County cricket’s long-form stories offer something IPL just can’t match

P sst. This bit is between just us, please. It isn’t something I’d want to get out in public, especially not when I’m in this line of business, but I need to get it off my chest. I don’t much like the Indian Premier League. There, I said it.

This, like an acceptance you will never play the Dane, is the sort of self-knowledge you acquire in middle age, but admitting it here exposes me to youthful titters on Twitter, marks me out as the sort of man who probably quite likes gardening, sighs when he settles into a chair, someone who, yes, you may well find at a county ground on a free weekday.

As I type this, Gujarat Titans are playing Sunrisers Hyderabad in what is, let me check, the 62nd game of the season that’s been running for 46 days. It looks like a good one as far as they go, Shubman Gill has hit a hundred, Bhuvneshwar Kumar has taken five wickets. It is, presumably, of serious interest to however many hundreds of thousands of cricket fans live in those two cities and everyone else in India and its diaspora who follow the league closely. For many of the rest of us, though, the games in this $10bn league come and go.

I may glance at the headlines, dip into the scorecard, maybe even watch a clip on social media while I’m putting off writing the rest of this sentence. But the truth is that I, a man who has spent the large part of the past 20 years writing about cricket, among other things, and who still makes a living doing it, couldn’t tell you who is top of the league without looking (just checked: it turns out I’ve already mentioned them). The matches pass like leaves from autumn trees.

Some of it is simply because of the format of the sport. We have had 20 years of Twenty20. Looking back, how many indelible