With Glamorgan’s cricketers having secured promotion, Andrew Hignell looks back to the summer of 2004 and the last time Glamorgan won promotion into the top tier of the County Championship.
It was twenty-one years ago that Glamorgan last secured promotion into Division One of the County Championship, winning five of their sixteen games of 2004 to finish in third place. Around them, Worcestershire, Lancashire and Northamptonshire were relegated, with Nottinghamshire and Hampshire joining Glamorgan in moving up into the top tier for 2005.
For context, it was a year when Ben Kellaway and Asa Tribe, two of the emerging stars of the class of 2025 were born. It was also a summer of other milestones, both collectively and individually.
Glamorgan won the One-Day title and appeared at Finals Day of the T20 competition, whilst Matthew Maynard scored his 54th, and final, first-class hundred for Glamorgan. Ian Thomas also struck the Club’s first century in T20 cricket whilst, off the field, headway was made with the ground re-development scheme at Sophia Gardens.
As far as the race for promotion was concerned, Matthew Elliott - the Australian overseas batter - played a leading role. But his presence in the Glamorgan side of 2004 had only come about six weeks before the first ball was bowled.
Jimmy Maher, his fellow countryman and who had originally been scheduled to return as the Club’s overseas batter, asked if he could miss the first two Championship matches in order to attend a friend’s wedding in Brisbane. His request was refused, and the upshot was that Elliott rejoined after a record-breaking time in Australian domestic cricket during 2003/04.
The left-hander continued in prolific form and scored 1,245 runs at an average of 54.13, besides being a hugely influential figure off the field and helping a number of players erase the frustrations from the previous seasons when Glamorgan had missed out on promotion.
With fast bowler Michael Kasprowicz limited by his Australian commitments to just seven Championship appearances, captain Robert Croft was most fortunate to have at his disposal two of Glamorgan’s finest overseas players of recent times.
Elliott played a major hand in the run of Championship matches during May and June, which saw the Welsh county record four successive victories.
The sequence began at Chester-le-Street with a 201-run demolition of Durham with Michael Powell overcoming a dry and untrustworthy surface. Powell posted a superb hundred from just 90 balls before Durham’s batters wilted against David Harrison and Alex Wharf with each of the tall seamers extracting bounce and movement from the capricious wicket.
It was then on to Derby and a more placid surface, where Elliott and Mark Wallace shared an opening stand of 168 and feasted on a Derbyshire attack, beset by injuries, and which had seen them pluck West Indian Daren Powell out of club cricket.
Batting for a second time, an unbeaten hundred by David Hemp saw Glamorgan’ maintain the upper hand and after being set unlikely target of 341, it was only a matter of time before the visitors wrapped up victory and their team song was echoing around the former racecourse.
Elliott was to the fore again at Swansea as Glamorgan met a despondent Somerset side. After Harrison had claimed 5/48, the Australian treated the visiting bowlers with complete disdain as he struck a majestic 157 as Glamorgan amassed a lead of 151.
Although Ian Blackwell replied with a belligerent century in their second innings, the damage had already been done as another forthright innings from Elliott saw Glamorgan romp to a seven-wicket victory.
The winning run continued as Glamorgan returned to their Cardiff base to celebrate Maynard beating the Club record of 52 first-class hundreds, shared by Hugh Morris and Alan Jones, as he struck an imperious 114 on the opening day of the contest with Leicestershire.
By a stroke of coincidence, Peter Hartley who was one of the umpires in the game at Sophia Gardens had been in the Yorkshire side at Swansea in 1985 when the gifted strokemaker had made his first hundred, with Hartley taking the catch to end his audacious debut.
After Glamorgan had secured a decent first innings lead, Jonny Hughes and Robert Croft dominated the visiting attack with the pair adding 218 for the sixth wicket, with each scoring centuries.
Set a target of 547, Leicestershire’s batting disintegrated in the face of some probing seam bowling, with Harrison and Wharf each taking three wickets. The East Midlands side were dismissed inside 51 overs as Glamorgan won by 409 runs – their largest-ever victory margin in Championship cricket and at the time, the sixth-best in the competition.
The bonus points accrued during this sequence were sufficient to catapult Glamorgan to the top of the Division Two table and lay the foundation for successfully gaining promotion.
Indeed, only one further match during the second half of the season - but what a match it was to highlight the never-say-die attitude of the team of 2004. The match in question came in September at Chelmsford - the veritable battleground from the 1997 season and the infamous NatWest Trophy semi-final which had seen Essex win by one wicket, during which Croft had “appeared” on the News at Ten after an over-hyped incident with Mark Ilott.
Fortunately, the angst and anger had long evaporated from the minds of the senior players, and in 2004 it was Croft and his men who had the biggest smiles on their faces as Essex were beaten despite making 642 – at the time the highest-ever total in any first-class game only to lose the contest.
A Glamorgan victory had seemed a very distant prospect as Essex rattled up 445-4 on the first day with Andy Flower scoring 119, before Ronnie Irani hit 164 and James Foster made 188.
In reply to Essex’s seemingly impregnable total, Glamorgan stuttered to 188-5 at the close of the second day and looked in danger of being forced to follow-on. But on the third morning, Maynard scored a forthright 136 – his 54th and final hundred for the Welsh county, before Croft weighed in with 125. The total was ably supported by a career-best 88 from Harrison as Glamorgan ended on 587, conceding a lead of just 55.
When Essex batted for a second time, they were soon in trouble against the pace attack of Mick Lewis, the Australian acting as a locum for Kasprowicz who was on international duty and Simon Jones who had joyously returned to both international and county cricket after his horrendous injury in the Brisbane Test of the 2002/03 Ashes series.
Once Essex had slipped to 22-4, Flower and Foster led a fightback. But both were snared by Croft as the Welsh county steadily worked their way through the tail as Glamorgan were left chasing 221 on the final afternoon.
It proved to be an enthralling passage of play as the visiting batters steadily accumulated, with Hemp playing the part of chief aggressor as the left-hander compiled an assured half-century. After a few nervous moments as wickets fell at key times, Hemp then shared a decisive unbroken stand of 70 for the seventh wicket with a defiant Croft, before hitting the winning runs with 3.4 overs to spare to give Glamorgan the most unlikely of victories and a place in the record books.
With a group of players now at their peak - as in the glory years of 1993 and 1997 - the swagger and self-confidence had returned to Glamorgan Cricket. This was evident as they clinched the National League title at Colwyn Bay still with three games still to play, winning eleven of their sixteen matches in the competition which then comprised innings with a maximum of 45 overs.
2004 also saw the Glamorgan Dragons reach Finals Day of the T20 competition, with the Welsh county defeating Warwickshire in the semi-final at Cardiff as Hemp and Elliott shared a match-winning stand of 118 for the third wicket. By their own admission, the Dragons didn’t fire on all cylinders on their big day out at Edgbaston, as they lost the semi-final against the Leicestershire Foxes, the eventual winners of the competition.