RED ROSE IN BLOOM
It’s official: the greatest all-round county of the last six decades is... Lancashire!
Late last year, and with a heavy heart, I was rereading Bob Willis’s Diary of a Cricket Season, written in 1978.
after only three paragraphs, Bob was in off the long run: ‘the early weeks are absurdly cluttered with one-day cricket; you either seem to be playing 55-over games or 40-over games; the Championship gets lost until almost the end of May.’
It reminded me of an email I had received from Wisden. they, too, had been taking stock of an era passed. this one had begun in 1963 when a second competition joined the Championship, and ended in 2019, with the announcement of the Hundred, the first domestic tournament not to feature the counties.
the almanack had compiled a spreadsheet of those 57 summers, tracking the performance of every side in each competition, and awarded points to the winners, runnersup and — where applicable — semi- finalists. the system weighted the Championship above the others, but aimed to keep things simple.
How had 1978 played out? County champions: Kent. Gillette Cup: Sussex. John Player League: Hampshire. Benson & Hedges Cup: Kent.
More from Bob’s diary, Sunday, May 14: ‘ Kent have never been my favourite bunch of blokes, and I liked them even less when they beat us in the Sunday League.We had them in a lot of bother until John Shepherd saw them home.’
the next april, Shepherd was one of the Wisden Five, along with David Gower, John Lever, Chris Old and Clive Radley.
I looked at the spreadsheet again. each entry, I realised, was not simply an outcome, it was a story, a day, a week, a season in the life, in many lives. eras formed, teams rose and fell.
Late-1970s Somerset, always at Lord’s, with Beefy, Viv and Joel, Dasher Denning and the Demon of Frome Colin Dredge.
Middlesex’s three Championships in the first half of the 1980s: Brearley, Gatting, emburey, edmonds, Daniel — what a bowler the Diamond was.
Warwickshire in 1994 and 1995, a treble, then a double. Reeve, Small, Brown, Munton, Donald, the Smiths, Lara — greatest few weeks of batting ever.
Gloucestershire around 2000, unbeatable at the short stuff: Russell, alleyne, Barnett, Snape, Harvey — the ‘ Freak’, with his supernatural slower ball.
Further forward, the Sussex of Mushy and Goodwin, the Surrey of Hollioake and the noble Ramprakash.
the effect of overseas players was visible. Uniquely, Nottinghamshire recorded a eurovisionstyle nul points decade in the 1970s, despite the presence for several years of Garry Sobers.
then came Clive Rice and Richard Hadlee, who arrived in 1978 but landed in 1981, with 105 wickets at 14, as Notts swept to the Championship title. there was another in 1987, when Hadlee took 97 at 11, the trent Bridge greentop now feared throughout the country.
Meanwhile, Sussex managed no Championship top-four finishes in the 1990s, when they mustered 14 points in all competitions — and then found Mushtaq ahmed. In 85 first- class games, he claimed 478 wickets at 25 and Sussex had their first three Championship crowns. It tripped the memory, this chart, revealing the most successful team of each decade: 1960s: Yorkshire. 1970s: Kent (by a mile, with the highest tally of any side in any decade).
1980s: Middlesex (by a hair, from essex).
1990s: Lancashire Warwickshire (a tie!)
2000s: Sussex ( pipping Lancashire and Surrey).
2010s: Somerset (despite the agonies of a Championship blank — a sharing of power, rather than a concentration of it).
there were 322 points between the bottom county — chin up, Derbyshire — and the top, but only 42 between the first four: Kent in fourth with 364, essex with 375, Warwickshire with 393, and Lancashire with 406. Some Moneyballing of the stats and underlined old truths. Lancashire were not a pre- eminent Championship team, accruing only one title (in 2011), and only 114 of their points in the longest form. On that score, they were trumped by seven counties, with Middlesex top (although only sixth overall).
they, essex and Yorkshire accounted for 22 titles, nearly two-fifths of the total. Lancashire’s power came in limited-overs cricket. according to the points system, they have been the second-most successful side in the Gillette Cup and its successors (behind Warwickshire), second in the B&H (behind Kent), third in the Sunday League (behind essex and Kent), and joint-first in t20 ( with Somerset). their 17 short- form titles bested Warwickshire’s 13 and the 11 by Kent and essex.
But it has been the Red Rose era, a dynasty started by Jack Bond, who captained Lancashire to their first five one-day titles. Bond (above) could call on Clive Lloyd, the proto-oneday spinner in Jack Simmons and containing bowlers.
the key was succession, from David Hughes in the dying of the light through John abrahams, Neil Fairbrother, Mike Watkinson, John Crawley, Warren Hegg, the eternal Glen Chapple, a northern brew of the home-grown and the glorious import — Wasim akram, Stuart Law, Carl Hooper.
everyone has done it, but no one quite like Lancashire.
Jon Hotten is the author of the elements of Cricket, to be published in 2020.