Impossible to win title with homegrown core? Somerset can prove otherwise

I have always had a soft spot for Somerset. Not long after joining Monmouth School as an 11-year-old came the arrival as cricket professional of Graham “Budgie” Burgess, armed with a mountain of knowledge and experience from being a fine county all-rounder in the very successful Somerset side of the 1970s alongside the likes of Viv Richards, Ian Botham and Joel Garner.

Soon we were all receiving top-class coaching and hanging on to every word that came from a vault of stories that were told in the most avuncular manner. A benefit match was staged for that much-loved opener Peter “Dasher” Denning, where the great Welsh entertainer Max Boyce famously dismissed Richards. I was fortunate enough to receive one of Richards’ bats for scoring a century, and soon Burgess considered me promising enough to drive me down to Taunton on winter evenings for net practices with the very best of Somerset’s youngsters.

It was incredible — like practising with schoolboy royalty. From Millfield School came two lads sadly no longer with us in Jonathan Atkinson and Paul Bail, as well as Rob Turner, Harvey Trump and Jeremy Hallett. From Taunton School came Ricky Bartlett, Nick Pringle and later Piran Holloway, who went from Millfield to Taunton. Queen’s College Taunton had recently produced Gary Palmer and had two quick bowlers in the Essien brothers, Tony and David. King’s College Taunton had produced Richard Harden and Roger Twose, a Devonian who played for Warwickshire and New Zealand.

Over in Devon, my old Glamorgan opening partner Hugh Morris had been at Blundell’s School, as before him had Vic Marks, who then taught there and would take his pupil Morris to Somerset practices. Morris would still call Marks “Sir” when they met in Glamorgan-Somerset matches.

Now, this is not another piece about the skewed influence of independent schools on English cricket, but is one intended to emphasise that nothing much has changed. That was in the early 1980s, and players of the highest quality still pass through the schools in and around Somerset.

But Somerset are lucky. Not only do they have those excellent schools — with Millfield and King’s College in particular now two of the very best in the country, possessing quite magnificent facilities — but they also have the nearby fertile cricketing counties of Devon and Cornwall from which to pluck players. The likes of the Overton brothers, Craig and Jamie (the latter now with Surrey), and Lewis Gregory illustrate that the relationship with Devon is so much stronger than, say, when Paignton-born wicketkeeper Chris Read went first to Gloucestershire, then Nottinghamshire.

This was all brought into the spotlight last week when Somerset fielded ten players who had passed through their academy in beating Hampshire to go well clear at the top of the County Championship.

When you also consider that their biggest test in a tense run chase was posed by the fast bowler Sonny Baker — one of their own, another Devonian allowed to depart — that there are three other former Somerset academy players at the Indian Premier League (IPL) in Jos Buttler, Tom Banton and Jamie Overton, as well as an England spinner in Dom Bess at Yorkshire, then the scale of their production line becomes even more apparent.

My colleague Mike Atherton has already written this season that Somerset are “the model county club”, and certainly in terms of developing their own they are setting a gold standard. They were not in action in the fourth round of championship games, but it is worth looking at the other counties that were, and how they compare.

Lancashire, Yorkshire and Essex all had seven homegrown players (I’m using the rule of having played in that county’s pathway and/or academy) and it was noticeable that Yorkshire had seven other such players appearing for other counties, while Lancashire had six and Essex had four.

The worst? Well, despite the complicated financial incentives from the ECB, by my reckoning Derbyshire did not have any of their own playing for them and Worcestershire and Glamorgan each had only one (although Worcestershire did have a whopping nine at other counties) and Leicestershire had two.

Surrey had six homegrown players in their side, but when you realise that five of them have played Test cricket for England, with Jamie Smith and Gus Atkinson likely to feature again this summer, you gain an idea of why they are the outstanding model among the bigger counties.

They, too, draw heavily from independent schools such as Whitgift, Cranleigh and Wellington, and are clearly the wealthiest club in the land, but if you look back to all England Test debutants since Ben Stokes was first capped in 2013, 12 Surrey players have made their bows in that time, with Durham (who do not rely on independent schools) the next most productive with seven.

The least productive? Ah, yes, my former county have not had one since Simon Jones’s debut in 2002 (Asa Tribe could change that soon, even if he is not homegrown). There has been no debutant from Derbyshire since 2014 (Boyd Rankin), with Northamptonshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire all having had only one each.

This topic raises so many questions, not least the worth of county academies upon which so much money is spent every year, but also the tricky balance between development and winning, something over which Somerset will be chewing furiously this week as they ponder moving King’s College alumnus James Rew up to open the batting against Yorkshire on Friday. He has done very well at No4 for the team but moving up will enhance his Test chances considerably — and then Somerset may lose him.

Would you rather produce a Test player or win the championship? It is a balance so many clubs fail to strike, preferring to waste money on washed-up old pros to win them the league rather than investing in facilities and coaching to produce more players of their own.

The obvious pull of those counties hosting the Hundred is already causing concern, with Gloucestershire aptly demonstrating its perils after losing a herd of bowlers while the batsman Ben Charlesworth is off to Lancashire at the end of the season. Champions Nottinghamshire, who only had three home-reared players in this round, are prolific signers.

But counties are quite right to ask for whom they are actually developing players when some spend the first half of the season at the IPL and so many now veer towards white-ball-only contracts that take them around the world.

Surely, though, the money garnered from the Hundred’s sale must still be seen as an opportunity for every county to future-proof their cricketing infrastructure and development pathways to produce their own, as well as, of course, securing their long-term financial and commercial futures. The ECB has rightly placed some strict criteria on how this money is spent (not on inflated salaries!), but it has said that about 25 per cent of each county’s money can be used for cricket investment. You would hope that indoor schools and net facilities are high on the priority lists.

Some years ago, a county coach told me that the days of a club winning the championship with a side reared within its own boundaries were long gone, that the franchise world had altered the lenses of development and loyalty inexorably. As someone who was part of a championship win in 1997 alongside nine other players brought through the Glamorgan system (I played some junior cricket for Gloucestershire but represented Welsh Schools and Glamorgan Colts in pre-academy days), I so wanted to disagree vehemently.

So, if this year Somerset could win their first championship with so many homegrown players, that would indeed be some statement. Most professional sport has long since moved away from clubs merely representing their communities, but in so many ways championship cricket has always remained an outlier in its clinging to tradition, except, recently, in this one key way.

Believe me, the satisfaction gained from a tight-knit, local, long-together team winning the championship is huge.

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