It’s here!!

 

Spring is now in full swing; I am sure many others feel the same but the light early morning and the night-time not starting until around 9pm always seem to creep up quickly. It was only a few weeks ago I had to get a train in the dead of night one morning to got to a work meeting in Leeds.

Now I am sure the more avid readers like me are building up to the season starting, something to be taken very seriously indeed. This began with the warmer weather in March getting by spikes changed on my boots, taking them to get a few repairs and patches replaced on them then cleaning and applying dubbin to keep he leather supple for the 2026 season. Most of you won’t have Ian Mason specials like I do (see previous articles about this) but this act is certainly something that marks the begging’s of the season. I remember as a kid a couple of other activities that have gone with time. These are getting the linseed oil on bats, getting the equipment out and my dad making sure he had properly oiled his Gray Nicholls Scoop for another season letting it dry outside in the garden, the second one being whitewashing old buckle pads, the fabric covering on old pads allowed this and it continued initially into the period when buckles were replaced by Velcro but now pads are all wipe clean depriving us of this pre season ritual.

As most people do as the season approaches, I take great interest in the weather to see how this will impact the season, this is very different for me because this is also of significant interest to me professionally, I wonder if maybe my life in cricket since a very young age influenced this in some way.

2026 though has turned out to be in the Normal ranges we haven’t had the very dry spring of 2025 or the wet 2024 when it felt like summer was never coming at all. What was wet was the end of 2025 after droughts in many parts of the country we all experienced cricket season of little to no cancellations and some of the most batting friendly cricket I’ve played in since leaving the Southeast of England. I do feel though that we all seem spooked by the spring of 2024 somewhat, with a lot of doom and gloom about grounds not being ready, this is justified in maybe February and early March but it seemed odd to me people were making such categorical claims, after hearing such things at my own club we had outdoor training using the artificial and having a training match on Tuesday night on a dry square and surprising quick outfield but the “it wont be ready” attitude means there is no cricket there on the weekend.

When could cricket start and end?

This brings me onto a very interesting question; we have counties playing games in March and we have teams playing games (all be it on artificial) right into November in London check out Pacific CC for the latest fixtures I could find in England and Wales https://pacific.play-cricket.com/home .

One thought is that the climate is overall getting hotter and wetter, but this disproportionally impacts the autumn and winter months, cold and frosty conditions with occasional snow have been replaced by rainfall and higher temperatures preventing those cold crisp days. But springtime has got drier and warmer it just when you use averages over a year all this extra rainfall in the winter has cancelled it out. This year has been around average in terms of rainfall but 2023, 2022,2020 (no cricket during COVID) and 2017 all had relatively dry starts to the season with some of them turning out wet at the year went on. What isn’t a guaranteed when looking at the figures is the September sunshine wet September’s have plagued the end of seasons recently stopping my personal drive to play right into the first week of October. But when it comes to September things get more complicated the weather when it isn’t wet can be much warmer than March resulting in this quandary.

Let’s face it what prevents cricket being played in these much more extend period lies with factors outside of its control. Multi-sport grounds such as the one I play on are shared between cricket and football you may play on a ground sharing with rugby the same things apply where the equitable split between the sports means that using the ground in March or October is just not possible. Secondly end of season work on squares means that if you leave it to late things can get tricky but I have felt over the years there is still a sense of “the league has finished” and clubs seem almost desperate to announce they are not playing any more almost like they are proud of it. Having spent a few seasons in Kent the shorter league season comes with this tradition of cricket into the first week of October my view is yes you do need to right climatic window to do end of season work on squares but this isn’t necessarily the end of the league season I think this has more of a relation to a tradition of non-league cricket in certain parts of the country compared to others.

Finally, the biggest factors preventing a cricket season from March to October; general enthusiasm of people involved, although I don’t fully understand apparently cricket isn’t the ultimate leisure activity in some people’s lives (I know right what’s wrong with people?), unlike me they don’t want to play cricket 3 to 4 times a week for what is nearly 6 months using the end of March to October timeframe. There are times I have been a bit fed up with cricket but this has always been league cricket, friendly cricket midweek or on Sundays always means I’m ready for more and those last few weeks in September when all that’s gone and it just people keen enough to chase the dying summer around the country for games always makes me appreciate and love the game even more.

 That’s it for this month I hope you enjoyed my thoughts on the summer weather, those of you interested in rainfall over the last few years always check out the water situation reports found here https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/water-situation-reports-for-england apparently the most read document we in the EA produce.

I must wait until Tuesday the 14^th for my first game but from then on, its full steam ahead into the cricket season provisionally ending on the first week of October, but we shall see about that.