Still second, still hurting: Somerset set for another County Championship near-miss after 136 years
Somerset's 136-year wait for a first County Championship title looks set to stretch into a 137th season. Warwickshire, 11 points clear at the top of the table, host a dejected Leicestershire at Edgbaston in the final round of the summer, while second-placed Somerset — for so long the nearly men of English domestic cricket — complete their campaign against Surrey at Taunton. Defending champions Nottinghamshire, meanwhile, finish at home to Yorkshire at Trent Bridge.
The forecast is warm and dry — one last late blessing for a competition that, in the era of the Hundred, is often treated like some kind of arcana, sporting Victoriana, but which remains some of the hardest cricket there is: a six-month slog up, down and around the counties across spring, summer and autumn. The championship commands an avid following among those who know — on the scorecards, through the streams and over the BBC's excellent local radio — and there is a strong case that this week will produce the very best cricket of a summer that also included the Hundred, the Blast, humdrum Test series against New Zealand and Pakistan, a white-ball tour by India, and the last dregs of Twenty20 and one-day series against Sri Lanka, "the butt of an international summer that has been smoked right down to the letters."
Only cricket, it is said, could engineer a schedule in which the final round of the premier domestic competition gets shoved to the back end of September and somehow still has to compete with the national team for attention.
Banton's reversal sums up the modern game
Tom Banton's story captures the tension neatly. This time last year the 27-year-old was talking about whether he could yet force his way into the Test team. "Winning our first County Championship, that is the main goal for me," he said back then. This summer he quit red-ball cricket altogether. It is a familiar pattern: for every player who talks about the vital importance of red-ball cricket, there is another who walks away from it.
Yet the counterargument is just as familiar: nobody has ever put up a plaque for a bloke because he scored a quick 40 in a 50-over game against Sri Lanka in September. There is nothing Banton could do in three bilateral ODIs this week that would mean as much as a match-winning hundred in Somerset's first championship.
The hoodoo: six runner-up finishes and counting
In Taunton — where Taunton Town play in football's Southern League Premier Division South and the rugby union side, the Titans, play in National League 2 West — the annual tilt at the title is the most compelling story in county cricket, and the hoodoo must be one of the oldest in all sport. This century Somerset have finished as runners-up six times: second in 2016, 2018 and 2019, and third in 2024 and 2025 — yet the trophy has never come back to the county in 136 years of trying.
They will tell you 2010 was the worst of them. That year Somerset were six points clear at the start of the very last day's play against Durham at Chester-le-Street, with ECB chair Giles Clarke having even flown up with the trophy. They needed to take eight wickets and score whatever runs were left to seal it. Then Dale Benkenstein batted through the afternoon and, in the end, Somerset were left chasing an impossible 188 in 17 overs. At Old Trafford, Nottinghamshire somehow scrambled the runs and wickets they needed to draw level with 38 minutes to go — and won the title on a tie-break.
2016 stung, too. Somerset were top of the table with a day left to play — again — when the two teams right behind them, Middlesex and Yorkshire, concocted a result by delivering 10 overs of declaration bowling that left Yorkshire needing 240 off 40 overs to win the championship. They didn't do it, but Middlesex did.
The pain is personal for generations of Somerset followers — those who grew up watching Ian Blackwell bat at Taunton, and those older still. Vic Marks made his debut half a century ago; if the 136-year wait hurts now, imagine how it feels for him.
Headingley may have ended it
In comparison with those disasters, this year's campaign had been kind — until last week. It felt like it ended at Headingley, where Somerset had Yorkshire six wickets down and only 65 runs ahead, only to watch Dom Bess and George Hill put on 166 for the seventh wicket before being bowled out for 101 themselves.
Maybe there will be a twist. Maybe Somerset will beat Surrey. Maybe Leicestershire — who lost Sunday's one-day final and have just been docked 27 points for a dodgy pitch — will do the needful at Edgbaston and become the first team to beat Warwickshire at home this season. Or maybe it is best simply to save whatever hope is left for next season. It would be less painful, anyway.
But then, so long as it still hurts, you can be sure it still matters.