Picking the top 30 County Championship players of the century has been a desperately difficult, but very fun task ahead of the new season which begins on Friday.
Thousands of players have turned out in the championship since 2000, so whittling many fine cricketers down to just 30 was not simple. Rest assured, I wanted to include many others, and there are some I feel guilty about leaving out.
Neatly, the turn of the century was also the advent of the two-division era, so is a good place to start but do come back tomorrow for Scyld Berry’s assessment of before 2000.
A huge thank you to Sky Sports’ brilliant statistician Benedict Bermange for some help with the numbers. It would have been a much worse-informed list without him!
I have tried to take a few things into account: a mix of eras, even though fewer games (14 compared to 16) are played now than in the early years of the qualification period, slightly skewing stats; a fair balance of batsmen, keepers, seamers and spinner; not having too many overseas players; a spread of counties; a preference for performance in Division One, but a healthy respect for Division Two.