What is the relevance of county cricket? Now before all eight of you start foaming at the mouth and screaming at no one in particular, the Spin would like to point out that this is not a rhetorical question: this column has always been a fan of the county game. But it struck us after Owais Shah's heroics in the second Twenty20 international on Friday that the public's view of the domestic set-up is often coloured to an unreasonable extent by the success or otherwise of the national side.
Asked how he coped with the double-figure asking-rate, Shah replied: "You've got to remember I've been playing county cricket for 10 years. I have learned from my mistakes and used my experience." This might well have been a dig at Duncan Fletcher, whom Shah accused recently of lacking communication skills during his brief association with Fletcher's England. But it was also hailed in some quarters as a face-value piece of common sense: learn about rough and tumble at domestic level and you'll be better prepared for the international stage.
This is all very well, but it fails to explain why England have been a miserable one-day side ever since the 1992 World Cup. After all, our cricketers have always played more limited-overs stuff than their overseas counterparts. Yet part of the Peter Moores honeymoon - itself tied up with a quiet but just about perceptible post-Fletcher backlash - involves a romanticising of the county game that made Moores what he is today. And, thanks to the selections of players like Shah, Dimitri Mascarenhas and Ryan Sidebottom, that county game currently has a spring in its step.
Why else, ran the argument, did Sidebottom slip so comfortably into Test cricket after being ignored for six years? Because - unlike Sajid Mahmood and Liam Plunkett - he had bowled plenty of overs on the county circuit. The fact that he was bowling against West Indians who played awayswing as if they had never seen it before was only mentioned in passing. No, this was county cricket's triumph.
And in a way it was. But isn't that also the kind of oversimplification that county cricket tends to generate? When England lost the Headingley Test to South Africa in 2003, the reaction of Michael Vaughan - then starting out as captain - was to blame the county game for failing to produce tough enough cricketers. The following year England won eight Tests in a row and did not lose a game. Had county cricket toughened up in the meantime? Or was it the case that it was never soft in the first place? Frankly, neither.
The fact is that when England are successful, county cricket becomes a rugged school of hard knocks. And when they are not, county cricket is a breeding-ground for mediocrity. As England's bowlers might well discover when India's batting galacticos book in for B&B on the flatter pitches of Lord's, Trent Bridge and The Oval, the most relevant factor is the quality of the opposition.
This is an extract from Lawrence Booth's weekly email, The Spin.
