Middlesex is unlike every other English county in at least one very important way. It doesn’t actually exist. It was abolished by the London Government Act of 1963, persisted, in dotage, as a postal subdivision, until Royal Mail put it to sleep in 1996. Today, you’ll find it on the tiles of Swiss Cottage Tube station – which are embossed with its badge of three seaxes – the pediment of the Sessions House in Clerkenwell, the mailing addresses of people who just won’t let go, the minutes of Spelthorne council, the titles of three hospitals, a university, assorted sports teams and tournaments, and the cricket club.
Those who don’t know any better will tell you English cricket is a country pursuit. It’s not. Sport England’s latest data showed 250,000 Londoners played at least once last year. That’s around 20% of the adult playing population in England and Wales. Walk from Lord’s into the playing fields in Regent’s Park and you will find five, six, seven games going on all at once on the public pitches. Over the road at Fab’s Food & Wine they always have the Indian Premier League on in the afternoons, streaming on a mobile phone. The guy who runs it tells me he is a Royal Challengers Bengaluru fan; I ask if he knows which county plays at the ground around the corner. “No idea.”
Middlesex CCC has a catchment area that stretches over 17 London boroughs, and includes one of the largest, most diverse, and enthusiastic cricket communities in the country. Last year they pulled in a grand total of 44,415 paying spectators for the County Championship. Now that the MCC is running its own professional team, the London Spirit, Middlesex aren’t even the most famous team playing in their own ground.
Time was, and not so long ago, when they were one of the greatest clubs in the game, and would have fancied themselves a match for anyone, anywhere. In the golden years, under the leadership of Mike Brearley and Mike Gatting, they won the County Championship seven times in 18 seasons. The last of their 13 titles was won a decade ago, in 2016, when they went unbeaten through the season. Only two of the team playing Durham this weekend were a part of that one, too, Sam Robson and Toby Roland-Jones.
“Jeez,” says Robson, “10 years goes by so fast, hey? It doesn’t feel that long ago. But yeah, there are other times when you reflect because it has been mentioned lately that it’s 10 years since and you realise, you know, Jeez, a lot has changed.” The players are phlegmatic. “There have been so many little dramas that the playing group have just sort of got used to it,” Robson says, “and have grown pretty resilient.”
Middlesex were relegated the next season. They’ve spent seven of the eight seasons since in the second division, they bounced up and down again in 2022 and 2023. Their T20 side has won nine games out of 42 in the last three years. South of the Thames, Surrey have never been stronger. They are the richest, and most successful, team in the country, pulling in total crowds above 80,000 just for their championship matches. North of it, there’s a sense that Middlesex are, as Gatting, Mark Ramprakash, Mike Selvey and a group of former players recently wrote in an open letter to the membership, “drifting towards irrelevance”.
“I understand the former players feel frustrated that performance isn’t what it was,” says the club chair, Richard Sykes. Frustrated isn’t the word. Furious might be. One I talk to for this article says that club have been “toxic off the field for some time”, another says that he believes they are facing an “existential threat”.
There is a lot of talent. They have a crop of young players who have come through the local system, and Robson describes the trio of Sebastian Morgan, Naavya Sharma and Caleb Falconer, as “definitely three of the more promising young players that we’ve had at the club for many years”. But Ramprakash says he worries that good as they are, they may start to ask if they’re “at the right club to pursue their ambitions in the game”. They wouldn’t be the first. In recent years, the club have lost John Simpson, Martin Andersson, Steve Eskinazi and Ethan Bamber. It’s one thing to see players go, another to see them improve when they do.
Simpson has grown into one of the most successful wicketkeeper batsmen in the country as captain of Sussex, and the batting averages of Eskinazi and Andersson have almost doubled since they moved.
At a certain point, reporting all this becomes a study in the viciousness of parish politics. Middlesex’s have become especially messy. In 2023 they were sanctioned for financial mismanagement, and put into special measures by the ECB. Since then they became embroiled in one interminable legal wrangle with their former CEO Richard Goatley, and then another with his successor Andrew Cornish, who is currently suspended on full pay awaiting the results of an investigation into alleged misconduct, which he denies.
They’ve also burned through three coaches in the space of a year, after sacking Richard Johnson, hiring Dane Vilas as a temporary replacement, and then appointing Peter Fulton this year. All this was done against the recommendations of at least some members of their own cricket committee, which had included Gatting, Ramprakash and other former players. Sykes says the cricket committee was “refreshed” last year. Others say it was “disbanded”. Ramprakash, who had been working as a consultant batting coach, quit in complaint against “the apparent absence of transparent process and accountability in recent cricket related decisions”.
“We want the club to do better,” Ramprakash explains. “I think there’s been an acceptance of mediocrity for quite some time. And I think it’s a great shame. And of course, the people who signed that letter, when they were players, they set high standards, and I think that they look at the club right now and they don’t see particularly high standards.” Ramprakash is quick and keen to stress that the letter wasn’t aimed at the players, despite how it was reported at the time. Robson is adamant that he and the rest of the men in the changing room never imagined it was.
Two separate independent reports have been commissioned into the running of the club in the last seven years. One, by the chair of the governance and ethics committee, raised concerns about the club’s administration, the other about their cricket, and in particular the pathways through the age grade to the academy and senior teams. That one is still used as a point of reference at the club, even though the man who was in charge of those pathways for much of that time, Alan Coleman, is now the director of cricket.
The entire club seems to be caught in an awkward position. Lord’s, of course, is one of their biggest advantages. But they don’t own it, which means they rely on the England and Wales Cricket Board for approximately 60% of their funding. The good news is that given the private investment in the Hundred, there is lots of that to go around. Except the club are caught in a peculiar catch-22. The ECB insists that the Hundred money can only be used to pay down debt or invest in capital assets. Middlesex have no debts and no capital assets. They’ve been allowed £2m to top up their reserves, but otherwise they can’t get at any of the £24m available. Even though, as one former player said, “they don’t have a pot to piss in”.
“We don’t have our own ground so we can’t commercialise anything or generate revenues,” Sykes says. “Until this year Middlesex has never even had any incentive to sell a single ticket because MCC bore all that financial upside and risk and just paid us a fixed fee.” But Sykes has a plan. He believes the club need to build their own ground in the outer reaches of north London. Last year the club spent £400,000 trying to drum up private investment in it. They had a partner lined up, only to find out at the last minute that the deal would have broken their agreement with the ECB.
Sykes is convinced it is the right idea; no one else I talk to seems to agree with him. Regardless, the only way to do it would be to persuade the membership to demutualise the club, which everyone thinks is extremely unlikely to happen. “We’re going to spend the next several months holding members’ forums leading up to an indicative vote at the next AGM,” Sykes insists. He is adamant that it is the only way “or we just accept the alternative of managing a steady decline”. Some who love the club would say that’s already well under way.