Why are Lancashire probably getting relegated?

5 minute read

Lancashire are 15 points behind Nottinghamshire and 20 points behind Warwickshire going into the last round of matches. Those two teams will play each other and a draw plus a couple of bonus points for Notts would be enough to save both. That would be true even if Lancashire were to take maximum points at Worcestershire – and both the weather forecast and Lancashire’s form this year suggests that outcome is highly, highly unlikely anyway. One way or another, we’re expecting Lancs to go down.

So what has gone wrong for Lancashire this year? It’s an interesting question to us because we follow Lancashire, but when you dig into it a little, you also get a broader sense of some of the challenges that are currently facing all of the counties.

Trophies?

“Bringing trophies back to Emirates Old Trafford is our number one priority,” said Lancashire chair Andy Anson at the start of the season. Given they were runners up in every competition as recently as 2022, that doesn’t seem an unreasonable ambition.

Likely relegation to division two of the County Championship therefore shapes up as a bit of a fall. What’s happened between 2022 and now on the playing side of things to precipitate such a decline?

Funnily enough, we kind of foresaw this, correctly wondering out loud whether we were already at ‘peak Lancashire’ in April 2022. This was not down to any magical seer attributes, of which we have none. It was just a straightforward assessment that keeping a half-decent County Championship side together is something of a cat-herding exercise, with people constantly trying to head off in all sorts of unexpected directions.

Sure enough, after finishing second in 2022, Lancs finished fourth in 2023 and will most likely finish this year in ninth position. To get a sense what’s changed, let’s have a look at that April 2022 side and compare each player’s situation, then and now.

“But how long will this last?”

That was the question we asked in April 2022, knowing the answer was ‘not very long at all’.

(1) George Balderson: Keaton Jennings – one of Lancashire’s few ongoing success stories – didn’t play the Gloucestershire match that inspired our piece. Then 21-year-old Balderson was therefore at the top of the order. He is still at Lancs, still playing first-team cricket. After averaging 19.46 in 2022, he made 702 runs at 50.14 in 2023, but this year he’s back to averaging 19.80 and hasn’t managed a fifty. This doesn’t have to mean much. These dramatic undulations are often part of the career trajectory a young cricketer.

(2) Luke Wells: Conversely, Wells is one of those county stalwarts who’s been around so long, you almost don’t even notice his name. These days he almost seems to be metamorphosising into a bowler. Bohannon’s season batting averages from 2022 to now have gone 52.15, 33.80, 28.90, while he’s taken 4, 10 and 24 wickets.

(3) Josh Bohannon: When you’ve seen what’s happened around him, it feels like Lancashire’s most promising batter (now 27) has been asked to shoulder greater responsibility by the season. His averages have gone 40.25, 59.85, 36.13. That last one, for this year, is second only to Jennings.

(4) Steven Croft: A top county player, who was on his way out. An average of 44.05 in 2022 halved in 2023 and then he retired. Who has replaced him? Not sure really.

(5) Dane Vilas: A similar story. The South African made a couple of hundreds in 2022, which dropped to one in 2023 and he too has now retired from first-class cricket.

(6) Phil Salt: Being as England white ball keeping and captaincy responsibilities meant minimal use of Jos Buttler, Lancashire hired Phil Salt. Unfortunately/predictably, Salt has also become increasingly occupied by keeping for and captaining England’s white ball sides (as well as playing in the IPL). In both 2022 and 2023, Salt played seven Championship fixtures and averaged 43. However, he hasn’t played first-class cricket for over a year and it’s hard to see when he next will.

(7) Danny Lamb: Not exactly a fixture in the Lancashire side, Lamb moved to Sussex. He’s made a few runs and Sussex have been promoted.

(8) Hasan Ali: Was never going to be around long. Took 25 wickets at 20.60 in his five-match stay in 2022.

(9) Saqib Mahmood: England and injuries meant that he only played this one game in 2022, two in 2023 and two this year – although he’s one of only four Lancashire batters averaging over 30 with the bat this season (along with Jennings, Bohannon and 20-year-old Matty Hurst).

(10) Matt Parkinson: With one of the most exciting spinners in England at their disposal, Lancashire surveyed the pitches presented to them in 2023 and picked him just once, so he moved to Kent. Tom Hartley was generally preferred instead. Despite Hartley’s incredible Test debut, Lancashire haven’t actually lost him to England duty, but all this has given them is 19 wickets at 44.84 in 2023 and five wickets at 81.80 this year. We’re not sure how much that’s down to Hartley and how much it’s down to county pitches, but we’re pretty sure it’s a bit of both.

(11) James Anderson: Come on, you know what happened with this lad.

Conclusion

Injuries, England duty and retirement have always had the potential to weaken a county side, but franchise cricket and the allure of specialisation towards that have thrown additional variables into the mix.

Different combinations of these factors will affect the availability of a lot of senior players, but the uncertainty of that means a lot of younger players are tempted to seek greater opportunities at other counties. How do you plan when any given player may or may not be thinking about retirement, or playing in the IPL, or might suddenly become a major part of one of the England teams (if they don’t first get injured)?

Juggling is hard. It gets harder still when you have to juggle a seemingly random selection of items, each with different and challenging qualities. We remember seeing someone juggle a ball, a piece of fruit and a knife once and when the audience seemed insufficiently impressed, he said, “Not good enough for you? How about I juggle a knife, a flaming torch… AND A CHAINSAW!?”

And then he juggled a knife, a flaming torch and a chainsaw and while his juggling was very accomplished, it did look to be a very challenging undertaking and not especially rewarding.

Kudos to Surrey for continuing to achieve a similar feat with their county contracts. Money’s helpful, but the way they accommodate the desires of overseas pros, franchise part-timers and England players and still manage to get a bit of County Championship cricket out of most of them is pretty admirable. It’s like successfully piecing together a jigsaw when both the picture and the shapes of the pieces are constantly shifting.

Lancashire haven’t managed it.

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