YOUNG WRITER: County cricket is already dead

HUGH OXLADE: County cricket must adapt, or else it will die. The phrase has become something of a mantra for administrators and journalists. A true cricket lover, they reason, could not bear to see the counties dissolve

County cricket must adapt, or else it will die. The phrase has become something of a mantra for administrators and journalists. A true cricket lover, they reason, could not bear to see the counties dissolve, the game revert to an amateur folly, Lord’s bulldozed and replaced with another block of luxury flats.

Occasionally a brave, yet undoubtedly deluded, commentator will question the ‘adapt or die’ thesis, perhaps citing the fact that the game seems in perpetual crisis. Seldom have I come across anyone, however, prepared to voice the opinion which I reckon is lodged in the heart of many a ‘true’ cricket lover: maybe it would have been better for county cricket not to have adapted, and to have died slowly, but with its dignity intact.

For county cricket has ‘adapted’ to the point that it is no longer the game we fell in love with. The second division has been robbed of all integrity as a contest, with some fixtures played home and away, yet others not.

Even in the first division, 14 games makes for too short a season, increasing the impact of anomalies such as weather or a fast-deteriorating pitch. The county averages I once trawled through obsessively upon the release of that year’s Playfair have been robbed of their intrigue, a thousand runs no longer a necessary indication of a good season with the bat, and those outliers who have played three games and recorded a bowling average of 12.33 all the more common.

The Championship games which are played are all at the edges of the season, essentially exclusively played out under dark skies on green tops in biting wind with occasional squally showers.

They are practically all, moreover, played at county headquarters, Ilford, Colchester and Southend in my county alone witnesses to a game now lost. Away sides can simply choose to field and roll their opponents out for 200 or fewer; not that this often does them a great deal of good, as they themselves fall foul of Chris Rushworth or Luke Fletcher.

Even county limited-overs cricket, to which our love, often guardedly, did extend, is barely even a shadow of its former self. Gone are the quasi-friendly forty-over knock-abouts which used to greet me coming home from school in the last days of the summer term. What we have now is one competition which is too short a league to be a league and too short a cup to be a cup, with a final played on June 30, not quite halfway into the season.

Only a minute, peculiar coterie of cricket fans have a deep-set affection for List A limited overs records, but there is scant chance of any of them being broken now that the competition’s highest wicket-taker can be a bowler with only twenty to his name.

Twenty20 is a disease which has developed to the point that county cricket is physically hobbled and feeble-minded. The disease became incurable long ago, and the game has reached the stage that it is not really the game we once knew, no matter how desperately we might try to convince ourselves otherwise. The loss of a dear friend has naturally left me flush with regrets, and has confirmed for me the adage that we don’t know what we have until it’s gone.

The manner of county cricket’s demise has above all things, however, made me angry. Every act of self-amputation has been accompanied by the brazen pretence that it has been carried out for the good of cricket, with the County Championship supposedly still serving as the pinnacle of the domestic game. If we want stadia full of people watching baseball, then that is fine by me. It makes people happy, and it makes people rich.

We should, however, drop the façade as soon as possible; it is players and grounds and counties, and casual fans with short attention spans, that the ECB wants to protect, not the ‘cricket’ aspect of county cricket.

We could have had a few more summers with the country’s finest sporting competition still at its finest. There might have been time for a heroic charge by Somerset or a fevered final-day finish before the money ran out. Our memories would have been fond ones, rather than ones distorted by the disfigured beast everyone pretends is the same animal it always was.

There was no saving county cricket as we knew it, but at least this could have been admitted; instead we have seen it adapt and die, a fate no ‘true cricket lover’ can seem to bear to admit. Take a long, hard look at yourselves and see if the love you have is for something that is, or, more likely, is for something that once was.