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Every English cricket season starts with an Indian spring now but they say this one will end in an Indian summer too. The forecast is warm and dry and this, at least, is one last late blessing for the County Championship.
Warwickshire, 11 points clear at the top, host a dejected Leicestershire at Edgbaston. Somerset, second again, play Surrey at Taunton; Nottinghamshire, defending champions, have Yorkshire at Trent Bridge, although the chances are that if you’ve read this far into an article about the championship you already know all this.
The championship has an avid following among those who know, on the scorecards, through the streams, and over the BBC’s excellent local radio. This week they will, I’ll wager, get the very best cricket of a summer that included the Hundred, the Blast, humdrum Test series against New Zealand and Pakistan, a white-ball tour by India that I know the scorelines for because I just looked them up, and these last desultory Twenty20 and one-day international series against Sri Lanka, the butt of an international summer that has been smoked right down to the letters.
Only cricket could engineer a schedule in which the final round of the premier domestic competition gets shoved to the back end of September and somehow still has to compete with the national team for attention.
In the era of the Hundred, the championship gets treated like some kind of arcana, sporting Victoriana, but the championship is still some of the hardest cricket there is, a six-month slog up, down, and around the counties across spring, summer and autumn. It means plenty, and especially in Taunton, where Town play in football’s Southern League Premier Division South, and the rugby union side the Titans in National League 2 West. In all honesty, there’s nothing Tom Banton could do in three bilateral ODIs against Sri Lanka this week that would mean as much as a match-winning hundred in Somerset’s first championship.
This time last year Banton, 27, was talking about whether he could yet make it into the Test team. “Winning our first County Championship, that is the main goal for me,” he said back then. This summer he quit red-ball cricket. So it goes, for every player who talks about the vital importance of red-ball cricket there’s another who quits it. But they never yet put a plaque up for a bloke because he scored a quick 40 in a 50-over game against Sri Lanka in September.
Some of this is personal. I’m a Somerset boy, and started this job in the press box at Taunton working for the Somerset Guardian, where I used to pretend I knew what I was doing while secretly feeling unable to believe I was paid 10p a line for the privilege of watching Ian Blackwell bat, while the correspondent from the Daily Telegraph, Wisden Cricketer of the year 1969 David Green, asked me if I knew the answer to 17 across in that day’s cryptic. If I find it painful that they still haven’t won the championship after 136 years, just imagine how Vic Marks feels 50 years after he made his debut.
At this point, Somerset’s annual tilt at the title is the most compelling story in county cricket. It must be one of the oldest hoodoos in all sport. This century they’ve finished as runners-up six times, and in the past decade alone have come second in 2016, 2018, 2019, and third in 2024 and 2025.
They will tell you 2010 was the worst of them. That year they were six points clear at the start of the very last day’s play against Durham at Chester-le-Street, and the England and Wales Cricket Board chair Giles Clarke had even flown up with the trophy. They needed to take eight wickets and score whatever runs were left to do it. Then Dale Benkenstein batted through the afternoon and in the end they were left chasing an impossible 188 in 17 overs. At Old Trafford Nottinghamshire somehow managed to scramble the runs and wickets they needed to draw level with 38 minutes to go. They won the title on a tie-break.
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But 2016 stung, too. They were top of the table with a day left to play, again, when the two teams right behind them, Middlesex and Yorkshire, concocted a result by delivering 10 overs of declaration bowling that left Yorkshire needing 240 off 40 overs to win the championship. They didn’t do it, but Middlesex did. In comparison this year’s campaign has been kind. It felt like it ended at Headingley last week, when they had Yorkshire six wickets down only 65 runs ahead, then watched Dom Bess and George Hill put on 166 for the seventh wicket before being bowled out for 101 themselves.
Maybe there will be a twist. Maybe they will beat Surrey. Maybe Leicestershire, who lost the one-day final on Sunday and have just been docked 27 points for a dodgy pitch, will do the needful and become the first team to beat Warwickshire at home this season. Or maybe it’s best just to save whatever hope is left for next season. It would be less painful, anyway. But then so long as it still hurts, you can be sure it still matters.
