The good ship county championship 2019 came into dock for the last time at Taunton on Thursday.  There's often something poignant about the end of a cricket season and this year the sense of loss was heightened by doubts over the county championship's future. George Dobell and  Tanya Aldred both capture the end of term tristesse. Normally their defence of championship cricket would have me nodding along and certainly when sat in a good size crowd at York CC watching Warwickshire beat Yorkshire it felt like there was plenty of life left in the old girl.  Conversely sometimes, watching at Edgbaston with a crowd of less than 500 in a stadium that holds more than 20,000, with two umpires taking them off for "bad light" with the floodlights blazing away like a thousand suns, I have wondered, how long can this go on for? Still there was much to enjoy in 2019, they'll be a championship of sorts (but increasingly mucked about with) in 2020, we'll just have to...

Durham Cricket Community Interest Company, filed its accounts for  the 12 months to 30 September 2018.  The accounts were due to be filed at Companies House on the 30th June 2019 but the director's report and auditor's opinion weren't signed until the 27th August. The company's auditors, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, resigned after signing the accounts and will be replaced by RMT for the 2019 audit.   Even though most of its financing (from the council and the ECB) is interest free Durham lost £1.1m in the period and had a cash outflow of £0.5m with ECB funding increasing by £0.1m to £1.9m. After the balance sheet date Durham entered into new loans with Invocap and Atom Bank.  The Invocap loan is guaranteed by Durham chief executive Tim Bostock.   None of this is great but it remains to be seen whether the additional funding from the ECB of £1m a year is sufficient to put Durham in a secure financial position.

It was a difficult time for the northern county cricket club.  Financial hubris, encouraged by the ECB, had seen it pile a high risk project onto a debt laden structure and, when the project failed, there was insufficient cash to pay its burgeoning debts.  It had to turn to the ECB for financing. Well you know the rest of the story, the ECB demands a high price for the bail out, the county is taken into special measures, penalised with relegation to the second division, swingeing points deductions for the next two seasons, a reduced salary cap etc.  A very public humiliation. Except none of that happened, because this isn't the story of Durham's financial difficulties, but Yorkshire County Cricket Club's (YCCC).  (Do you see what I did there). What had brought Yorkshire to the brink of financial ruin was the staging, in 2010, of a Headingley test match between Australia and Pakistan.  You can see the logic, Pakistan supporting Yorkshire men and wome...