Northamptonshire celebrate 100 years of first-class competition in 2005. Matthew Engel reflects on their survival against the odds but fears this landmark year will bring few smiles for his fellow supporters
Years ago, when I was an exceedingly junior reporter on the Northampton Chronicle & Echo, we were occasionally expected to knock on the door of people celebrating their 100th birthday and ask how they had managed to reach such an age. You just prayed they would not reply: "Clean living, young man."
I got out of this task when, by a combination of good timing and sticking pins in the effigy of a rival, I was appointed the paper's cricket correspondent and was able to report the only story in Northampton worth covering: the doings of the county cricket club. Now Northamptonshire CCC, who began their opening Championship match on May 18, 1905, has reached 100 years as a first-class county. How on earth have they achieved that? Late-night car accidents effectively ended the careers of two of the club's greatest players (Freddie Bakewell and Colin Milburn) and sent another (VWC Jupp) to jail. And for many years the club was kept afloat on the proceeds of rowdy discos. So we can rule out clean living.
It has required the dedication and brilliance of a handful of remarkable individuals on the field and off it; the inertia of English cricket that allowed the club to continue when, in all honesty, it should have been kicked out; and a phenomenal dollop of luck.
Northamptonshire is a bland county with a small, shifting, population and no especially strong cricket tradition. For all but the last decade of their century, the cricket club had to share the ground with Northampton Town FC, whose touchline was absurdly close to the square. The county were promoted out of their natural habitat in the minor counties because a freakish generation of outstanding Edwardian local cricketers - led by the allrounder George Thompson - was simply too good to be ignored. And they frightened everyone: in the Titanic year of 1912 Thompson and the (white) Trinidadian import, Sydney Smith, bowled Northamptonshire within two points of Yorkshire and the title. The senior clubs were less than enchanted.
The War put a stop to the county's aspirations, as to so much else. The local talent dried up, and from then on the club would depend on Smiths far more than Thompsons. Indeed, it could hardly depend on anyone and achieved a condition of such wretchedness that the side became a national joke for their cricket as well as the ground. From 1935 to 1939 they went four years - 99 matches - without winning once.
I grew up on two pieces of County Ground folklore, both of them so ingrained that one assumed they must be untrue. One was that the first captain after the Second World War, Peter Murray-Willis, had been chasing a ball to the boundary when his cap fell off - whereupon he turned back to retrieve his cap. Andrew Radd, who co-wrote the official history of Northamptonshire with me, discovered this not merely happened but had been a factor in Murray-Willis' mid-season "resignation". This moment might be regarded as the epitome of the county's bad old days.
The second story is set three years later when Freddie Brown was appointed captain. At his first selection meeting, which began with the usual committee-type blather, he listened patiently before taking a piece of paper out of his pocket and announcing: "There's my team." I interviewed Brown for the book, just before his death in 1991. And he more or less confirmed the story, except to say that he didn't listen for long. And that, 44 years after Northamptonshire's promotion, was the turning point. In the 20 seasons between 1923 and 1948, they were bottom 10 times and second-bottom six. Since then, there have been 56 seasons, and they have been bottom and second-bottom just once each. In short, they have been as competitive and respectable as just about any team in the country.
They have won three finals at Lord's. And in each decade in the second half of the 20th century - nearly always the middle of each decade, by a curious quirk - they have had a team capable of matching or mashing the best in the land. In 1957, under Dennis Brookes, Northamptonshire finished ahead of everyone except Surrey. In 1965 Keith Andrew's gifted and exciting team was within a whisker - and a controversial declaration - of beating Worcestershire to the title. The mid-1970s team, its attack led by Cottam, Dye, Sarfraz, Bedi and Mushtaq, could and should have been champions. In 1987, under Geoff Cook, they nearly won everything, and got nothing. In 1995 the ageing Allan Lamb strutted bossily round the field and almost bullied his boys to the title.
But it has never happened. One by one, the other outcasts have left us. When I first began watching cricket at the County Ground in the late 1950s, seven counties were deemed by Wisden never to have been champions: Hampshire, Worcestershire, Leicestershire, Essex, Sussex, Somerset and Northamptonshire. The first five have gone and spoiled their record.
The club now stands at four: first Durham joined us; then I had to help the process along myself by discovering, as Wisden editor, that before 1890 there was no firm concept of a champion county. The supposed titles attributed to Gloucestershire in the 1870s were simply not credible, WG or no WG. So they are in our ranks too. But even those wretches from Leicester (we've never cared for them) have had titles, dammit! Maybe it is that failure ever quite to be champions that has kept our reputation back. Posh paper writers traditionally come to the County Ground and sneer: Cinderellas, they call us, underdogs, artisans. Artisans? The county of the imperious Brown, of Frank Tyson, of Curtly Ambrose, of Bishan Bedi, of Andrew the master gloveman, of elegant Dennis Brookes, of mighty Jock Livingston and even mightier Milburn? Give over. But if they are not artisans and underdogs, what exactly are they? I became a junior member of Northamptonshire (fee: 1) in, I think, 1958, when I was seven. In only one summer since then have I failed to get in at least an hour or two at the County Ground. Some years I hardly missed an over. There is no organisation in the world, not even the National Union of Journalists, to which I have been so staunchly, hopelessly, pointlessly loyal.
And through my early life they repaid that loyalty. Northampton in the 1960s was not famous for its range of attractions, though I did take my first date there to a Gerry and the Pacemakers concert. Yet there was always cricket. And my summer memories consist of banana sandwiches (which had a mysterious ability to take wickets, like the tide at Southend), Tizer, Gallones lager-and-lime flavour ice lollies, and boundaries from Milburn and Roger Prideaux that rattled the old slotted-together green-and-white boundary boards.
Even then, crowds at county matches were feeble: one-day cricket was taking over. But in the school holidays there would always be 50 or 100 kids scrabbling for autographs at the close of play. I popped in on a lovely August afternoon last summer and saw three. Then again, I'm not sure there was a player whose autograph was worth chasing. Still, I retain my membership (though the computer lost me for a year, which was a fine way of repaying my loyalty) and I have just received a spring mailing, beguilingly explaining all the benefits that would accrue if I vote for the club's plan to become a limited company.
But companies these days have mission statements. And, 100 years on, it is not at all clear to me what this company will be for. Its purpose cannot just be to make a profit, though after the recent disappearance of large sums of money (including my subscription, perhaps) that would be nice.
Is it to bring through a new generation of George Thompsons? By the turn of the 21st century, Northamptonshire were again turning out sides that were more than half local-born. Those players have now vanished, the last and best of them, Graeme Swann, stomping off to Trent Bridge last autumn and eloquently warning that the club was losing its identity. Is it to produce players for England? In the past 10 years, one player (Swann) has played once, in a one-day international. Round the circuit, the joke is that the Steelbacks have been renamed the Kolpaks.
Is it, finally, to win that damned elusive Championship? Well, not in the centenary year. Like half the counties under the current system, they are not even eligible. For the first time since Brown's arrival, the middle of this decade shows no sign of producing a Northamptonshire surge. There are problems here that, to a greater or lesser degree, face all the counties. In Northamptonshire, they seem particularly acute. The question a reporter has to ask these centenarians is not how they have survived but why anyone should subsidise them to survive any longer.
I shall drop by when I can this summer to enjoy those great County Ground traditions: a Gallones and a moan. And as the second century begins, I hope against hope that, I will some day be able to write an article celebrating our first Championship. But far more than that, I want above all to see players that gladden the heart, and be reassured that I pay my subs to Northamptonshire County Cricket Club, and not to some company of uncertain purpose that happens, by historical quirk, to be based in Northampton. I will need some convincing.
This article was first published in the May issue of The Wisden Cricketer.
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