County cricket is heading to a ground near you – even if you do not live within striking distance of one of the 18 first-class county headquarters.
One of the most striking features of the 2015 fixture list is the amount of cricket that will be played on outgrounds – a total of 84 days at 20 different venues staged by 13 of the 18 first-class counties, with the intriguing possibility of a 14th yet joining the list.
There are the traditional festivals which have such a rich history, from Cheltenham in the south-west to Scarborough in the north-east.
But there are also a couple of less familiar names on that list of 20 venues – most intriguingly Welbeck Colliery, a ground that last hosted a Nottinghamshire first-team game in 1904, and which was more recently the first club of the county’s distinguished former wicketkeeper Bruce French.
Notts Outlaws will play two Royal London One-Day Cup matches at the ground on the weekend of July 25-26, against Warwickshire and Glamorgan – their first home fixtures away from Trent Bridge since they faced Durham at Cleethorpes, in neighbouring Lincolnshire, in 2004. Lisa Pursehouse, their chief executive, suggests there could be more in future years.
“We were one of only five counties that didn’t use an outground in 2014, and it is a priority for us to develop a suitable second facility,” she told trentbridge.co.uk.
That theme recurs at several other counties, and there is no better example than Kent’s alternative County Ground at Beckenham, which is becoming firmly established as their second home.
It seems almost disrespectful to describe it as an outground, given the substantial and permanent feel of the set-up down Worsley Bridge Road, where an impressive indoor school and 2,000-seater stand have been erected during the winter.
(A note here for anyone planning to visit the County Ground for the first time this summer. Don’t confuse it with Beckenham CC, the long-established club slightly nearer to Beckenham Junction railway station, whose former players include Derek Underwood and Rob Key.)
Since 2003 Kent have used the County Ground for two County Championship matches, four List A fixtures – including a Friends Provident Trophy quarter-final in 2008 – and 16 Twenty20 games. But this year they will stage more cricket than ever in Beckenham – very much a part of the south-east London suburbs, adjoining the Crystal Palace training ground with the Selhurst Park floodlights visible on a nearby hill (and various capital landmarks including the Shard and Canary Wharf looming a little further away).
“We’re excited about the fixtures we are staging here this year, and about the whole Beckenham development,” explains Jamie Clifford, the Kent chief executive.
“We have a full week of cricket against Surrey at the end of May, with our LV= Championship match followed by the official opening of the new facilities at a NatWest T20 Blast game on Friday 29th. There is another Blast match against Gloucestershire the following Friday, and we will also be using the ground regularly for second team and women’s matches.
“We don’t see Beckenham as a satellite. We see it as building towards having two venues at a similar level. This year it will still feel like an outground, but over time we want to make it feel like the 19th county ground.
“Canterbury and Beckenham are 60 miles apart, probably an hour and 10 minutes drive, so it makes sense for us to bring first-class cricket to people at this end of the county – especially when the transport links are so good, and so many people live within such a small radius of the ground. That means there are strong reasons in terms of pure numbers for doing it.
“But it is also spreading the game. For example for a boy or girl growing up in Lewisham, their nearest first-class cricket would previously have been at The Oval, which while not that far as the crow flies is not the easiest journey. We’re making cricket more accessible to them here at Beckenham, and I do believe that is how you appeal to youngsters – seeing first-class cricket and cricketers in the flesh gives life to the whole thing.”
For Clifford and also Andrew Braddon and Peter Wilson, whose Leander Sports and Leisure company enabled the redevelopment of the old Lloyds Bank ground, that official opening against Surrey, when they hope to attract a capacity crowd of over 7,000, will be a proud day indeed.
Kent will take another championship match, against Essex in mid-July, to the Nevill Ground in Tunbridge Wells, where newspaper reporters have long felt obliged to mention the rhododendrons. Clifford points out that the county have a long history of getting on the road, having used as many as six different home grounds in a season in the past – that is one of the reasons why they have been able to hold such a successful festival at Canterbury, their county headquarters, which is this year built around the visit of Lancashire in early August.
“Taking cricket out to the people is something unique to our county game,” Clifford added. “When we go to Tunbridge Wells, I liken it to the circus coming to town, and a lot of the things you do are similar – putting posters up in the shops, things like that.”
Some players have been less enthusiastic in the past, reluctant to give up the familiar comforts of their county grounds and adjust to more basic facilities which can include unpredictable pitches – although that has never been an issue at Beckenham, where the groundsman Paul Whittaker has earned high praise.
But Lancashire’s Steven Croft is delighted to have the chance to play at three different outgrounds away from Old Trafford this summer – Southport, Liverpool and especially the return to Stanley Park in his native Blackpool.
Croft scored a memorable century when Lancashire last played on the Fylde to set up a crucial win against Worcestershire in their title-winning campaign of 2011.
“I was still living down the road from the ground so I’d walk there every morning, and it felt more like a club game than a county game,” he recalled.
“It was special to play there for Lancashire because I was watching a championship game there a few years earlier that had first got me thinking about playing county cricket.
“By going to Blackpool in the summer holidays, you do appeal to an audience who probably wouldn’t come to watch at Old Trafford. We always get good support, and it feels like there are more people in a club ground rather than Old Trafford which has so many seats to fill.”
If you fancy some cricket by the seaside, Lancashire will play their Royal London Cup game versus Middlesex on July 29 at Blackpool, having hosted their championship match against Derbyshire in Southport in mid-May.
They also play Glamorgan at Colwyn Bay CC, another coastal venue which is actually in Rhos-on-Sea, in mid-July, as the Welsh county maintain their annual trip to the north, in addition to staging their ‘derby’ match with Gloucestershire in August at the historic St Helen’s ground in Swansea.
Other outgrounds which will stage cricket this summer are Chesterfield (Derbyshire), Colchester (Essex), Cheltenham (Gloucestershire), Guildford (Surrey), Rugby School (Warwickshire) and of course Scarborough (Yorkshire), while Sussex will take games to both Arundel and Horsham, and Middlesex will use no fewer than four alternatives to Lord’s – Uxbridge, Richmond, Merchant Taylors School and Radlett.
That makes 15 championship games at 14 venues away from county headquarters (as usual, Yorkshire will play two of their eight home games at Scarborough), in addition to 11 NatWest T20 Blast matches at seven outgrounds, and 13 at 11 in the Royal London Cup.
That could become 14 at 12 if Hampshire finalise plans to take their game against Lancashire Lightning across the Solent to the Isle of Wight – which their chairman Rod Bransgrove has confirmed as a real possibility.
For the last word on outgrounds, over to the Balconiers, the cricket-lovers of Swansea who have played such a key role in maintaining Glamorgan’s presence at the ground where Garfield Sobers famously struck Malcolm Nash for six sixes in an over.
“It is important to continue this tradition of playing some first-class cricket away from the main county bases, thus widening the audiences and showcasing the great game in different surroundings,” they write on their website. Hear, hear to that.