Back in the Groove

Leicestershire v Kent, County Championship, Grace Road, 19-22 August 2018

It had been so long since the last Championship match at Grace Road, which had begun on the 20th of June, that, when the regulars reconvened at last, it had the feeling of the start of a season, with all its pleasures of rediscovery and recognition. By the time it had finished, it felt like the beginning of the season’s end.

The progress of the game was largely determined by the weather, the first two days having been played under floodlights from beginning to end. The leaves (apart from some twirling samaras from the sycamores)

and temperature suggested Summer, but the light and the low cloud hinted at early Spring, or late Autumn. The weather brightened a little on the third morning, and, at lunch, the clouds dispersed altogether to uncover a blue sky suggesting flaming June.

The first two, damp and artificially illuminated, days produced totals of 220, 195 and 227. Chasing what had seemed an ambitious target of 253 on the third, sunlit, afternoon, Kent’s Dickson and Kuhn put on an unbeaten partnership of 215 between them for the third wicket. On the first two days, a wicket seemed always on the verge of falling ; on the last afternoon there seemed no reason why the pair should not continue batting indefinitely.

On the first morning, the eternal verities of Championship cricket seemed to have reasserted themselves as Darren Stevens took the new ball in light drizzle, particularly when he switched to the Bennett End, where some quirk of the air conditioning in the indoor school meant that he came in accompanied by an evocative gust of disinfectant and old socks.

It is one of the minor tragedies of Leicestershire cricket that Stevens, the quintessential Leicestershire cricketer, son of Hinckley, the natural heir to George Geary, should have played most of his career for Kent. I cannot remember much lamentation when he left (at the time he seemed a stodgy middle-order batsman who bowled a bit of occasional medium pace), but he has given us plenty of cause to lament since (as late as last season he took a career-best 8-75 against us in Canterbury).

There have been few signs this season, at the age of 42, of his strong enchantments failing : his 26 wickets have cost him a little over 20 runs apiece, and just over a quarter of his overs have been maidens. The abolition of the toss, which was intended specifically to disempower the likes of Stevens, meant, here, that he was in his natural element (inevitably, Kent chose to bowl). In he came through the friendly murk, setting off at a gentle jog, then slowing almost to a stroll, steadying himself, cocking his wrist and then with a flick of it sending down ball after ball that pitched on off and moved away in the direction of the slips, with the grooved smoothness of a skilled framework knitter.

His first victim was young Harry Dearden, born in the year that Stevens first played for Leicestershire. Like a child venturing into a dark wood, he must have been warned of the enchanter’s wiles, but after some brave flourishes (he continues to emerge tentatively from his tortoise-shell), the left-hander was lured to his doom by a ball that moved into him (perhaps more sharply than usual, perhaps not, perhaps not at all).

Stevens’ new ball partner was Podmore, fleetingly creating the illusion that the archetypal English bits-and-pieces player was bowling with his parodic doppelganger. This Podmore (Harry, late of Middlesex), was clean-cut and svelte, but still a frank medium pacer, who I would not expect to see taking the new ball in normal conditions, but then these were not normal conditions. Without the lights I doubt they would have been playing at all, which was good news for the spectators and seamers, but less so for the batsmen, who must have been pining for the bright lights of the pavilion, winking in the distance.

Although progress was slow (opener Horton took ten overs to make two runs), on the cusp of the twentieth Horton and the prolific Ackermann had seen off both the sorcerer and his apprentice, and had inched gingerly across the minefield to 47, when Ackermann fell LBW to first change bowler Grant Stewart, a muscular Australian with an Italian mother.

Mark Cosgrove, who, like many out-of-form batsmen, manages to find ever more inventive ways to get out, then attempted to cut a ball from Ivan Thomas that appeared to be moving in at him and played on. Thomas, whom I vaguely remember as a fresh-faced youth bowling for Leeds/Bradford MCCU, has now grown a full red beard that ought be accessorised with a coonskin cap. He is 6’4” and seemed to put on pace as his spell progressed : although the pitch (a used one that had been substituted at the last minute for one deemed excessively green) might not quite have attracted the attention of late Princess of Wales’ excellent charity, the unpredictability of its bounce exaggerated the already considerable threat from his persistently short-pitched bowling.

In about the only sighting of spin before the last day, Joe Denly was given the last over before lunch. Ateeq Javid, who is yet to make much of a positive impression since his move from Warwickshire, edged one of his deceptively harmless looking leg breaks to slip, a sucker punch that sent Leicestershire into lunch on 79-4, although that didn’t seem too bad in the circumstances.

After lunch, with the gloom, if anything, deepening, Ned Eckersley briefly released his inner cavalier to hit three fours before young Podmore, who had looked the least threatening of the bowlers, trapped him LBW playing back to a ball that nibbled in a way that must have made Stevens’ heart glad. A similar delivery next ball resulted in the loss of Ben Raine’s middle stump and, in his next over, Horton played on, one short of a hard-won half century.

At the other end, Thomas was bowling with enough pace to make being nibbled to death by Darren Stevens seem an attractive prospect. Parkinson, who is capable of brave defiance, edged him to the wicket-keeper, leaving Chappell, whose height, hair, and upright stance remind me a little of Tony Grieg, to attempt a counter-attack. When he had reached 31, a leaping ball from Thomas was met with the reassuring sound of the ball hitting the meat of the bat : this, unfortunately turned out to have come from his head. Ten minutes of rubbing and shaking, and a few drinks of water, failed to restore him, and he left the field.

In the past, he would probably have returned, if necessary, and plotted revenge on Thomas when his turn came to bowl. In these more enlightened days, it was decided that he might have suffered concussion, and that Dieter Klein would replace him for the remainder of the match. The loss of Chappell’s batting was a blow, that of his bowling would prove to be a more serious one.

That the tail-enders, who went on a measured offensive, managed to extend the score to 220 seemed a minor triumph (it was the sort of game where every run seemed a victory over the odds), and Leicestershire hastened to let Mohammad Abbas, who seemed likely to be unplayable, at the openers, while the light was still barely playable. By the close, three wickets had fallen for 53, with two for Abbas and one for Raine : if play had not been curtailed by what felt like the premature arrival of an October evening, it might have been significantly more.

Leicestershire were pleased to find that the conditions had not improved on the second morning. By early afternoon Kent had been dismissed for 197, with six wickets for Abbas and four for Raine. The only significant resistance had come from Denly, who made 62, and who had, ominously, shared in a sixth wicket stand of 57, when the change bowlers, Griffiths and Klein, had relieved Abbas and Raine, and, unfortunately, the pressure. Griffiths has a tendency to bowl loosely when he first comes on, and conceded four fours in his first over ; at his best, particularly if roused by a blow to the bonce, Chappell would not have been so lightly treated. Five of the wickets to fall had been caught by Eckerlsey, the balletic elegance of whose wicket-keeping has not always been matched by its reliability.

By the close of the day, the match seemed to be hurtling towards an early conclusion, Leicestershire having collapsed from 82-1 to 126-5, in the face of renewed hostility from Thomas, who took four wickets in light that was not detectably better than that of the previous evening.  It would have been very much to Leicestershire’s advantage to have come off at the same time as on the first day.

The third day dawned ominously bright, with some cloud, but not enough for the floodlights to have been turned on. Harry Dearden, who had resumed on 61, seemed to be on course for his first first-class century, and the laurels of a tortoiseshell hero, when he aimed an uncharacteristic, and unbusinesslike, cut at a delivery from Stevens and top-edged to slip, for a 74 which had taken him a little over three-and-a-half hours. At the time, it seemed as though this might prove a match-winning innings, which would have been a just reward for the most sustained display of concentration and good judgement of the game. In an, as it turned out, perfidious sign from the Gods that they were on his side, a shy at the stumps had even rebounded from Dearden as he made his ground, and made its way to the boundary for a gratuitous, and welcome, four.

Under the illusion, as we were, that every run was precious, the forty runs that the boldly striking Klein put on with Griffiths and Abbas for the last two wickets, to push the target beyond 250, were greeted with wild enthusiasm (or as close to it as we get at Grace Road), as were the two Kent wickets that quickly fell to Abbas. The first of these was Bell-Drummond, who had looked badly out of sorts in both innings, the second Grant Stewart, who had batted at number ten in the first innings. The thinking behind this unorthodox, but shrewd, promotion became clear in the afternoon, as the last of the cloud vanished, the sun shone benignly on the newly-docile pitch, and Abbas and Raine, who had been treated with decent respect, approached the end of their opening spells.

The afternoon session, as you will see if you re-examine the figures at the beginning of this piece (an unbeaten third wicket stand of 215), seemed to have been cut-and-pasted from another season entirely, both in meteorological terms, and in the sense that we were unwillingly dragged back to one of the too numerous seasons of recent years when Leicestershire went through many a long afternoon with no sniff of a wicket.

Griffiths, who has improved greatly this season, but may be tiring, again bowled loosely in his first overs, feeding Dickson and Kuhn a succession of deliveries on or outside leg stump, and Parkinson was the victim of a premeditated assault, which did not quite knock him out of the attack, but, judging by the consoling arms placed around his shoulders by a kindly Cosgrove, had dented his confidence. Having been deserted by the elements, and with Abbas apparently slightly niggled (he spent some time just outside the boundary, waving his legs in the air like a dying ant), Horton was eventually reduced to giving Mark Cosgrove his first over of the season. Apart from that, there seemed to be nothing to be done, apart from trying to enjoy the sunshine, while it lasted.  Dickson, who had a head start, completed his century ; Kuhn was left one boundary short.

This defeat (the first of the season by any significant margin) felt like the end of Leicestershire’s promotion hopes : having begun the game on roughly equal terms with Kent, we are now some way behind them, and even further from the leaders. We have two, perhaps three, games (against Gloucestershire, Glamorgan, and Durham) that we should win, two (against leaders Warwickshire and Sussex) that, by the same token, we ought to lose. The hope has to be that our season does not fall apart in the way that it did in 2016, as we enter the silly September season of declarations, contrived finishes, and sporting pitches, as we all scramble after points through the deepening gloom.

Even more urgently, having caught a glimpse of a possible future that looked worryingly like the recent past, we have to hope that the team does not fall apart too. Our success this season had been based on our fast bowling (only Ackermann has been prolific with the bat) : the indications are that Chappell will be leaving, as might Raine (assuming that we are not promoted), and there is no certainty that Abbas will be returning (he is apparently keen to do so, but no terms have been agreed, and, if we are still paying Carberry close to £100,000 for doing nothing, we may not be able to afford him). To lose one fast bowler would be a misfortune, to lose three would be a disaster.

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Drift Dodgers

Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream …

Some time on the morning of the first day of Leicestershire’s match against Kent (which, in the event, saw no play at all), Richard Rae of the BBC tweeted a quotation from ‘The Cricketer’ in 1926, to the effect that Leicestershire were “engaged in floating complacently down the streams of Time”. This led me to thinking (there was plenty of time for thought that day) of how the governing principle of County Cricket is drift (a little like Thomas Pynchon’s conception of entropy).

Innings accumulate slowly, grain by grain, flake by flake, imperceptibly, like sand or snow-drifts. Games drift to a conclusion, drift towards a draw. Clubs are said be drifting ; overly passive Captains are accused of letting games drift ; players’ careers start to drift, they drift out of the game. Crowds drift around the ground (particularly when it’s raining) and start to drift away after tea. Clouds drift over and away again. Afternoons, days, games, seasons drift by, and with them the years.

This drift is seductive (what could be more pleasant that floating effortlessly downstream on a Summer’s afternoon?) as long as you don’t think too hard about where the current is taking you. Resistance is ultimately futile (the greatest players, as the least, are carried away in the end), but temporary victories depend on fighting the drift and swimming upstream against the current.

Leicestershire v Kent, Grace Road, 19-22 May 2017

The first day of the Kent game was, as I say, a washout. It had rained heavily overnight and the rain returned intermittently throughout the day. No-one at the ground (some small parties from Kent and the usual suspects) seriously expected that there would be any play, though there were the usual teasing announcements about inspections and what might happen if there were no further rain. You can (and I have) spent days such as these at Grace Road, drifting aimlessly round the ground, playing spot the wheelbarrow

observing the dark clouds drift over and drift away again, watching the rain fall through the big picture windows of the Fox Bar, barely conscious of the hours, of life, drifting away, not unpleasantly but inexorably, but, for once, I chose to fight the drift and, after a quick lunch, spent the afternoon at an exhibition about the Anglo-Sikh Wars.

The second day was an affair of showers, interrupted by scattered outbreaks of cricket, and, by its end, it already seemed likely that the natural direction of drift was towards a draw. I am not suggesting any element of conscious collusion, but a slow drift to the eventual conclusion (a draw with maximum bonus points each) would not have struck either side as an outcome to be struggled against too determinedly.

Kent are a side I still think of as being, like Worcestershire, made up of young, locally-produced talent, but this is to ignore the slow drift of time. Sam Billings (26 in June) was away with England ; Sam Northeast, now in his 10^th year of first-class cricket, is 27 ; Adam Riley (25), seen by good judges not so long ago as the future of English spin, only made two first-class appearances last season and may be drifting out of the game altogether. Matt Coles (27) has drifted away to Hampshire (apparently adrift on a tide of alcohol) and back again. James Harris (27), ten years after his debut, has unexpectedly drifted in from Middlesex on loan. Daniel Bell-Drummond (24 in August) still fits the description, but, given the competition for the England openers’ berths, may soon find that he’s missed that particular boat. Fabian Cowdrey, apparently, has given it up for music and a free electric band.

Having said that, a side made up of players in their prime who are not quite good, or lucky, enough to play for England (and Kent also have nearly men of a different generation, in Denly, Tredwell and Gidman) is one route to success in County cricket. They should, by rights, have been promoted last season and came into this game having won their first three matches, but may be well advised to catch the tide before the drift catches up with them.

Play began on time, under low cloud and continued, through some light drizzle, until roughly lunchtime. Horton and Dearden opened ; both Lancastrians, they are beginning to forge the kind of safety-first partnership that drove Cardus to lyrical peaks of exasperation when writing about Lancashire’s Hallows and Makepeace in the 1920s. Horton, who was a little more expansive, departed when the score was 58, leaving Dearden to make 34 off 108 balls, having taken 12 overs to reach double figures.

They were permitted to take this approach by Coles, whom I have seen bowl well, but who looked sluggish here, bowling a few showy bouncers, but few balls that did not give the batsmen the option of leaving them, but compelled to do so by Darren Stevens, whose first ten overs resulted in roughly the same number of runs. Stevens, a brazenly nibbly medium pacer, who, at 41, looks like the sort of bloke you’d expect find in B&Q on a Saturday morning, is so much the embodiment of the kind of cricketer who is officially frowned upon that the toss was abolished to discourage him from taking wickets ; he still went into this game as both the leading run-scorer and the leading wicket-taker in Division 2. When he switched to the Bennett End, and came in with a stiff breeze at his back, scented by the familiar whiff of disinfectant and old socks, he was in his element, as threatening in his way as Thommo at the WACA.

A combination of Stevens’ miserliness and the rain that washed out the afternoon, before a brief four over reprise at 5.45 (by which time I’d drifted off home), meant that Leicestershire began the third day on 127-2 with another 63 overs to reach the 400 they needed to achieve maximum batting points. Colin Ackermann played his first innings of any substance at Grace Road, making 89 in a little over four hours (I thought a quick burst of “Sylvia” over the PA might have been in order when he reached 50). A slight, neatly turned out figure, he seems something of a throwback, playing in an unobtrusively stylish, through scrupulously orthodox style, as if he’d learned to play by following the MCC Coaching Manual while observing himself in the mirror. Together with Cosgrove (39) and Eckersley (33) he provided the middle-order solidity that he seemed to promise when he first signed.

However, with those three, plus Pettini (who didn’t look in the mood) and debutant Callum Parkinson out cheaply, the score stood on 278-7 after 91 overs. Although there was no prospect of losing, it seemed unlikely that a fourth, let alone a fifth, batting point would be secured. It occurs to me that an observer unfamiliar with the scoring of bonus points would have been puzzled by what happened next, which was that Tom Wells, Clint McKay and Dieter Klein began to flex their muscles, making 139 off the last 19 overs (a quite reasonable T20 score). Even Darren Stevens was forced to concede 44 off his 21 overs, though Matt Hunn (a tall young seamer with a disappointing lack of nicknames, given the options) bore the brunt, going for 110 off his 22.

Having left soon after 5.00, I missed the one point in the game where it seemed that the drift to a draw might be reversed, that the extraordinary thing might happen, as Dieter Klein took four wickets and Tom Wells one to reduce Kent to 144-5, in a session that did not end until 7.30. The man to re-establish it the next morning was, inevitably, Stevens, who had begun to turn the tide with a counter-attacking 50 the evening before. He went on to make exactly 100 (cheered on by the Ultras in the Stench & Benno Stand, who can’t have been quite wasted enough at that time of the morning to have forgotten that he was now playing for Kent), making the follow-on, and thus a result, unachievable by about lunchtime.

After that, the innings ended with a mirror image of Leicestershire’s, as the Kent lower order secured the fifth bonus point with 20 overs to spare. With the serious business concluded, they continued clubbing the bowling (Coles taking 26 off an over from a visibly shaken Parkinson) long after the point where it had begun to seem merely gratuitous. Leicestershire’s reply, in which Harry Dearden scored 17 in 72 minutes represented an exercise in Zen pointlessness, although young Hunn did have the consolation of returning figures of 1-2.

You may have noticed, incidentally, that this report is uncharacteristically reliant on figures (which I have borrowed from Cricinfo). Even at the distance of little over a week, much of my memory of the game has been erased by the sand-drifts of time : in fact, what I remembered most clearly about it (and this you couldn’t find on Cricinfo) was the remarkable mackerel sky on the Sunday afternoon.

Picture yourself on a boat on a river …

Northamptonshire v Worcestershire, Wantage Road, 26 May 2017

I have not renewed my Membership at Northamptonshire this year. Technically, no-one has, because Membership has been reduced to Season Ticket Holder-ship, and, with the sentimental motive removed, I have chosen not to buy one because three of Northamptonshire’s home matches coincide with Leicestershire’s (a fourth, the one against Leicestershire, is a day-night game, so I am unlikely to see much of that either).

As a result, this single day, the first of a low-scoring contest which Worcestershire won in three days, lacked context, though it drifted by enjoyably enough. What I remember best is, rather ignobly, hoping that the young Worcestershire seamer Josh Tongue would fall over, so that I could make a joke about “a slip of the Tongue” and the stroke of doubtful heritage (perhaps a kind of paddle-pull over his shoulder) that removed Ben Duckett after a watchful 28, caught behind off the said Tongue (and not even by a slip). Last season Duckett would have played this stroke without hesitation and sent it over the boundary ; he is a “confidence player”, if ever there was one, and his misadventures with England over the Winter may have depleted even his considerable reserves of that quantity.

The Memorial Garden looked lovely in the sunshine, I must say.

Derbyshire v Leicestershire, Derby, 27 May 2017

Two Derbyshire supporters

The following day I visited Derby. The ground is not, these days, one that you would choose to visit without some strong motive (even the once adequate tea-room has now been replaced by a burger van). Mine was that there was an outside chance that Leicestershire might win (the extraordinary thing), with the chance of sheet lightning thrown in (which, in the event, might have livened the game up a bit).

On the first two days, Leicestershire had made 619, chiefly because they could (in that unattractive phrase). On a Slumberdown of a pitch, and with Derbyshire lacking Viljoen and Cotton (the two bowlers who had threatened in their RLDOC match), Ackermann, Cosgrove and Eckersley all waxed fat to the tune of a large century apiece. Any chance of a result depended on Derbyshire being made to follow on. When Godelman and Thakor (another couple of drifters) began the day on 154-1 this seemed unlikely ; when, by the early afternoon, they had a century apiece and were collectively on 323-1, the direction of drift was clear.

The promised sheet lightning, which was meant to be sweeping up from the South-West (like the Duke of Monmouth), had failed to materialise during the morning, which was warm, but with a strong wind providing an undertone of unease. After lunch, though, the sky darkened and the wind rose further, coinciding with the arrival of the second new ball. McKay removed Thakor and Madsen ; Klein snared Hughes ; Chappell, who always seems to be bowl best in Wagnerian conditions, finally yorked Godelman in a moment of catharsis that had at least one spectator* leaping to his feet and punching the air. At 384-5, the extraordinary thing still seemed a possibility.

The sheet lightning never arrived, and neither did the extraordinary thing. Although Chappell subjected Smit and Wilson to a fearful battering in Stygian light (breaking Wilson’s bat, to his annoyance), they weathered the storm, which had never quite arrived, and the total drifted on past the 469 required to avert the follow on, thus killing the game late on the third day.

Cricinfo headlined their account of this match “Dull draw ends Derbyshire’s run of defeats”.

And so the season drifts on. Leicestershire stand 8^th in Division 2 (without the points deduction they would be 6^th). Ned Eckersley is the leading run scorer in Division 2, with Cosgrove not far behind ; Ackermann would be third in the averages (if they still had such things), and Leicestershire have more batting points than any side bar leaders Nottinghamshire. Zak has taken his first four wicket haul, which should give him confidence.

On the other hand, we have played five games and have yet to win. Nine to go.

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily – Life is but a dream!

* Me.