Kohli’s arrival proves reports of County’s death aren’t quite true

Acouple of weeks ago, The Spectator – a magazine which appears to be produced entirely for the benefit of the sort of people who shout at self-checkout machines in supermarkets and make a face when their phone call gets puts through to an overseas call centre – published an article entitled “The Strange Death Of English Cricket”. In it, the author laments the “terminal” decline of the first-class game, the proliferation of what he – and somehow it always is a ‘he’, isn’t it? – describes as ‘Twenty20 Trash’, and the sheer vulgarity of the IPL, a criticism he mitigates by pointing out that an Indian friend of his feels the same way, so that’s all fine.

This sensation of endemic decline, that things are always getting worse, that we are essentially and inexorably descending slowly into depravity, has followed English cricket around for about as long as it has existed. Around this time of year, too, it has become customary to the point of cliche to juxtapose our poor, dishevelled County Championship – with its empty grounds, shivering fielders and lunches that consist of a single lump of coal – with the starlit entertainment of the IPL, where the cheerleaders are Amazons, a six is hit every 4.7 seconds and Hardik Pandya’s hair wax contains actual jaguar tears.

The early weeks of the county season seemed only to reinforce this, as the sight of Rishabh Pant and Sanju Samson belting it miles in front of sweaty, shrieking crowds brushed up against the sight of Peter Siddle bowling in a beanie hat because of the freezing April chill. The exodus of top England players seemed to have left county cricket denuded, demoted. The ECB’s 100ball competition felt like an admission of surrender.

At which point, enter stage left: round four, in which the Bank Holiday weekend brought with it glorious weather, heartening crowds and some genuinely startling matches. Yorkshire won despite being bowled out for 50 in their first innings, with a haste that could only be described as extremely BBC-friendly. Durham beat Leicestershire after following on 256 runs behind. Nottinghamshire, who have started the season like a train, beat Hampshire in front of crowds of over 2,000 at Trent Bridge.

For the first time this season, it felt like the County Championship had come to life. What was particularly striking about some of the cricket on display was just how high the standard was. At Trent Bridge, Hampshire’s Hashim Amla and James Vince grappled with a Test-level attack of Stuart Broad and Jake Ball. At Old Trafford, James Anderson against Matt Renshaw is a potential 2019 Ashes match-up. At Chelmsford, a match with 13 internationals on show saw Yorkshire fielding a middle order of Cheteshwar Pujara, Joe Root, Gary Ballance and Jonny Bairstow, boasting over 15,000 Test runs between them.

This summer marks the 50th anniversary of the official admission of overseas players to the county game, a decision that opened the door to some of the game’s greatest ever exponents. And while the days when Mike Procter and Gordon Greenidge and Clive Lloyd and Bishan Bedi turned the humble Championship into the game’s greatest showcase are long gone, it has been a while since we saw this many elite international cricketers on our shores.

Seven of the world’s top 10-ranked Test batsmen – excluding the suspended Steve Smith and David Warner – will play Championship cricket this summer. For the first time in a while, the county game feels genuinely elite, a worthy counterpart to the IPL rather than a poorer relation.

And in a few weeks’ time, the biggest fish of them all will arrive. At the start of June, Virat Kohli will join Surrey to play six domestic games, the biggest star county cricket will have seen since Brian Lara’s last season at Warwickshire in 1998. The old saw that English cricket should not be helping out its opponents pales against the effect the Indian captain could have on the county game. Though he will only be here for a few weeks as a tune-up for India’s Test series here in August, his arrival has the potential to electrify the Championship in a way no player since Lara has managed. At some of the smaller grounds where he will be spotted next month –Beckenham, Guildford, Scarborough – sold-out crowds are not an outlandish possibility.

The most heartening thing about this is that even a player of Kohli’s calibre has no guarantee of success. While many of the storied international players have faltered – South Africa’s Aidan Markram registered three consecutive ducks earlier in the season and was fortunate to miss what county pros describe as an ‘Audi’, while Root fell for a golden duck – some of the most encouraging performances have come from young English players: Harry Brook, Joe Clarke, Amar Virdi, Matt Parkinson, Ben Coad.

And so as county cricket prepares for Kohli’s arrival, it can take comfort in the fact that his signing is so much more than a PR coup, a quick fix, an eye-catching headline. THE INDEPENDENT