County Cricket Day is back for a second year in 2025, with two days on offer to fans. Sunday June 29 is men's County Cricket Day, Sunday July 6 is women's County Cricket Day.
Here, one of the organisers of the event - Alex Wilson, explains why County Cricket Day was set up as an initiative and how it's looking to take the domestic game to more fans.
***
The coolest kids in the country like going to old man pubs.
That sounds ridiculous doesn't it? Why go to a tired old boozer with worn-out carpets when the high street's full of polished bars with exposed brickwork and moody lighting designed just for you and your demographically appropriate friends?
But then you go and you join them and you slowly see what they see. What first appears tired and faded is slowly revealed as soul.
The desperately modern and embarrassingly polished is exactly what they're trying to escape.
The County Championship's like that. It shouldn't work at all. We live in an age where we all carry supercomputers in our pockets, and where apps designed as the unholy offspring of TVs and fruit machines have supposedly turned our attention span into something that would shame a goldfish.
And yet, here we are. Letting four-day-long games wash over us in a 130-year-old competition, in a sport whose age remains a total mystery.
We started County Cricket Day because, counter-intuitively, this most anachronistic form of the sport is perhaps the most timely of all. If you listen to future-gazers and the trend forecasters, they'll tell you that the most avant-garde among us are taking up craftwork to slow down, joining "no phone clubs" to get offline, and desperately hunting for anything that promises real-life connection and community
And yet here county cricket is, hiding in plain sight, quietly offering the solution to all our modern ills. Matches defiantly unspooling at their own leisurely pace. A game that requires just the right amount of mental effort to follow. Tickets cheap enough to attract retirees, young professionals, and autograph-hungry children chasing fielders around the boundaries.
It's good, is county cricket. And other people are starting to notice it too. But it doesn't like to shout about itself very much. So last year, me and a few other people thought we'd be a bit louder, do the shouting for them, and let a few more in on the secret.
The idea for County Cricket Day (nicked from football’s Non-League Day) is to pick a date in the calendar, and rally everyone to turn that into a special day where we can all unite to celebrate this special format of the game. There’s no real reason why this day is different to any other day, but through the mystical alchemy of passionate sports fandom, somehow it becomes special.
And this year, women's cricket is finally being properly folded into the county set-up, so we've got two days: one for the men, and one for the women.
For the men, on Sun 29 June, it's the Rothesay County Championship, and the unhurried rhythms of four-day cricket that so bewitched us to begin with. And for the women, on the Sun 6 July, it's the explosive thrill of the Vitality Blast.
Slow and fast. Past and future. Tradition and progress. It feels an apt combination.
So bring your family, bring your friends, or come by yourself and make some new ones. It's time to let the secret out.
*
Head to the County Cricket Day website to find out more about the day and what fixtures you can attend.