The 2006 English cricket season includes home international series for England against Sri Lanka and Pakistan. England are coming off a winter with more Test losses than wins, for the first time since 2002-03, but still attained their best series result in India since 1985. The One Day International series against Pakistan and India both ended in losses.
In domestic cricket, Nottinghamshire, holders of the County Championship, were in danger of relegation until the very last round, and it was Sussex who took the Championship title as their Pakistani overseas player Mushtaq Ahmed ended with 102 wickets. Sussex pipped Lancashire to the title, as they did in the one-day C&G Trophy, which was changed from a direct knock-out into two regional leagues of 10, from which two teams progressed to the final at Lord's, where Sussex won by 15 runs. Essex Eagles defended their National League title from last season, a league tournament that has been shortened from 16 to eight matches per side and officially named Pro40. They finished level with Northamptonshire Steelbacks in the table, though the Steelbacks lost by 109 runs in their meeting. The Twenty20 Cup completed its fourth instalment during 2006, and was won by Leicestershire Foxes, the first team to win the Twenty20 Cup twice.
Read more about 2006 English Cricket Season: Roll of Honour, April, May, June, August
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“My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the obscurity of a learned language.”
—Edward Gibbon (1737–1794)
“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)
“The instincts of merry England lingered on here with exceptional vitality, and the symbolic customs which tradition has attached to each season of the year were yet a reality on Egdon. Indeed, the impulses of all such outlandish hamlets are pagan still: in these spots homage to nature, self-adoration, frantic gaieties, fragments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose names are forgotten, seem in some way or other to have survived mediaeval doctrine.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)