The long road to success

PAUL EDWARDS: This column is about the lads and girls we’ve not heard of yet, the fine young people who are stars at their local clubs and may even have played some age-group cricket

Brett Hutton is taking the long road to success. We should all be grateful that no one dug it up before he decided to make the journey.

This column is being written on the second evening of Nottinghamshire’s home game against Lancashire. Hutton has just taken 5 for 62 in the visitors’ first innings to put his side in a strong position in the game. All his victims were top-order batsmen. It is Hutton’s second five-wicket return of a season marred by injury but which may yet end with him being a member of a Championship-winning side.

Yet those who follow the county game closely know that Hutton was not a Nottinghamshire cricketer last season. After the end of the 2017 campaign he decided to leave Trent Bridge and join Northamptonshire for three seasons in order to play more white-ball cricket. But it barely needs saying that he wouldn’t have opted to play his cricket at the County Ground if Northants did not also play the four-day stuff.

As things turned out, Hutton took 87 wickets in two and a Covid seasons for his new county and helped them to apparent promotion in 2019, only for the pandemic to intervene. When he was tempted back to Trent Bridge last October, Notts head coach, Peter Moores, acknowledged that he was returning a better cricketer than when he left.

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One of the more loudly voiced plans for the future direction of the domestic game is that fewer counties should play first-class cricket. It is argued that this will improve the quality of the England team. Anyone who has read these columns over the past two summers will know that I loathe such plans. Rather than making the national side any better I think it far more likely – indeed, it seems a logical entailment – that it will reduce the opportunities for younger players with red-ball skills to pursue a career in the game.

It is one of English cricket’s most glorious ironies that at a time when politicians and social reformers are trumpeting the importance of encouraging our young people to make as much as they can of their lives, a few ECB officials and maybe one or two county chief-executives believe it would be beneficial to reduce the number of opportunities available to ambitious junior cricketers who want to follow in the path of Sir Alastair Cook, Joe Root or Ollie Robinson.

^{Brett Hutton has been a key part of Nottinghamshire's bowling attack}

Ah yes, Ollie Robinson, I’m glad I mentioned him. Last week I talked about talent and the challenges that faced one of the cricketers of the year. After being sacked by Yorkshire in 2014 Robinson played a few second XI games for Hampshire and Essex before being picked up by Sussex who eventually offered him a one-year contract. The rest of the story reflects enormously well on Robinson’s new county, the coaching of Jason Gillespie and, above all, on the player’s own determination to turn his professional life around.

But suppose Sussex had not played red-ball cricket? Robinson was already a skilled death bowler in the white-ball game. Perhaps he would have simply concentrated on those formats. Maybe he could have gone somewhere else: Northants or Derbyshire or Leicestershire or any of the other counties that some say they would like to “cull” from the first-class list. The clubs where David Willey, Jack Brooks, Stuart Broad, Ben Duckett, James Taylor and Ben Slater took their first steps as professional cricketers. Don’t need ’em, do we?

Life is far more haphazard and random than we credit. That is one of its joys. We cannot know what fine service some of the counties who do not boast an international ground will eventually render the English game. All we can assess is what they have done in the past. Then we can look at fine cricketers like Saif Zaib, Harry Swindells and Harvey Hosein and be grateful they got their opportunities to live out their lovely dreams.

Haseeb Hameed and Ollie Robinson show the importance of looking in the mirror

If those players’ counties cease to play first-class cricket the game in this country will only be damaged. For some young players who would otherwise get their first contracts will not do so.

And who knows how much talent will thereby be chucked down the grid? It isn’t true that quality will always find a way. It has to be encouraged, it has to be given opportunities, it has to be coached.

But I must admit that my argument is more fundamental than that. On the second evening of the game I’ve just been watching a Lancashire bowling attack lacking Saqib Mahmood has fought back well.

It may not be enough to save their side from defeat but it gave us yet another chance to admire the skills of the English county cricketer. Tom Bailey took two of the five wickets to fall and reminded me once again that he is one of the most skilful and underrated seamers in the country.

^{Ollie Robinson has been a star of England's international summer}

Bailey is 30 and although he once got an England Lions call-up I doubt he will gain any more representative honours. Yet as a very good crowd at Trent Bridge sat contentedly and watched the cricket in the evening sunlight I wondered how much simple happiness would have been removed from life if people like Bailey had not played the game.

Now, of course, you can argue that Bailey has made it at one of the “bigger” counties and that is testament to a talent that would have flourished wherever it had pitched up. But we can go through each of the 18 counties and find plenty of one-club cricketers who have never earned representative honours yet have built a career for themselves and their families and have brought enormous joy to spectators who have turned up at games or watched their cricket on the live streams.

And then an hour or so ago Daryl Mitchell announced that this season would be his last as a first-class cricketer. “Mitch” made his debut in 2005 and has spent his entire career with Worcestershire. I’ve seen the county win promotion on two occasions at New Road and on the second of them, in 2017, Mitchell scored seven centuries. When he went to field at third man, the crowd at that end of the ground stood to a man and applauded him.

Yes, when it was thought that he might leave Worcestershire, Mitch was not short of suitors. He could have made a career at many counties, including some with Test match venues. But I doubt such things were as obvious when a 21-year-old Daryl Mitchell was making his debut 16 years ago. Even the best need some help.

But this column is really not about Mitch or Tom Bailey or Ollie Robinson or Brett Hutton. It is about the lads and girls we’ve not heard of yet, the fine young people who are stars at their local clubs and may even have played some age-group cricket.

They live in Eastbourne or Pershore or Loughborough or Daventry or Chesterfield. They like the white-ball stuff a lot but they like red-ball cricket, too. Who are we to deny them their chance? And who are the ECB officials who apparently wish to do so?