Yorkshire need to start a resurgence
THE start of the 2017 county championship season next week will bring welcome comfort and reassurance alongside the perennial excitement that arrives with every new campaign.
As the England and Wales Cricket Board presses on with plans to reorder the summer again – and more radically than ever – from 2020, events around the country on April 7 will bear a familiarity which extends long beyond living memory.
The business will get very serious plenty soon enough - not least, for example, if Alastair Cook ends up facing his first ball in first-class cricket since his resignation as Test captain against his fellow England great James Anderson when Essex take on Lancashire on their return to Specsavers Division One.
But aside from the eye-catching opening exchanges, the games within games, at Chelmsford and six other venues at 11am next Friday there will be an air of slow-burn, manageable expectation which may just prove the antidote many need to the far-reaching changes afoot.
That is not to say all will be as it always has been, of course.
The championship has undergone more than its share of transformations already, especially in modern times, since its official inception in 1890.
By the time a new franchise Twenty20 tournament inevitably redraws the landscape yet again, the four-day competition will be marking 20 years of its own two-division format.
Before then, though, this year sees a reduction from 16 to 14 rounds of matches and an asymmetric Division Two structure in which 10 teams will no longer be able to play each other twice.
Taking part will be clubs with points to prove, perceived wrongs to right perhaps and – in the case of current champions Middlesex – a benchmark to repeat.
Last September, it had been 23 years between the Londoners’ eighth and ninth outright title wins.
James Franklin’s team sealed the deal in the most thrilling fashion, Toby Roland-Jones finishing with a hat-trick as Middlesex bowled Yorkshire out for 178 in 35.2 overs in the last session of the season to stay above their back-to-back championship-winning opponents and also deprive Somerset of a still elusive first title in their history.
That Lord’s culmination of a protracted three-way tussle is no dramatic outlier in the battle for silverware over recent years, in which several championship pennants have been narrowly won. What of the 2017 contenders then? Middlesex should be top of plenty of lists, on a trends basis alone.
Yorkshire’s wins in 2014 and 2015 provided the fourth instance in the previous 16 years of champions following up the next season, and the squad assembled by Angus Fraser et al looks capable of doing the same.
They had only half an hour and four points to spare eight months ago - but with a settled and powerful line-up which has no obvious weakness and a clutch of players still improving to complement others’ experience, many boxes are ticked.
Yorkshire, who start their warm-up for the season against Leeds/Bradford MCCU at Headingley tomorrow, will do well to kick-start a resurgence, while for runners-up Somerset getting over the line has proved a major headache not just in first-class cricket but the shorter formats too.
Of the other likely contenders, Surrey are a coming force again - having re-established themselves in the top flight and subsequently acquired Durham wantaways Scott Borthwick and Mark Stoneman.
Those two top-order batsmen doubtless moved south with mixed feelings, since when the true plight of their native north east club has become painfully apparent.
Durham’s financial difficulties are well documented and although they have recruited wisely in the shape of overseas signings Stephen Cook and Tom Latham, the 48-point deduction with which they must start the new season following their enforced relegation will surely leave them with an impossible task to push for a return.