Well, another Saturday, another rained-off. That’s now 3 out of 6 games lost already this season. For comparison, we only lost one all of last season, and that was on the final day.
It’s not just frustrating for players who spend all winter dreaming about standing in a field for eight hours. Clubs across the region will be feeling the financial pain too. We’ve already lost around £1,000 in subscriptions revenue, and if you factor in the bar takings that never happened, you can comfortably double that. Apparently “liquid assets” aren’t supposed to refer to the weather.
We don’t ask for much. All winter we look forward to cricket and really only require one thing: a dry Saturday. A bit of sunshine would be a luxury. Instead, this season has delivered two games played in temperatures north of 30°C, while the rest of the time Hampshire has been auditioning to become Greenland’s summer capital.
The question is whether we’ll eventually find some sort of happy medium, or whether the future is simply endless rain interrupted by brief periods where the planet tries to kill us with heat.
There is hope. After a lovely spring in 2025, the first week of June was dreadful too. We just happened to get lucky on the Saturday. After that came a cracking summer. So perhaps this is merely history repeating itself.
On the other hand, we’re currently stuck on the wrong side of the jet stream and relying on weather models that have spent the last week confidently assuring us that conditions will improve again “next week”. Then it’s next week, and somehow the improvement has moved to the following week. It’s the meteorological equivalent of a builder promising he’ll definitely start your extension on Monday.
We’ve seen this before. After the glorious summer of 2022, both 2023 and 2024 were pretty miserable affairs. In fact, the hottest day of 2023 arrived on 10 September, which felt very much like the weather gods dangling a prize in front of us and shouting, “Look what you could have had”, in a full Jim Bowen accent.
A week of summer in September after a washed-out season was certainly welcome. It was also bloody irritating. As for the latest forecasts, the dominant high pressure that was definitely arriving by the end of next week has now been delayed.
But it should arrive the following week.
If not, the week after that.
If not, possibly July.
Failing that, September can be lovely in Hampshire, it really can.
