Wettest summer for 100 years: the details

By Andrew Hignell

It's official: 2012 has been the wettest summer for exactly a hundred years. Ironically, the summer of 1912 also saw visits by the Australians and South Africans to the UK with the triangular international series being badly hit, while county games were also severely disrupted.

A century later, the county game has again seen massive levels of disruption with the frustration being shared by the cricketers themselves, by club officials and the game’s loyal supporters.

Each county, in theory, plays sixteen matches in the LV= County Championship, equivalent to a potential maximum of 384 playing hours. Yorkshire – the raining champions of 2012 - lost no fewer than 36 per cent of this playing time. Their total of 138.25 lost hours was also over a hundred more than their total in 2011, so it was something of an additional triumph that they managed to dodge the weather enough to secure promotion back to Division One on the final day of the season.

A similar pattern of major disruption has also been experienced by other counties, with an unprecedented seven others topping the hundred mark, and two more coming within an hour of joining this rather unwarranted century club.

Without taking anything away from the magnificent achievements of Warwickshire and Derbyshire, the winners of Division One and Two, perhaps the most telling statistic in this year’s Championship was that they were the teams who lost the least playing time in their respective divisions.

Division One

(Figures represent hours lost in 2012, 2011 and days lost in 2012)

Warwickshire                74              21.75                 5
Somerset                     99.25         31.75                 4
Middlesex                    69.75         51.25                 3
Sussex                         77.50         12.50                 6
Nottinghamshire          96.75         44.25                 5
Durham                       106.25        41.75                10
Surrey                          102.75       21.75                11
Lancashire                   117            15.25                 9
Worcestershire              91.75         34.25                5

Division Two

Derbyshire                    82             37.75                 7
Yorkshire                      138.25       32.25                13
Kent                             88.75         23.00                4
Hampshire                   110             46.25                7
Essex                           112.75        35.75               10
Glamorgan                  103             33.25               11
Leicestershire               99.25         20.50                 5
Northamptonshire         94.75         26.50                 9
Gloucestershire             115.75       35.00               12


Other weather-related statistics from the 2012 season are:

• Yorkshire’s total of 138.25 hours of lost play is the highest amount of weather interference since the competition was split into two divisions in 2000, breaking the record previously held by Worcestershire who lost 124.25 hours in 2007.

• Eight counties lost over a hundred hours of potential playing time in 2012. The previous worst aggregate had been three counties losing over a hundred hours in 2000, 2004 and again in 2007.

• Nine counties – equivalent to half of the participants - experienced their wettest-ever summer of two-divisional cricket. These were Durham, Essex, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Lancashire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Surrey and Yorkshire.

Weather experts have calculated that such a wet summer can be expected to happen, on average, once every 57 years, so county cricketers, their administrators and followers will all be eagerly looking forward to business as usual in 2013.

*Andrew Hignell is Glamorgan's official scorer




Date: 15/09/2012 09:26:39 by Andrew Hignell
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