Farewell Darren Stevens – the Guinness-loving trundler who became a county cricket legend

“Stevo’s gonna get ya” - so the WhatsApp group for Australian cricketers playing in county cricket is named. Darren Stevens normally did too, even removing the great Marnus Labuschagne cheaply both innings he bowled to him in the County Championship.

To the relief of those Aussies - and dozens of Englishmen throughout the shires too - Stevens might not be around to get them much longer. He is being released by Kent at the end of this season. While Stevens says he still wants to play on, he turns 47 next April; his career in county cricket is almost certainly nearing an end.

But what a career it has been: Stevens has been the Benjamin Button of county cricket. Aged 28, he had only six first-class wickets to his name, playing as a batsman who only occasionally bowled. Since 2011, the season in which he turned 35, Stevens has taken 497 wickets at 22.61 apiece.

In the same period, his batting - easily overlooked, but so dangerous that he smashed 15 sixes, one shy of the Championship record, against Glamorgan last year - accumulated 7,840 runs at 35.96 apiece. Added together, it amounts to one of the great extended runs in the history of the county game.

The older Stevens got, the better he became. When Kent last had the temerity to release him, in 2019, he scored 237 and took five for 20 in the same Championship match against Yorkshire; Kent promptly backtracked. In 2021, he became the oldest player to be named as one of Wisden’s five Cricketers of the Year since 1933. From 2017, the summer he turned 41, until the end of last year Stevens’ 227 wickets cost 17.92 each.

These were numbers straight out of the 19th Century. And, in many ways so was Stevens’ approach - outswing, combined with a scintilla of seam movement, on a good length on off stump delivered with metronome accuracy at a speed just over 70mph. His old-school approach extended to off the field, too. "What I do rely on is a pint of Guinness after every day's play," he explained last year. "There's the secret right there, plenty of iron."

Stevens is perhaps best understood as a profoundly English figure. The cult of Stevens would have been unthinkable in any other cricketing culture: he was a product not only of the pitches, but also the number of domestic games - more than in any other nation - and England enjoying greater support for first-class cricket than anywhere else.

The sense that Stevens was sui generis to England meant that, unwittingly, he was thrust into cricket’s culture wars. For many, his zest for the game, shrewdness and simple competitiveness embodied all that was best about the county game.

For others, that Stevens could put together such superlative bowling figures at speeds that would seldom have disturbed a motorway speed camera encapsulated all that was worst about the domestic game: the short-termism, the pitches designed for the expedient needs of counties rather than the development of England players.

Of course, it is possible to hold both these views at once: the idea that Stevens, and what he represented, was simultaneously the best and worst of English county cricket.

After last year’s Ashes debacle, the catalyst for a renewed focus upon the county game, the nature of the debate changed. This year, Stevens’ bowling - his six wickets have cost 75.16 apiece - has essentially been neutered by the heightened emphasis on preparing flat tracks, together with the softer Duke’s ball.

Yet to blame Stevens, of course, always missed the point. He was simply a sportsman summoning all his skill to do his very best to win. And so, if this really is the end, he will depart as a giant of the county game: a figure that, whatever the changes that await English cricket, will be cherished in Kent and far beyond for decades to come.