aning and power.Time is sometimes an enemy. The Championship does not fit with modern life. If cricket were being conceived now, it would be

Increasingly, cricket seems to have just one subject, the subject of time. Cricket fights time, struggles with its changes, but in other ways embraces time, puts time at the heart of its drama. As the autumnal sun, soft and fragile, fell down on Lords at the end of this years County Championship, time in all of these aspects was refracted.The match had finished in the way it might in a kids back-garden imagination: three teams in the fight, two engaged in the battle at crickets HQ, the other watching anxiously on television 170 miles away (and lucky that Sky decided at the last minute to show the game, otherwise theyd have been clustered around a radio…). Within two hours the game moved from the farce of lob-up bowling to a desperate race against the clock and the light, settled at the death by a nerve-rattling hat-trick from an unsung hero. It was particularly, peculiarly English: nostalgic, anachronistic, dreamy, and almost impossible to explain properly to outsiders.The drama had built not just on the last afternoon or during the final round of matches, but across a season that began under iron skies on April 10. Behind that lay history, of Yorkshire, the defending champions; of Middlesex, who had not won the title since 1993, when their current director of cricket was still chuntering in, through wind and rain, from the Nursery End; and of Somerset, who have not held the gold trophy at all since the County Championship was constituted at Lords on December 10, 1889, when the Marquis of Salisbury was prime minister and the Wisden Almanack named six bowlers as its first Cricketers of the Year, among them George Lohmann and Bobby Peel.To compete in the County Championship is to join this great history, this vast story, to feel the weight of Yorkshires 32 titles, Phil Meads 46,268 runs, Tich Freemans 3151 wickets, to stand alongside the deeds of Grace and Hutton and Ramprakash, of King Viv and Big Bird and Dasher Denning, of Clive Radley, Mike Gatting, Vince Van der Bijl; of Imran and Sarfraz and Malcolm Marshall and the thousands of other cricketers who have played across the summers. Its a rich and rare place, and its not too fanciful to suggest that all of those summers played into this one, and offered it meaning and power.Time is sometimes an enemy. The Championship does not fit with modern life. If cricket were being conceived now, it would be in its three-hour form of boozy Friday night crowds and heightened, manic action. The Championship began in the era of steam and has survived until steam punk. It has endured through global schisms and wars from which its players did not return. It is cast as crickets crazy old uncle who insists on turning up at the party each year, even though accommodating him and his 18 mates is becoming increasingly inconvenient. This is the story anyway, the one we all know, about county crickets great irrelevance. But as time accelerates and attention spans shorten to mouse-clicks, the internet age has offered something strange and new. A visit to the Championship may be impossible physically, but it is now happening virtually, and it is happening a lot. On digital radio, the BBC broadcast 3889 hours of coverage. Live blogs, including the popular one right here on this site, were read frantically in workplaces and on mobiles. Twitter offers a constant presence. And Lords announced on Sunday that 21,595 people managed to escape their lives and watch the four days of Middlesex versus Yorkshire, making it the biggest crowd for a single Championship game there since May 1966, a time before England won the football World Cup.It is a modern riddle, a metaphor for where were going: the Championship now exists for those who cant watch it but would like to. It retains a purity of competition precisely because it is unfashionable, takes its own sweet time and is not loaded down by the requirements of television and sponsors. Most of its players labour knowing that they have reached the heights that they are going to reach, and that one day they will have to rejoin the real world, for which their current lives cannot prepare them. Its real and human and touching, a quotidian kind of sporting heroism.As each season folds into autumn, some of them ride into the sunset, and they only need look at Twitter or the live blogs to see what they have meant and what they leave behind. Each goes out with a story, be they beloved old warhorses like David Masters and Graham Napier at Essex, or young men who have been granted fleeting careers, like Sussexs remarkable Lewis Hatchett. Others sweat on contract renewals and hunt for gigs in club cricket somewhere in the southern-hemisphere sun to kill another winter.This bittersweetness underpins cricket in England. The County Championship understands time and its challenges, and it has weathered them all. 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Ben Barba has been released from his playing contract by premiers Cronulla and faces a 12-week ban if and when he returns to the NRL in the wake of testing positive to cocaine.The Sharks released a statement on Tuesday saying fullback Barba would be taking time away from the game to address some significant personal issues.The club said the former Dally M Medal winner had on Monday night left to attend an overseas rehabilitation program.I know and accept I need to take some time away from the game to deal with some personal issues, Barba said in a statement.I am accountable for myself and my actions and if I dont address them now I will certainly ruin my career and more importantly my life and that of my family.I hope to return to the game at some stage and am very grateful for the support of the Cronulla Sharks and I hope that one day I can again play beside this terrific bunch of guys.The NRL confirmed the positive test, returned just days after Cronullas breakthrough grand final triumph, was Barbas second positive sample under the NRLs illicit drug testing program.ddddddddddddThe first positive test was recorded in 2015.Given Barba has now been released from his contract with the Sharks, he will serve the mandatory 12-match suspension if he returns to the NRL in the future.Barba is the third player suspended under the NRLs illicit drug program, following former South Sydney centre Kirisome Auvaa and Cronulla under-20s player Jayden Walker.Cronulla CEO Lyall Gorman said the immediate focus for the club was helping Barba get his life together off the field.This is an incredibly difficult situation for Ben, his family and our club and all involved with it, Gorman said.While Ben will be a major loss to our football club, the far greater priority is for him to focus on his long term future away from football and we will continue to support Ben throughout that process in any way we can. 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