A social media post from Middlesex CCC caught the eye recently. It was championing the grass nets at Merchant Taylors’ School in Hertfordshire that their squad had just used for the first time, a project three years in the making. It gives Middlesex exclusive access to nets away from Lord’s, where the use of practice facilities has long been a problem for the county, but, crucially, with the surfaces also replicating the famous Lord’s slope.
Lovely attention to detail, that, and you hope it bears fruit for the Middlesex batsmen when facing James Anderson at Lord’s from Friday in their County Championship opener against Lancashire.
When mentioning attention to detail I am always reminded of an incident at Sophia Gardens in 1997 when Glamorgan were preparing for their first match of the season against Warwickshire, and in particular their mighty fast bowler, the South African Allan Donald.
My opening partner, Hugh Morris, and I decided to take the bowling machine out to the nets on the square and try to imitate Donald’s pace by cranking it up to 90mph. We had begun doing this when our new head coach, a Zimbabwean chap by the name of Duncan Fletcher, wandered over, stopped the practice, picked up the machine and moved it a little to the left. “That’s where Donald bowls from,” he said, and walked off.
Tiny detail, massive difference. My old mate Morris, who is so bravely battling cancer for a second time, made a career-best 233 not out and we were soon all agreeing that it had been the best pre-season we’d ever had. That was not just because Fletcher had arrived — he barely said a word initially — but because the weather had allowed outdoor nets, which had been prepared specially on the square for the new coach, for nearly two weeks uninterrupted. It was no coincidence that we won the championship that year.
Championship cricket has changed much since then, not least when you hear Surrey’s Sam Curran talking recently about being excited to watch the start of a competition in which he may well be playing later in the season on his iPad in the coffee shop of an Indian hotel. He is, of course, playing for Chennai Super Kings in the Indian Premier League.
And pre-seasons have changed too. The season used to start so much later, with most counties reporting back on April 1 for a couple of weeks of training, often including some comical fitness training and tests — Lancashire’s Jack Simmons hitching a lift on a training run and all that.
But the reality remains that, for very obvious climatic reasons, pre-season preparation for counties is a lottery. The weather has actually been reasonably clement this year and you would hope that will be reflected in the quality of the pitches this week — Warwickshire made 504 without loss in 90 overs against Northamptonshire in a friendly at Edgbaston last week, even if six batsmen were “retired not out” — but many counties have ventured abroad, something that became all the rage in the late 1980s and 1990s, even if many of the trips were more of the bonding variety, rather than gaining any real cricketing advantage — and often prohibitively expensive.
To take a small selection this year, Durham went to Zimbabwe, Gloucestershire to South Africa and Yorkshire played Somerset in Abu Dhabi, and there are certainly options nearer to home now, such as the Desert Springs facility in Spain, visited by Worcestershire. But none of them is like Durham in April, and often you can return home to be confined by the weather to indoor training, which can then rather defeat the object in the first place.
And there are also the marquees that house grass nets at some grounds now, an initiative England sometimes use at Loughborough before winter tours. But how good are the grass nets in general?
It brings to mind an interview my colleague Mike Atherton did in 2018 with Rahul Dravid when he was India Under-19 coach. “Go back to my time, what’s changed is facilities,” Dravid said. “Cricket is a game that needs facilities, such as grass pitches, because without them it’s hard to produce players. Without good facilities you can’t develop your skills. You can have as much passion as you want but to kick on you need good infrastructure.”
Indeed you do. Leicestershire have always set the gold standard in county outdoor net facilities, allocating a groundsman whose sole job it is to look after them. You would hope that such facilities, especially now with the women’s game returning to a county-based system and their cricketers deserving and rightly demanding good facilities too, will be high on the list of priorities for all counties when considering how best to use their money from the sale of the Hundred.
Recently the Sussex head coach, Paul Farbrace, was talking about the county schedule when he said: “We’ve never had a better opportunity in the game, with the money that’s coming from the Hundred, to actually have a county plan for the summer that absolutely is right for cricket and not right for finance.
“We’re now in a position where the money that’s coming in means that, actually, every county should be able to say, ‘This is what we want in terms of county cricket. What is best for English cricket? How are we going to produce players for England?’ ”
But that also applies to the cricketing infrastructure. The story from my colleague Simon Wilde about the possibility of a roofed stadium is the extreme end of the facilities argument, but there is so much room for improvement across the board — all counties should have second grounds, as many have already, ideally with top-notch practice nets, both indoor and outdoor, because indoor nets are such a necessity in our climate.
For instance, Glamorgan have not produced enough of their own cricketers in the past 20 years, but it is especially sad that the production line from west Wales — think Simon Jones, Greg Thomas, Steve Watkin, Robert Croft, Alan Jones, Don Shepherd and so many others — appears to have all but dried up, mainly, in my opinion, because of the chronic lack of indoor facilities in the area.
As for a new county season, what is the optimal preparation anyway? How many overs does a bowler need in his legs? How many runs does a batsman need behind him? How many balls does he need to hit? For worriers like myself it was never enough.
It has been a subject much discussed at international level, with the lack of warm-up fixtures on tours now an accepted norm. The England Test captain, Ben Stokes, argues that the benefits of time in the middle for red-ball cricket is an “old-fashioned” concept. I actually don’t disagree with that, preferring good net practice in pre-season training to too many mediocre practice matches, but there is clearly a balance to be found.
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The England head coach, Brendon McCullum, has sought to eradicate so many traditional but transparent pre-match practices — because county cricketers do have a habit of spending a lot of time at grounds outside playing hours doing very little — and instead focus on “turning up” for the real stuff.
I hope the county players “turn up” on Friday on what is always an exciting date in the calendar, but I certainly won’t miss that dread of wondering whether you are actually ready.
