The 1997 English cricket season centred on the six Test Ashes series against Australia. England won the first, at Edgbaston, by the decisive margin of nine wickets, and the rain-affected second Test at Lord's was drawn, but any English optimism was short-lived. Australia won the next three games by huge margins to secure the series and retain the Ashes, and England's three-day victory in the final game at The Oval was little more than a consolation prize. The three-match ODI series which preceded the Tests produced a statistical curiosity, with England winning each match by an identical margin, six wickets.
The County Championship went to Glamorgan for the first time since 1969, by a margin of just four points from Kent. The combination of captain Matthew Maynard and Steve James' batting and Waqar Younis' and Steve Watkin's bowling propelled them to the title, although the matter was not settled until the final match of the season, when Glamorgan's maximum-points thrashing of Somerset at Taunton ensured that Kent's own victory over Surrey was irrelevant.
In one-day cricket, Warwickshire won the AXA Life League by two points from Kent, but were themselves thrashed by nine wickets by Essex in the final of the NatWest Trophy. The honours in the Benson & Hedges Cup went to Surrey, who beat Kent by eight wickets in the final.
Ali Brown's 203 for Surrey in the AXA Life League against Hampshire in July remains the only double century ever scored in a 40-over List A match.
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“The English were very backward to explore and settle the continent which they had stumbled upon. The French preceded them both in their attempts to colonize the continent of North America ... and in their first permanent settlement ... And the right of possession, naturally enough, was the one which England mainly respected and recognized in the case of Spain, of Portugal, and also of France, from the time of Henry VII.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“All cries are thin and terse;
The field has droned the summer’s final mass;
A cricket like a dwindled hearse
Crawls from the dry grass.”
—Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)
“Let us have a good many maples and hickories and scarlet oaks, then, I say. Blaze away! Shall that dirty roll of bunting in the gun-house be all the colors a village can display? A village is not complete, unless it have these trees to mark the season in it. They are important, like the town clock. A village that has them not will not be found to work well. It has a screw loose, an essential part is wanting.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)