2023 marked the tenth year of my weekly county cricket blogs. During the domestic season, I select a balanced team of the week, from opening batters to fast bowlers, incorporating the best performers in red or white-ball formats as appropriate. A decade on, I thought it might be interesting to see which players have appeared most often in this period.
The central contract system, designed to protect the national squad’s interests above all else, inevitably means that many of the top England stars exclude themselves from the majority of fixtures. Therefore, the list is dominated by players who have either worked their way up to international recognition or those whose cricketing ambitions are relatively modest or whose Test or ODI careers are largely behind them. It goes without saying that The Hundred franchise competition does not count.
68 have appeared in a Team of the Week on at least ten occasions and six have done so twenty times or more. Keeping with the tradition of selecting a genuine XI, I was surprised how the Decade Team almost picks itself. Here goes….
Keaton Jennings’ inability to impress the England selectors has benefitted first Durham, then Lancashire. 2016 was his breakthrough season but, at the age of 31, he will surely get Lancashire (or whoever) off to many more solid starts in the Championship or One-Day Cup. Daryl Mitchell was another unflashy opener. His team, Worcestershire, have been a yo-yo county in the Championship for years, and the local man’s form has been equally erratic. However, before he retired in 2021, he produced numerous big innings that frequently won games.
Prior
to his reinvention as a Test match Bazball exponent, Ben Duckett was a compact hard-hitter
for Northants, later shifting to the richer Nottinghamshire. He was one of the
highest scorers in the Covid-affected summer of 2020 and no specialist batsman
has bettered his twenty Team of the Week appearances. Hampshire’s redoubtable
James Vince is another evergreen master of all formats, but especially in the
Twenty20 Blast where he has been top-scorer for the past two years. Sam
Northeast, Joe Denly and Gary Ballance have featured frequently but my third
middle-order man is Wayne Madsen. Derbyshire may be short on success but the Durban-born
batsman has been an absolute rock for so long, also briefly but economically contributing
to the T20 cause as an opening spinner.
There
were several contenders for the wicketkeeper berth, including Foakes and Steven
Davies, but Chris Cooke’s often match-defining heroics for Glamorgan have
earned him an impressive seventeen Team of the Week slots. Batting down the
order, he is always hard to remove, and takes plenty of vital catches behind
the stumps to the likes of Hogan and Neser.
All-rounders have figured very strongly in my selections. The ability to strike a few fifties and take a five-for is a surefire way to merit a place in my weekly Eleven. Samit Patel, Liam Dawson, Rikki Clarke, Ben Raine and Ryan Higgins have been regulars, kept out of the England set-up by virtue of not being Ben Stokes. However, Somerset’s Lewis Gregory has been a below-the-radar star for a decade, but much-loved by the Tanton faithful, and me. Also deserving of twenty Teams of The Week appearances is Darren Stevens. His pace and eye may have slowed but even in his twilight years, past the age of forty, he was still capable of opening the bowling for Kent in the four-dayers, taking more than fifty wickets a season at under twenty runs apiece. Stevens was more than a mere journeyman.
Michael Hogan and Chris Rushworth have also thrived well into their thirties but my next two bowlers have been instrumental in Essex’s success in recent years, notably in the County Championship. It is crazy that James Porter cannot find a way into the senior England set-up and, now 30, probably never will. He has been picked for 18 Teams of the Week, primarily for his red-ball exploits but his SA-born colleague Simon Harmer has gone three better. The off-spinner has dominated the Championship for a decade or so, and has more than nine hundred first-class wickets to his name, a sizeable chunk in the whites of Essex. Aged 34, he will surely reach a thousand, a rarity in this T20 era.
Last but not least, the leading Team of the Week-er of the past decade is Craig Overton. Like Porter, his supreme county performances have not been enough to forge an enduring career for England, whose strategy no longer requires a McGrath-esque talent for nagging seam line and length. 2023 apart, the Somerset twin has been brilliant, particularly in those early months of the Championship. Like Harmer, his tendency to strike a brisk late-order half-century also does no harm.
So there we have it. Who will be there in another ten years? The speed at which cricket is evolving, including its short-form entry into the Olympic arena, makes predictions impossible, and then there’s the uncertain future of the county game itself. Whatever happens, Simon Harmer will probably still be at the forefront!
Team of the Week of the Decade:
Jennings, Mitchell, Duckett, Vince, Madsen, Cooke (w), Gregory, Stevens, Harmer, C Overton, Porter. 12th man: Denly
