The Wicket Men

It's Britain's hottest summer since 1976 and English cricket is in a sweat of transformation. The public is no longer interested in County Championship games, traditional touchstone of the calendar. Fans prefer a bit of flash, bang, wallop – or so the experts tell us. Where though does that leave the twenty minor counties – strung out from Northumberland to Norfolk to Cornwall – who for the past one hundred and twenty-five years have fancied themselves the stepping-stone between regional club and first class county competitions? A level of the game seen as either an ex-professionals' graveyard or the last refuge of blazered old duffers is in a struggle for its very existence. And come 2020, the venerable Minor Counties Championship will indeed be blown away, like dandelion seeds on the breeze, replaced by the newly-branded and 'more marketable' National Counties Championship. At least that was the plan. In 2018, no-one has yet heard of Covid-19. What they do know is that this threat to their competition is existential and the modernisers at Lord's are to blame, far more interested in such innovations as a proposed new 'Hundred' than bolstering that which has stood the test of time. Granted full access to committee and squad, Tony Hannan, author of Underdogs – A Year in the Life of a Rugby League Town, spent a season with Cumberland CCC amid the lakes, fells and mountains of Cumbria. And as might have been expected in such dramatic terrain, he tells a story full of ups and downs – complete with one or two surprises. Skippered by former Durham player Gary Pratt – who as substitute fielder ran out Australia captain Ricky Ponting during the 2005 Ashes – Cumberland's expenses-only nomads are nevertheless just one important thread in a yarn stretching well beyond the boundaries of Cumbria. The Wicket Men is a cricket book unlike any other. It draws stumps on a small but fascinating aspect of a pastime whose rhythms and rituals, while endlessly evolving, are rooted firmly in the English folk tradition.