Kent Cricket 2021

Could a winner be picked when I first played against him in 1999? Was it possible to see someone who would be still playing more than two decades later? I do remember noting, as it happens, how natural a ball-striker he looked as a batsman, even though he was not a heavy run-getter. And that flow — still evident last week — stands out even more so now in a county game littered with stilted, stiff and manufactured batsmen drowning in theory.

But his all-rounder status was impossible to predict because he hardly bowled then, only a few fill-in overs here and there. In the first eight years of his career (admittedly in a stop-start introduction to the game) he took a grand total of six wickets. In the past eight years, he has taken 363 first-class wickets, with 26 five-wicket hauls. It has been a remarkable transformation, one that tells you a lot about him, and a lot about county cricket.

County cricket and Test cricket are, essentially, two different games. Played early and late in the season, on often slow, seamer-friendly pitches, county cricket is a game of slower pace — Stevens’s average speed this year is about 69mph — lower bounce and greater lateral movement off the seam, encouraging bowlers like Stevens and challenging batsmen in different ways. Marnus Labuschagne’s struggles in these early months are a good reflection of that.

It would be tempting to sneer at this difference but it should be resisted. After Stevens’s performance against Glamorgan, he was damned with faint praise by one supporter on social media: “Extraordinary in a way and, of course, I admire him. But you could also take the view that he’s representative of all that’s wrong with county cricket.” While Test cricket is of a far higher standard, it is not intrinsically more worthy than any other level of the game. In any case, Stevens is an outlier, not the norm.

The history of the game is one of changing conditions and challenges and a player must find a way of being successful whatever the contest throws up. Uncovered pitches in England pre-1960s; dust bowls in Ahmedabad now; a lightning-fast pitch at Perth; the slow seamers of early and late-season England; a shocking club pitch in the fifth division of a Sunday league in Devon. Standards may differ, but challenges remain: the wobblers bowled by Stevens are no less a product of their environment than generations of bowlers before him.

Stevens’s late blossoming is worth celebrating. A game that can accommodate a 45-year-old and a 16-year-old (James Coles became Sussex’s youngest player last year at that tender age); that can incorporate Stevens’s 69mph wobblers as well as Olly Stone’s 90mph thunderbolts, and allow for strike rates with the bat, ranging this year from Stevens’s 80 to the more pedestrian 40 of Will Young of Durham, is attractive in its variety. The domestic game cannot be seen only through the prism of international cricket which, by its very nature of being more competitive and of a higher standard, can be more homogenous too.

Stevens’s raging against the dying light is also a reminder why sport remains among the most rewarding of professions, being essentially meritocratic in nature. He has forced Kent to keep employing him, despite his age and despite their sense that his time was done two years ago, because of his performances. It is impossible in many jobs to tally your worth on a daily basis — professional sport allows for that.

Age should be irrelevant at both ends of the spectrum. A year ago, a rash of opinion suggested that the days of James Anderson and Stuart Broad opening the bowling together in England should be over, with the Ashes on the horizon. But the two champions put that consideration to bed last summer, and there have been far fewer such calls of late. Anderson will be rolling them out again next week at Lord’s and, if performance dictates, in Brisbane this winter.

Citing Zlatan Ibrahimovic (39), Tom Brady (43), Roger Federer (39) and Chris Thompson, qualifying for another Olympic marathon aged 40, Anderson said: “The thing that frustrates me the most, and it happens in this country more than most, is that you get to a certain age and people begin saying you have to start slowing down or you’re losing the ability to do your job. But I’m not sure from my own experience that’s the case.”

At his own lower level, the level at which he has now operated with distinction for a quarter-century, Stevens would no doubt agree.