Late September, the very butt end of the season. In London it was a soupy sort of day, the sky a uniform grey and the atmosphere, in the morning at least, still thick with the lingering humidity of last week’s Indian summer, leaving the city’s commuters facing the dilemma of whether or not to pack an umbrella. If this morning was meant for anything, it was bowling first.
Amid the crowds, happy bands of cricket fans heading to Lord’s, conspicuous both by their picnics and kit, backpacks, anoraks, floppy hats, and their conversations about the many permutations of the next few days’ play, which promise to be especially enthralling. At the start, Middlesex were top of the Championship table, their opponents, Yorkshire, were second, nine points shy, and Somerset, playing Nottinghamshire at Taunton, a point further back in third.
If Middlesex win this match they will win the Championship, too. If they lose, the title will be between Yorkshire and Somerset, so long as they beat Nottinghamshire, won by whichever of them earns the most bonus points for their batting and bowling. So the competition, which has been simmering on the backburner since way back at the start of April, has come to the boil.
The ground wasn’t full, or close to it, but there were enough people for the stands to hum with conversation, the chitchat about this and that punctuated by occasional urgent bellows of “C’mon Yorkshire!”. They didn’t emanate from the pavilion.
Yorkshire are trying to become the first team to win the Championship three times back-to-back since their own illustrious predecessors did it between 1966 and 1968, Middlesex are trying to win it for the first time since 1993, while dear old Somerset for the first time in their history.
So the stakes are high, the pressure, which sometimes slackens over the course of a long county season, particularly intense. Which, history suggests, should suit Yorkshire just fine. Jim Kilburn spent 40 years working as the cricket correspondent of the Yorkshire Post and his words were, according to Geoffrey Boycott, “read like scripture throughout the county”. Kilburn once wrote that “Yorkshire cricket is supposed to be played the hard way, with competitive success a primary concern”.
Under the regulations in use this season, of course, Yorkshire had the choice of whether or not they wanted to field. Having packed their team with a formidable battery of five medium-quick bowlers, they didn’t dilly-dally over the decision. From the Pavilion End, they opened with Ryan Sidebottom, 38 now, and with an approach so slow he appears to be running in at three-quarter speed. His first over was a maiden, one of five he bowled in that first spell. Altogether, he gave up only 14 runs in his first 13 overs. Steve Patterson, on as second change, was similarly thrifty, Tim Bresnan, who gave up a four off his first ball and then only a solitary single from the next 21 of his first spell, only a little less so.
All this parsimony allowed Jack Brooks and David Willey some leeway to cut loose at the other end. Brooks bowled well in the morning, and had both Nick Compton and Sam Robson lbw, Robson falling over a full, straight, fast ball as though he had stepped on his own shoelaces while he tried to move his feet. It was Yorkshire’s morning. And if Azeem Rafiq had only taken a catch at point to dismiss Nick Gubbins when his score was 22, it would have been their day, too, and his team would surely now be favourites to win the County Championship. But Gubbins went on to make a century, so there will be a few more twists and turns to come.
“Yorkshire cricket,” Kilburn wrote, “is seen as the cricket of championships and leagues, of determined batting and painstaking bowling; as cricket of serious men and an unsympathetic, not to say contemptuous view of failure and misfortune.” All that hardness, Kilburn reckoned, “stems from self-criticism”.
There will have been plenty of that, you’d think, after stumps on the first day’s play, as Rafiq and his team-mates stewed on what could prove to be an inordinately costly drop.
