Richard Clarke AKA The Grumbler

As you might expect from one of the world’s most literate sports, county cricket has been the subject of more than its fair share of obituaries. To date, all of them premature.
There were a good few written during the 2019 campaign, the season before the planned introduction of The Hundred. I like to think my own book, Last-Wicket Stand, predicted many of the pinch points we are facing right now. Ten years earlier, Duncan Hamilton’s A Last English Summer (note the common word in both titles) used a season on the boundary to examine the challenges in “a semi...