Cricket-mad Taunton back on the map
After hitting rock bottom at turn of the century, Somerset will today host England v South Africa
At the County Ground, it feels like Christmas Eve. Catering staff skim from room to room carrying giant trays of crockery. The phone in the ticket office is ringing off the hook. Somerset chief executive Guy Lavender and chairman Andy Nash have been feverishly checking the weather forecast every few hours. Trepidation mingles with exhilaration mingles with disbelief.
For this evening, international cricket is coming to Taunton. Yes, Taunton: a modest little market town that will become England’s 11th home venue this century. The visiting South Africans can expect a raucous welcome – temporary stands almost doubling the usual capacity to 12,500 – and as ever, plenty of runs. “It really is a paradise,” says Marcus Trescothick, who has been batting here for 25 seasons. “The ball doesn’t deviate a great deal, it sits up nicely, and coupled with short boundaries and a quick outfield, it’s always been a good batting wicket.”
It is not only runs that will be flowing over the next 24 hours. The game is worth around £1million to the local economy. Hotels have been booked out for months. “We could have sold this match out three or four times over,” says Lavender. “Taunton breathes cricket, you’ll get a sense of that when the match arrives.”
To visit Taunton is to tread in the foothills of cricketing history. Stroll out of the County Ground, where Graeme Hick made his 405 in 1988, where Jack Hobbs broke WG Grace’s first-class century record in 1925, and in every direction lie monuments to Somerset’s cricketing heritage.
To the west, the River Tone, where Chris Gayle hit one of his 15 sixes during a recent T20 game. Just beyond it, the Crown and Sceptre, where Greg Chappell first lodged when he arrived in England. A little way down North Street, you come to the site of the Four Alls pub, where Ian Botham drowned his sorrows with Viv Richards after losing the England captaincy. “It’s a cricket-mad town in a cricket-mad region,” says Lavender. “The enthusiasm has always been there.”
Perhaps the real question, then, is why international cricket has taken so long to return. The ground hosted games at the 1983 and 1999 World Cups, but by the turn of the century, it had lost its way. Somerset were almost entirely dependent on board handouts, a small county with small ambitions. “We were rock bottom,” Lavender admits. And so in 2004, chairman Giles Clarke embarked on a gradual programme of redevelopment. Little by little, stands and facilities were rebuilt. At one point, a local graveyard had to be partly relocated, with bodies dug up and reinterred elsewhere. A new block of flats, conference facilities and an Elton John concert brought cash rolling in. More importantly, they showed everyone that Taunton had the infrastructure to cope with a big sporting event.
Now, Somerset generate around 70 per cent of their revenue themselves. And this game is just the start. Taunton will host three matches at the 2019 men’s World Cup, and seven at the forthcoming women’s World Cup.
Floodlights will be installed in the next year or so. Test cricket is not a possibility for the time being
– the ground is simply too small. But as Nash points out: “The great thing is now, we don’t need international cricket to survive.”
The really impressive thing about all this is that for all the change, so much has stayed the same. The cider still flows like water. You can still see the Quantocks in the distance. The crowd are still so close to the boundary that they can reach out and slap fine leg on the back. Somehow, Taunton has managed to thrive without losing the essence of what made it great.
“We are easily the smallest of the counties by population,” says Nash. “We only have 540,000. Yorkshire has 10.5 million. So, we really have to scrap to develop, on and off the pitch. But this is what can be done. It’s a great story for county cricket. It’s taken 13 years to get this far, and we’re not finished yet.”