Essex return home as champions
ESSEX arrived in Chelmsford for their title homecoming party yesterday with captain Ryan ten Doeschate hailing their improbable championship triumph as like winning the World Cup. Legendary former skipper Keith Fletcher headed a welcoming party of staff and supporters as the team bus made its weary way back from Edgbaston while Somerset were beating Lancashire to confirm an emphatic Essex title triumph. ‘If you look at the history of the championship and the yo-yo effect of teams going up and back down again, you begin to understand the scale of what we’ve achieved,’ said Ten Doeschate as he reflected on Essex’s first championship title in 25 years and the first by any non-Test staging county in 10 years. ‘This is a small club with limited resources, so for us it feels like a World Cup. It is without doubt the proudest moment of my career. This makes up for all the years of being nearly men.’ The Holland international was plucked from obscurity by Essex 14 years ago and now, at 37, has been one of the catalysts for them becoming only the second team after Notts in 2005 to win the title in the season after promotion. ‘I played against Essex when they were on a pre-season tour of Cape Town and I hadn’t been offered a contract back home,’ said the South African-born dual national. ‘Graham Gooch and Paul Grayson asked me to come over and try county cricket. I hope this goes a little way towards repaying the faith they showed in me.’ The one cloud on the Essex horizon is the possibility of coach Chris Silverwood becoming England bowling coach. Silverwood will join up with the England one-day squad at Bristol next week and was non-committal about his future yesterday. ‘I’m not really going to talk about that,’ he said. ‘I’m going to Bristol to help out, as I did at Lord’s last year. Today is all about Essex and the success we’ve had. We’ll worry about that later.’