The cricket season begins just two weeks tomorrow, Tuesday April 5th*, when the opening first class matches will be played on home soil including Durham v Durham MCCU at the Riverside. Of course there is cricket before that, MCC take on Yorkshire in Abu Dhabi next week and as early as this Thursday , March 17th , a Gloucestershire XI will be facing Oxford University in The Parks and if you are very tall you may get a glimpse of Derbyshire v Yorkshire at The County Ground in the week after Easter but in my book anything before April 5th is 'pre-season'.
There are those who contest my view that the season begins even as early as April 5th and I have crossed tweets during the winter with Martin Emmerson, cricket commentator for BBC Newcastle who is prepared to inflict another five days waiting on himself by insisting that the season does not begin until April 10th when the County Championship programme gets underway. And no doubt there will be those who feel things don't really get going until league cricket resumes on April 17th (in most cases) or those who wait until the football season ends before thinking about the summer game.
Contrast this with baseball, busy at the moment with spring training which is fully reported in the US media building up to 'Opening Day' on April 4th and described by Wikipedia as a 'symbol of rebirth' and 'a chance to forget last season'. There is even a book by Thomas Boswell entitled 'Why Time Begins on Opening Day'. Fixtures for this year's opener have been known since before the end of last season and in Cincinnati the annual Findlay Market Parade is taken by nearly all residents as a holiday to cheer the Reds, the only team to always open the season with a home game.
Opening Day games typically feature appearances by retired players, local celebrities, politicians etc and in recent years the ceremonial opening pitch has often been thrown by the President., a tradition going back more than 100 years. I am not suggesting that next year we get the Prime Minister, whoever that might be, to bowl the first delivery but surely we can do better than the current dog's breakfast where the domestic first class season begins with what are generally hopeless mismatches unworthy of the 'first class label' and the traditional season opener is played 3500 miles away from Lord's. How about for 2017, when we will be on a reduced diet of first class cricket, restoring the MCC v County Championship game to St John's Wood and following it up with a full round of championship matches in both divisions? If as proposed there will be an eight teams in Div 1 and ten in Div 2 all counties could be involved and if only for one moment all would be level.
* apologies for since writing this piece this morning I have discovered that the match between Oxford MCCU and Worcestershire in The Parks on Thursday 31st March is first class.
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