One day cricket: 50 not out

Cricket - Gillette Cup - Final - Somerset v Northamptonshire - Lord's

Fifty years ago this week, Lancashire met Leicestershire at Old Trafford for what would become one of the most significant matches in cricket history.

The date was 1st May 1963, and by stumps the home side had beaten the Foxes by 101 runs and recorded the first ever victory in the new Gillette Cup. Today the contest is known as the YB40 –  but rather more significantly, it was also the world’s first professional one-day cricket competition.

And so limited overs cricket was born. Half a century later, the game’s infant has become its grand old man, and a fecund one, too – spawning endless domestic and international versions, from the John Player League to the World Cup, and not forgetting its most rebellious, impudent, and youngest child, the bastard offspring which is T20.

Endlessly tinkered with, and ruthlessly exploited in commercial terms, one day cricket became the game’s financial saviour and the mainspring of its growth in Asia. Without it, few people would ever watch live cricket in New Zealand, and to an extent, South Africa. But here in England, its birthplace, our relationship with the 50/55/60 over format has always been complex and ambivalent.

Cricket is a realm of ironies, not least that it was our own nation’s establishment – usually and often rightly caricatured as conservative and timorous, which created and then propagated the most revolutionary, most transformative, version of our sport. And not just English cricket per se, but the county game – the archetype of antediluvian, backwards-gazing stuffiness.

In a lovely piece in the Daily Telegraph, Steve James reminisces about the sepia-tinged early years of county one-day competition, many aspects of which now seem quaint. It’s almost startling to recall that until fairly recently, limited overs cricket was played in whites. To begin with, conventional breaks were taken for both lunch and tea. Captains posted a full cordon of slips and gullies, and the first trophy – the aforementioned Gillette Cup – began as a 65 (yes, 65) overs-a-side contest.

For me, the glory days of county one-dayers were the 1980s. Perhaps that truly was the case, or it might just have been due to my age – those earnest and unjaded years from late childhood to the cusp of my teens.

But it really did seem to matter much more in those times, before they began changing the name, rules, and format every ten minutes. This might even have been something to do with the whites themselves- which leant an air of gravitas to proceedings, in contrast to the disposable impermanence of coloured clothes.

In the eighties, the B&H Cup and NatWest Trophy were big events, and the finals marquee dates in the calendar. All the later rounds were screened on the BBC, on Tuesdays, the day after a test match finished – and that was exciting enough in itself, as it meant an extra, bonus day of coverage, hungrily consumed by my eleven-year-old self’s insatiable appetite for televised cricket. The BBC covered two matches simultaneously, flitting between the pair, which meant a chance to hear an exotically-unfamiliar cast of second-string commentators. Ray Illingworth, normally the summariser, would even be given his own match to take charge of.

For me and my generation, this was the most extensive access to English domestic cricket we would ever have. If you’re aged between 32 and 45, and you don’t believe me, close your eyes, think ‘county cricket’, and an image will come to mind of Derek Pringle bowling to Asif Din, both wearing baggy shirts, with Tom Graveney commentating.

It was through the B&H and NatWest that we discovered a whole range of characters – and cricketing textures – we would never have done otherwise. From ageing legends (Alan Knott and Derek Underwood), to the not-quite-good-enough-for Englands (Mark Nicholas, Simon Hughes), to the quirky, the daft, and batsmen who stood sideways (John Carr). But my memories aren’t just sentimental and frivolous: they remain vivid because the cricket was meaningful, hard-fought, and competitive.

That’s not to say that modern county one-dayers are none of those things, but the lustre faded years ago. T20 appropriated the glamour, the profile, and the compactness. And by merging the knockout cups with the Sunday League, in the form of the YB40, the premier limited overs competition has been diluted into relative anonymity, exacerbated by the constant rearranging of the furniture. The fact it’s also no longer on terrestrial TV doesn’t help.

In broader and global terms, 50-over cricket is still important and an integral part of the game’s architecture. For many, it continues to hold its own as a form of the sport both long and demanding enough to command respect and satisfy our senses. The World Cup remains the game’s single most prestigious contest, and if England win this summer’s Champions Trophy everyone on these shores will regard it as a significant achievement.

But though I sorely wished not to end this piece on a sombre note, I can only admit that to my eyes the format too often feels outworn and unloved, outflanked by its rivals, invariably predictable, and the continuous rule-changing far seems more a symptom than a cause of its decline. As unhealthy and deluded as it sounds, I want to go back to 1987, with the clothes in white and the trophies sponsored by cigarettes, to see Clive Radley taking guard against Monte Lynch.

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