COUNTIES ARE STILL A BIG HIT

ENGLISH cricket may be obsessed with a ‘new’ audience and the ever-mystifying ECB decision to gamble the domestic game’s future on the Hundred, an unnecessary new format. Yet at the start of a pivotal season for the game comes genuine satisfaction for cricket’s existing audience. The County Championship is a format that would never be invented in today’s impatient world. But the first three rounds of the grand old lady of the game have been magnificent. Truly, they have provided everything the cricket fan — new and old — could possibly want. The dry, albeit cold, April weather has led to far better pitches than usual at this time of year and a good, even contest between bat and ball. And extra points for draws have helped encourage disciplined batting which has led to gripping, proper four-day contests. The conference system, initially brought in just for this season, has proven that it might be here to stay by giving unfashionable counties like Gloucestershire, and a promising batsman destined for the England team in James Bracey, the chance to show they can keep up with the big boys. But what has stood out most of all so far is success for spin, the discipline so often literally frozen out of the domestic game by early spring red-ball starts — and exposed as England’s biggest weakness by another chastening 3-1 Test defeat in India this winter. Most of all, there has been the leg-spin impact of Matt Parkinson, whose influence in three months with England this winter was restricted to the emergence of tweets from his teenage years bad-mouthing Virat Kohli and MS Dhoni. Now he is making a far more positive impression, with 15 wickets in just two matches and a carbon copy of Shane Warne’s ‘ball of the century’ to dismiss Mike Gatting in 1993 when he bowled Northants’ Adam Rossington. And it was at Old Trafford, too. There are five more rounds of the Championship before the first Test against New Zealand on June 2 — all starting on Thursdays so supporters, for once, can get their heads around a typically baffling schedule. It is truly an early-season treat and one that may well see unusually full county grounds when spectators are allowed back next month.