County Cricket Matters Issue 22

Martin Chandler | 8:55am GMT 16 March 2025

Published: 2025
Pages: 36
Author: Chave, Annie (Editor)
Publisher: County Cricket Matters
Rating: 5 stars

Not that I have ever not enjoyed a copy of County Cricket Matters, but I knew that CCM22 was going to be a special one as soon as I saw the front cover. It is a photograph of Hampshire openers Jimmy Gray and Roy Marshall going out to bat for Hampshire a matter of days after I was born.

The pair were two great stalwarts of county cricket,but very different. Gray was an orthodox opening batsman and more than useful medium paced bowler who scored more than 22,000 runs and took 457 wickets between 1948 and 1966.

Marshall was something else however, and one of my father’s favourite cricketers. A West Indian he was, for the times, an unusually aggressive batsman who took the decision after four modest Test appearances in Australia in 1951/52 to qualify for Hampshire. Having done so he then served them faithfully until 1972 before he retired with the best part of 36,000 runs under his belt. Had he not given up any hopes of a Test career by committing to the county he would undoubtedly have been capped many more times over a period during which West Indies never did find a reliable opening partner for Conrad Hunte.

Which is a roundabout way of looking back at an era when county cricket was the be all and end all. It was the only fully professional domestic circuit in the world, and it just had one prize, the County Championship. Those days will never return, and no one in their right mind would suggest that they should, but at the same time as CCM has consistently advocated through its 22 editions we must try and prevent the Championship being marginalised any further.

And that is doubtless part of the reason why the image was chosen this time round, although not the main one. That arises out of the fact that the man who took the photograph, Patrick Eagar, is the first of two guests interviewed by Annie for CCM22.

The interview is a lengthy one and, naturally, illustrated by several examples of Eagar’s work, and takes up almost a third of the issue. Such is Annie’s ability to ask the right questions, and to tease good answers out of her subjects, that it still seems far too short. We are all looking forward to the appearance soon of Annie’s first book, and perhaps her next project should be to assist Eagar with his autobiography?

But then she could equally provide the same service for her other interviewee in CCM22, David Graveney. It is easy to forget what an interesting life Graveney has led, and one aspect of this interview particularly caught my eye. The reluctance of those English cricketers who went on the rebel tours to South Africa to discuss the issue is notable, but Graveney seems to be an exception, and the observation that it certainly severed relationships with members of my family is just one that warrants further exploration.

Naturally Annie contributes an editorial as well. The recent sale of shares in The Hundred franchises and the consequences of that will doubtless take up many column inches in future editions, but for now for those of us who prefer to try to ignore the existence of The Hundred her summary is particularly valuable.

Moving on from Annie’s personal contributions there are three pieces that are of particular interest to bibliophiles. Two, from Simon Lister and Bob Doran, are based on books that they published last year, and then David Woodhouse continues a look back at the county game’s place in the literature of the game that he began in CCM19.

Lister’s book was an excellent biography of Frank Worrell and his summary of it here is a masterpiece. I can say with certainty that anyone who reads it will want to go and buy the book, and just in case there is any doubt even those who have already read the book will enjoy the piece as well.

Doran’s book is a very different one, Cricket and Poetry, a book primarily about the two most famous cricketing poems there are, At Lord’s by Francis Thompson and Vitai Lampada by Henry Newbold. He tells the story of both men as well as their writings.

Woodhouse’s piece moves forward from looking at Dudley Carew’s 1926 England Over to a series of books and writers of the post war years. Carew reprised England Over, in a slightly different way, in To The Wicket and John Arlott, AA Thomson (each on a number of occasions) as well as Trevor Bailey all looked at the same theme.

Brian Carpenter’s piece is titled simply Sedburgh, after its subject, the school cricket ground in Cumbria that has in recent years, not without controversy, provided the setting for occasional Lancashire home fixtures. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the club’s reasons for visiting a ground such a distance from the county’s borders the beauty of the setting, and that is Carpenter’s concern, is not in dispute.

Greener Games by Archie Cornish covered a subject that, I have to confess, had hitherto passed me by. For the reasons explained in the essay cricket does have a role to play in the battle against climate change, and I begin now to understand what that role is.

Previous issues of CCM have seen many writers reprise the circumstances under which they fell under the game’s spell, and in CCM22 Aamer Malik gives his story, one that had Imran Khan as one of its main characters.

CCM’s patron is Jason Gillespie, and he has put pen to paper in CCM22, with some interesting thoughts on the way in which England now ‘fasttrack’ men into their international squads on grounds of potential alone, without the hitherto accepted need for them first to have shown their mettle in the county game.

Finally, the somewhat too difficult for me crossword apart, that leaves just the contribution on the women’s game from Martin Davies and, I am afraid, for me, it is not a happy one. I watch very little women’s cricket, for the simple reason that the format I enjoy, the red ball game, is so seldom played. And then the recent Ashes series, which I had been looking forward to, I ended up barely watching because it was so one sided.

I was aware that the women’s game was to be reorganised along county rather than regional lines. Perhaps foolishly I had assumed that would include some red ball cricket, but to my great disappointment I learn that only the shorter formats will be played. I sincerely hope that one day soon, whatever the economics of the situation might be, that that will change.