England Calls May Wreck Surrey's Bid To Retain Title

Past patterns are what everyone from soothsayers to economists look for to predict the future and so it is with this column’s gander at this season’s County Championship, which gets underway today.

- Derek Pringle

I’m not sure how the bookmakers arrived at Surrey as favourites for this year’s title, but I’ve looked back over 38 years, or by another metric the last ten home Ashes series, to see who has won the Championship while the Aussies had been over on tour.

My findings revealed that six different teams won the title on those ten occasions, though four teams –Yorkshire, Durham, Nottinghamshire, Middlesex – won twice each.

If you believe the past has any effect on future happenings, the bad news for counties who do not play at Test grounds is that only one them, Worcestershire, managed to win the Championship from a non-Test base. All the others play at places where Tests have been held though Glamorgan, the other winning team in our sample, had not staged one at their Cardiff HQ by 1997, the year of their triumph.

That fact bodes well for Surrey who play at the Kia Oval as well as Yorkshire, Warwickshire, Notts and Hampshire, who can all call Test venues home. Not so good for Kent, Somerset and Essex with my old county doubly cursed it seems for never having won the Championship during an Ashes summer. That notwithstanding, they have been made second favourites to win this year after the Brown Hatters of SE 11.

Surrey will be defending their title in this Ashes year, something that also bodes well for them. Of the previous teams mentioned, Yorkshire managed to retain the title in 2015 having won it in 2014. But so too did Durham (2008 and ’09), and Worcestershire (1988 and ’89).

The obvious factor to look for in the successes was how many players did each county lose to the Ashes cause in those years and for how many matches?