The 2025 season for Lancashire’s men started full of cheerful high hopes. In the spring many, including a now bashful Spin, tipped them for immediate promotion back to Division One of the County Championship after being relegated in the last game of 2024 – as they had done in 2013, 2015 and 2019. It didn’t turn out like that.
Two months later, hope had turned to heavyweight disgruntlement after a run of hapless performances. By the end of May, they were the only team in either division not to have a win under their belt. An innings defeat against Leicestershire in less than three days was the final straw.
The captain, Keaton Jennings, who seemed to be carrying a thousand bricks below those rosy cheeks, stood down. The head coach, Dale Benkenstein – who had been recruited from Gloucestershire, bottom of Division Two – was shown the door “by mutual consent”. Young guns didn’t fire as hoped and even the return of Jimmy Anderson couldn’t cheer things up.
Slowly, though, the season turned around. Old boy Steven Croft, initially as interim coach, guided the team to Blast finals day and a much-improved Championship campaign that left Lancashire fifth in the final standings. Croft was confirmed as permanent coach in October and the evergreen Anderson signed as the red-ball captain for 2026, with another one-year contract, backflipping into his mid-40s.
Chris Green and Marcus Harris return as overseas players for the summer, Ajeet Singh Dale and Paul Coughlin are new recruits and the signing of the former Australian captain Meg Lanning is a coup for the, much more successful, women’s team in the Blast. She will get her first taste of the English county game.
Off the pitch, the big news is that Lancashire have taken the keys at their new second ground at Farington, near Preston. This new complex, a low-rise build on green-belt land, is made up of two ovals – a professional one, for the men’s and women’s first and second teams, and a recreational one. It is based loosely on Christchurch’s Hagley Oval in New Zealand, familiar to anyone who has switched on Test cricket late at night during the winter, gazed at the families and the kids running around and wished English grounds were a bit more like that. The grass banks should be a hit, if the Lancashire weather plays ball.
The club have committed to 750 hours of community work as part of their deal with Lancashire county council and in the words of the chief executive, Daniel Gidney: “We want all the kids in state schools across Lancashire to have a cricket experience. This is not about kids from wealthy families having private nets.”
Lancashire’s membership is a famously disgruntled one. Disillusioned by events on the pitch over the past few years and feeling unloved and short-changed by the management, that the club have concentrated on making money, with cricket and members left as an afterthought.
Gidney admits the club has concentrated on commercial development over the past 10 years– with the two huge Lego brick hotels at Old Trafford. “Now is the right time to pivot to cricket and facilities,” he says. The (ragtag) Old Trafford cricket centre is promised a spruce-up and Gidney is confident the combination of Farington, Old Trafford and a top medical team – and a Hundred franchise – will draw the best to Manchester.
It won’t shock readers that the lure of Farington doesn’t satisfy everyone. A suspicious Lancashire member, who didn’t want to give his name, isn’t so sure. “It’s a selfish point of view to some extent because I’m up the road from Old Trafford and it would take longer to travel there and back to Farington than it would to watch a T20 game there. But it isn’t the easiest place to get to. At least in Manchester you’ve got travel options.
“But the biggest worry from members is that Farington will replace the other outgrounds. And what members love most is outground cricket, Blackpool is my favourite ground and it is always full, it’s such a fantastic day out.”
At the moment, the club are committing to some outground cricket on other grounds (Gidney and the director of cricket performance, Mark Chilton, are said to be great fans), though Farington will inevitably become primus inter pares. The groundstaff are due to start work on the square in April, weather permitting, and the club hope to play a couple of Metro Bank men’s games at the end of July and a women’s game in September. But pitches are capricious beasts.
The training nets and indoor dome, part funded by the England and Wales Cricket Board, will not be ready until later in the year.
“We’re incredibly fortunate, to have a facility like this,” Gidney says “It is unique in cricket … it doesn’t happen because it is expensive and complicated. And we’ve got an elite and community oval – the best of both worlds.
“Cricket has been a bit behind other sports, if you want to drive performance on the field. It feels to me like a Premiership training ground, no other professional county in the UK has a professional training ground.”
The club has not been short of people wanting to have a look around. With New Road flooded yet again, and Worcestershire still unsure of their future plans, the chief executive, Ashley Giles, has been up with his notebook and pen. He said to be impressed. But the most difficult customers to please are yet to sniff around and make their verdict.