Surrey vs Yorkshire – One of the great county rivalries, stripped of all that’s good about the game
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It could have been the biggest club match of the season: Surrey and Yorkshire head-to-head for the first time in T20 history, England players available, in front of a capacity crowd at the Kia Oval in the quarter-final of the Vitality Blast.
It could have set the standards for the county game and communicated that England’s professional circuit is not dead yet. It could have appeased traditional supporters at a time of change as well as showing new fans that there is life below the England side, even an England side playing such uplifting cricket.
After four mentally and physically wearying Tests within a month, for those two to play requires a special effort. Arguably, the two players presented as available have the strongest case to say no.
The ECB’s attitude has so far been described as “fluid”, which is good survival PR and a polite way of saying a few crumbs might be thrown onto the table at the last minute, or maybe not – and if they are, then county cricket had better give thanks for the gesture. We wait, agog.
Nobody at the highest level is taking this seriously enough. Nobody regards it as a priority. Everybody views it as just a little inconvenient. Partly, the schedule is so non-stop, everyone has too much to think about. Partly because England are so celebratory at the moment that everybody is just loving the party. But this is also the arrogance of centralised power and professional club circuit can do nothing about it. As Chet Baker (and many others) once sang, county cricket has long mortgaged all its castles in the air.
Ah, well. We have been here before. So it could have been a great occasion. “Could’ve, would’ve, should’ve,” as the football manager, Republic of Ireland defender and pundit, Mick McCarthy, liked to say. He added another line to that, too, to hammer home his point, but only in mildly impolite company. The core message (because core messages do not necessarily need a marketing agency to invent them) was that he was tired of excuses.
County cricket is also tired of excuses, and so are county supporters. Lovers of the county game can be easily caricatured as resistant to change – if they are somewhat wedded to tradition, this is England after all, it is a national malaise – but they recognise mindless vandalism when they see it and hold the ECB (whoever is in charge of it these days) entirely responsible for an overstocked fixture list that, instead of respecting their everlasting love, suffocates the county game.
In football, the club game holds sway but it has negotiated a reasonable truce with England, especially when it really matters. In England, international cricket still dominates and too often it shows scant regard for the world in which it belongs, burning resources, destroying habitats and risking sending the game into irrevocable decline. Planet ECB is consumed by greed.
Not everybody cares. The game is buoyant again, thanks to England. The Hundred, as disruptive and contentious as it is, is delighting a new audience. But that does not justify destruction elsewhere. The Blast must make do with a debilitated set of quarter-finals because of its clash with a T20I series against India that has been shoehorned unsympathetically into the summer.
As we thrill at another stunning Test match – a Test format reinvented for the modern age, more aggressive than those who first cut their teeth on Tests of the late 60s / early 70s can begin to believe – and as we look forward with even more anticipation at the possibilities to follow in the international summer, complaints about the details of team selection in the Blast quarter-finals will be impatiently waved aside by many.
But there has to be some accommodation. International cricket must take a backward step. It must become more holistic and recognise the collective interest. Windows must be built into the schedule so that the Blast quarter-finals and Finals Day can achieve their full potential. To do that is not actually all that difficult.
If this does not happen then, as the remake of The Fly had it, “Be afraid. Be very afraid”. This self-harm is so unnecessary. Fail to look after the roots and the plant will surely die.
David Hopps writes on county cricket for ESPNcricinfo @davidkhopps
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