Catch up four years later

Posted by Tony Hutton

For the last four days YouTube has shown full coverage of the match at Lord's in 2016 when, in the last match of the season, Middlesex beat Yorkshire to win the County Championship in one of the most exciting finishes ever. This was of special significance to me as, although I had been present to see the first three and a half days, I had to leave after lunch on the last day to catch a train back to Paris. The reasons for this were spelled out in my blog at the time, but suffice to say I had commuted from and to Paris to celebrate the birthdays of my two grandsons, both born inconveniently in September.

Time to leave.

This meant I missed the denouement, which my dictionary describes as 'the outcome of a complex series of events'. You could certainly say that about the events on the afternoon of 24th September 2016. Three teams were still in with a chance of winning the title, the two engaged at Lord's, plus Somerset who had already won at Taunton. Somerset appeared to have a good chance of winning their first ever title if the game at Lord's ended in a draw, which at lunchtime on day four seemed the most likely result.

What happened next was that the two captains, James Franklin and Andrew Gale, devised a cunning plan which involved joke bowling to feed Middlesex easy runs, prompting an eventual target of 240 runs for Yorkshire to win in 40 overs. Both teams needed an outright win for the championship title. Many commentators and cricket followers thought this plan to be 'not cricket', especially those of a Somerset persuasion. However the pundits on the Sky coverage thought otherwise. Obviously it made good television and both teams had to go all the way in pursuit of victory.

In the end, despite a valiant attempt from Yorkshire, who continued to go for the runs to the bitter end, rather than play for a draw, which would have given Somerset the honours, Middlesex emerged triumphant. The bowling of Toby Roland-Jones clinched matters for Middlesex when he achieved a remarkable hat-trick, completed with the first two balls of the 36th over. He removed the last man Ryan Sidebottom and his leg stump as shown on the front cover of Duncan Hamilton's book 'The Kings of Summer'.

This slim volume concentrates entirely on the four days of this memorable match and was all I had to go on until this week, when I found the Sky coverage and the high standard of the pictures such an excellent way to catch up with the events which I had missed four years ago. The book ends as the season comes to a close and the author quotes Neville Cardus 'There can be no summer in this land without cricket'. Little did either of them know what was in store for all of us in the summer of 2020.

Shortly after finishing this blog I received a message from Peter France in Huddersfield to confirm that the mystery ground shown in my previous blog was that of Paddock cricket club, now sadly no longer in existence. Thanks to the detective work of Peter's son and friends. Obviously the Sykes Cup semi-final was played on a neutral ground, but most certainly it was not Lascelles Hall.