Surrey win hat-trick of County Championships

Surrey achieved a hat-trick of County Championship titles when Somerset, their nearest rivals, disintegrated at Old Trafford and lost to Lancashire. It is the first time the feat has been achieved since Yorkshire pulled it off between 1966 and 1968.

Praise is due to Surrey for their masterly organisation under their director of cricket, Alec Stewart, in his farewell season. They have far and away the most resources of any county, but they also have far more England players than their rivals: to juggle all the comers and goers and transform them into a juggernaut for three years in a row has been an extraordinary achievement for their head coach, Gareth Batty.

In this three-year reign Surrey have ticked every box except one. They have class batting in depth (their latest recruit Dan Lawrence from Essex, recently for some reason England’s Test opener) had to begin this season as Surrey’s No 6. Their tail barely has a tailender in it, down to Dan Worrall who can be a dangerous hitter or determined blocker.

Their leading batsman, by a margin of 350 runs, has been their captain Rory Burns, with 1,057 at 55 per innings. Burns should feel fulfilled after this treble. He did not merit being dropped by England in the circumstances: in and out of the Covid-hit Ashes team in Australia, and shaping up well in his final Test innings in Hobart. Quiet, calm, his own man, he has led by example as the fourth-highest run-scorer in this season’s championship (not coincidentally, perhaps, four of the five highest run scorers were county captains).

Ollie Pope had a poor half-season, averaging 22, and Ben Foakes, deflated by being dropped from the England Test team, a modest 26, but Burns stepped up and with Dom Sibley gave Surrey consistent starts – the one thing Somerset lacked.

Foakes, of course, ticked all of Surrey’s wicketkeeping boxes. Their pace bowlers – aided by Oval groundsmen who left more grass on the pitches than in previous summers – overwhelmed all-comers at home. Worrall led the way with 52 wickets at only 16 each, backed by Jordan Clark with 38, followed by Kemar Roach to Gus Atkinson and the Curran brothers among others.

The one box that was only half-ticked was Surrey’s spin. The Oval was once the home of England’s most famous pair of spinners, but there was no specialist spinner in this first team. They made do with all-rounder Cameron Steel’s leg-breaks, with Lawrence – who picked up 15 wickets with his idiosyncratic off-spin – and by flying in the Bangladesh all-rounder Shakib al-Hasan for the match at Taunton, which they lost with less than five minutes to spare, having made no attempt – their one major mistake of the summer – to score runs.

A comparison, therefore, with the last county to win a hat-trick of titles is not an altogether favourable one. Yorkshire in the late 1960s had even more England players than Surrey: at one point their entire XI consisted of England Test players past and future, with Geoffrey Boycott away representing his country at the time.

Yorkshire’s batting might not have been as classy as Surrey’s – Jamie Smith bids fair to become England’s first batting master of all formats – but it had similar depth, and their attack had the perfect balance for those days of three-day cricket on uncovered pitches: two pace bowlers, a pace-bowling all-rounder, and two finger-spinners in Ray Illingworth and Don Wilson. And one of Yorkshire’s pace bowlers, Fred Trueman in his final season, would have been prepared to look Worrall in the eye as a fellow fast-medium outswing bowler.