the Ageas Bowl was healthily supported for a midweek game in a maligned competition, chants of "Stevoooooo" were so frequent and well-chorused that to close your eyes you might as well have been at Canterbury. The same was true last week on a rare return to Leicester, the club of his youth and – unless this latest rescue act is enough to clinch another year – surely his destination.
It must be difficult to be Kent at this juncture, every year guessing whether Stevens' eternal agelessness is about to run out. When he broke down with a calf problem in early August, they might understandably have thought that they'd timed their declaration perfectly.
After all, it's been a tough season that's seen him outside Kent's County Championship team, struggling on the flat pitches that have engulfed his home turf and given him nothing, no longer allowing him to affect those games as he used to.
But he is the young troublemaker, whose parents constantly tell family friends that their toddler has learnt not to pour red wine on the carpet again. Only, as soon as that guarantee is made, Young Darren lobs the Malbec all over the white rug. Every time Kent let him go, he embarrasses their judgement.
James Anderson is still running in at 40, sending Dean Elgar's off-stump five feet beyond the popping crease. Yes, Stevens has six years on him, but if we've been taught anything in English cricket by these two, then it's surely that age can be an irrelevance. They are a two-man circus, bossing Test cricket in Anderson's case and the county circuit in Stevens', both in such a way that their legend has transcended these shores.
The WhatsApp group shared by Australian teammates is an explicit warning of the demonic talents of a 46-year-old balding, Guinness-enthusiast allrounder, who – for all the cult status and good fun – is first and foremost a serious cricketer, who was rightly offended over the winter when England's Ashes frailties were pinned on his dominance of seaming pitches.
As Ollie Robinson, who made 95, put it at the close: "He's a credit to himself."
Stevens' last hurrah in a Kent shirt looks set to be the Royal London Cup final at Trent Bridge (Credit: Dave Vokes)
Either side of the injury that threatened to bring a wrongful end to an incomparable career, he has averaged 113.5 in this tournament, most of those runs coming in one of white-ball cricket's toughest roles. There is a tremendous irony in a competition derided as a development event having as its centrepiece story a man who had played more games for two of the quarterfinalist counties than any of the players in their respective squads.
This game would have been finished one ball sooner, but for an earlier flat-batted straight wallop thudding into the backside of umpire David Millns, costing Stevens four valuable runs. His response was to playfully embrace Millns, a former teammate at Leicestershire, who retired from cricket in 2001.
That same year, Stevens was involved in the infamous C&G Trophy final at Lord's, when Scott Boswell suffered his misfortune. Richie Benaud was on commentary, Stevens was trapped in front by Steffan Jones, two years his senior but more than a decade out of the game.
And yet, twenty-one years later, we're engulfed in a legitimate debate about whether Stevens – only 11 years younger than Millns, who in under a decade will have reached the ECB's retirement age for first-class umpires – is being forced out too soon.
It remains astounding that he never played 50-over cricket for England in his pomp. Those who've followed his career since before this inexplicable Indian summer will tell you that what he's doing now is what he did then.
Yes, a first List A final victory would be a glorious exit. But don't you just want to find out how much longer this remarkable sporting career could sustain if it runs its natural course, rather than speculating over a one-of-a-kind?
In Ferdinand's words: "Let him sign it."
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