BREEDING GROUNDS
HOTBEDS
No.11 THE A52 CORRIDOR
Next in our series, Scott Oliver takes a trip to the East Midlands and examines two heavyweight Premier Leagues which are home to the some of the country’s most successful clubs
At the heart of club cricket
SCOTT OLIVER
Freelance sportswriter and stalwart club cricketer
@reverse_ sweeper
As well as lying smack-bang in the centre of England, Derby and Nottingham sit at the bottom of their respectively longitudinal counties like magic 8-balls in a Christmas stocking. Drive south, and you’re quickly in another county; head north, through the old Sherwood Forest or over the Peaks, and it’s quite a jaunt before you hit Anywhere Else. Between the two cities runs a 17-mile stretch of the A52 known as Brian Clough Way, in honour of a football manager who, after successful spells at Derby County and Nottingham Forest, is one of the few things about which these East Midlands neighbours won’t bicker, given the opportunity. Which brings us neatly to the cricket.
For all the longstanding imbalance between the two county clubs, lordly Notts in the Trent Bridge castle and Derbyshire’s irregular forces fighting their guerrilla skirmishes, the battle for supremacy between the respective Premier Leagues is a far more nip-and-tuck affair. Each is able to mount a solid top-dog argument, drawing on inter-league matches along with success at the national level and, perhaps especially, in the Derbyshire Premier Cup, in which four Notts Premier League (NPL) clubs are invited each year to compete with the Derbyshire County League (DCPL) dozen.
Before delving into the parochial nitty-gritty, though, a quick look at the area as a whole, a wide-angled thought experiment. Were you to take the top five teams from Derby and Nottingham and their respective environs – a five-mile hinterland, say – chucking them into a league together along with one up-county team each, you would have close to the strongest league in the country. In the last 20 years, there have been four national knockout triumphs and two final defeats (this would read six wins and three lost finals were the net being cast a little wider to Leicester, pulling Kibworth under an ‘East Midlands’ umbrella), along with five semi-final losses and another five quarter-final reverses. Chuck in three lost national T20 finals in 15 years and you have a heavy footprint.