Pace Bowlers in County Cricket

Where are they?

A couple of related things caught my eye, one during The Hundred, and one this week. Both relate to pace bowlers in county cricket, or to be honest, the lack of pace bowlers in county cricket.

First, this week’s observation.

I’m struggling to remember such a lack of high-quality, robust pace bowlers in the English domestic game for as long as I’ve followed cricket. It is a major factor into why so many counties are focusing on overseas pace bowlers with their recruitment - and also the same can often be said of teams in The Hundred too, with the player pools for county cricket and The Hundred being interlinked. I’d also go as far as to suggest that this would be my biggest concern for the English national team, particularly in white-ball cricket, in the medium-term future.

To compensate, overseas pacers of extremely variable quality have been recruited. Overseas pacers such as Jayden Seales, Nathan Smith and Kemar Roach obviously add to the quality of cricket on show. Others, not so much - they’re simply filling the gaps of a player pool full of pacers who are injured, or who aren’t trusted to play at first-team level.

Here’s a list of frontline domestic pacers who have featured in 8+ matches in the County Championship this season, including the current round of matches.

Division One:

Ben Raine (Durham), Jamie Porter (Essex), Shane Snater (Essex), Tom Bailey (Lancashire), Dillon Pennington (Notts), Craig Overton (Somerset), Dan Worrall (Surrey), Oliver Hannon-Dalby (Warwickshire), Joe Leach (Worcestershire)

Division Two:

Zak Chappell (Derbyshire), James Harris (Glamorgan), Ajeet Dale (Gloucestershire), Scott Currie (Leicestershire), Tom Scriven (Leicestershire), Ben Mike (Leicestershire), Ethan Bamber (Middlesex), Toby Roland-Jones (Middlesex), Ben Sanderson (Northants), Ollie Robinson (Sussex), Ben Coad (Yorkshire)

20 players in total - just over one per team in an 18-county structure. You can quibble about a few others to be included, who are more all-rounders, but it is clear, pacers who play red ball cricket as good as game in, game out, are a scarce commodity. Actually, I’d argue that some of these players (and their agents) may not quite realise how high their value is to county cricket teams.

Not only this, but the majority of these players aren’t likely to be on England’s radar. This group features a fair few county stalwarts who aren’t express pace, with their skills based on durability and consistency - a lot of these pacers, such as Porter, Worrall, Hannon-Dalby, Bamber, Coad, Robinson and Sanderson, are excellent at hitting repeatable lines and lengths - skills which work extremely effectively in county cricket.

When put like this, you can understand why England are possibly looking at the attributes possessed by individual players for international selection as much as a player’s performance in county cricket.

It also doesn’t help that there are quite a few blocked domestic pacers at bigger counties who tend to have a stockpile of good young bowlers - these bowlers often need to move one step down to take two steps up, but tend to sign one contract too many at their existing team. Getting game time is important for a player’s development, and if they step down to Division Two but show that they’re good enough, they’ll get picked up by a big county again pretty soon because the cupboard is pretty bare when it comes to high quality young pacers.

The other problem which nobody seems to want to address is a question which I’ve asked a lot of people in county cricket but have yet to hear a clear-cut, well-argued answer.

“What is the point of county cricket? Is it to produce players for England, effectively being a feeder pathway? Or is it to run as a sustainable business on and off the pitch?”

Most people answer “both”, which is, when you think about it, a pretty ridiculous answer. Because the two things are in most cases, mutually exclusive. It’s a similar scenario to when I ask people in franchise T20 whether they want to be successful on the pitch (results) or whether they value marketing and the commercial value of players highly. Again, I often hear “both”, but mostly, again, they are two mutually exclusive requirements.

Just a few paragraphs ago, I mentioned that most of the pacers who appear regularly and have success in county cricket are county stalwarts without express pace, which is precisely the opposite to the type of pacers England want.

Further, what really is the benefit of a county providing players to England? Particularly with pacers, once they are centrally contracted, a county will rarely see them again. And we know already that there aren’t many ready replacements for them in the player pool, so as soon as a pacer goes to England, the county’s expected results are likely to take a negative hit.

Yes, there is some fees which counties get for that production, but I’d question whether these fees are enough to make the a strategy with high priority focused towards creation of a viable production line of England-ready talent a worthwhile plan for counties. So, to make their spending work best for them, counties need to face up, be honest, and answer that question that nobody seems willing or able to answer - I’ll repeat it here.

“What is the point of county cricket? Is it to produce players for England, effectively being a feeder pathway? Or is it to run as a sustainable business on and off the pitch?”

Moving on to my second observation, which came from when I was with Birmingham Phoenix at The Hundred. We were in the dining room at Cardiff ahead of our match with Welsh Fire, and there was a display hung on the wall celebrating Glamorgan’s unbeaten County Championship season in 1969, when they won the title.

A few of us got chatting about this incredible achievement, and the back-to-back matches in which they played (the dates of each match were listed). So, I took a look into the Glamorgan squad that year. We all had our minds blown by the appearance record for their players. There were 24 matches in a county season then (3-day cricket, so 72 days maximum, compared to the current 14 matches x 4 days = 56 days) and nine of the Glamorgan squad that season played in 23 or 24 of those matches. With two other players featuring in 21 matches, they had 11 players who were virtually ever-present that season. Plus, in those days, they played seven days a week, with a Sunday League match breaking up the championship games.

Of course, I’m not remotely suggesting that we go back to those levels of appearances, but given the improvement in medical science in the last 55 years, it does raise an awkward question to those involved in the creation and sustainability of pacers for county cricket - if the Glamorgan players could play day in day out in 1969 and go the entire season unbeaten in red-ball cricket, why can’t domestic pacers often do even half that workload in 2024?

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