Cricket: Grim up north
It was somehow appropriate that Lancashire's season expired at the Rose Bowl in circumstances of pure farce. It was symbolic of a season that promised so much and delivered, again, so little.
On Friday we had stared mournfully as the rainwater collected in gloomy puddles on the covers. On Saturday we had the unedifying spectacle of Hampshire bowling virtually unplayable "moon" balls at Lancashire batsmen who were too embarrassed to acknowledge the conventional landmarks of their innings.
Neither Shane Warne nor the crowd could understand why Lancashire did not declare and set up the prospect of a decent finish in an otherwise meaningless game, but then the caution that has been the unfortunate hallmark of Lancashire's cricket this year has been just as responsible as the ubiquitous rain for their failure, for the 72nd year in a row, to win the championship.
It was a mystery to me why Lancashire failed to enforce the follow-on at the end of the second day's play. Apparently they were worried about facing Warne on a fourth-innings pitch - the same Warne whom they had just hit for 105 off 35 wicketless overs. There have been too many such decisions taken out of fear of defeat and not enough out of confidence in their ability to win.
So we continue our long day's journey into night. Only Lancashire supporters now aged 80 or over can remember the last time the county finished as champions. In that glorious summer of 1934 we had an unpopular leader of the Labour Party and Italy had just won the World Cup.
2006 has been a season typical of so many in recent times - a strong squad on paper, much pre-season optimism and a heady start. By mid-June Lancashire were top of the championship and in the C&G Lord's final.
"But it's a long, long way from May to December and the days grow short when you reach September," sang Walter Huston in Knickerbocker Holiday and, as I drove sadly home from the Rose Bowl, Kurt Weill's doleful September Song made for an appropriate accompaniment.
True to form, by the time the autumn weather turned the leaves to flame Lancashire's season had slipped disappointingly away. Failure to qualify for the Twenty20 knockout stages was followed by defeat by Sussex at Lord's after they had bowled themselves into a winning position. Only two victories in the last week staved off relegation in the Pro40, after which second place in the championship seemed a formality.
While counties such as Leicestershire, Glamorgan and Essex, with far fewer resources, have won championships in the past two decades, Lancashire have consistently come up short.
In the 1970s the Jack Bond/David Lloyd side with two overseas stars in Clive Lloyd and Farokh Engineer might have won it but didn't. In the 1990s the all-star side of Atherton and Fairbrother, De Freitas and Wasim Akram certainly should have won it but didn't.
This lamentable catalogue of failure results from more than the accumulation of rain clouds over Old Trafford. It presumably rained in 1926, 1927, 1928, 1930 and 1934 when Ted McDonald and Dick Tyldesley bowled Lancashire to victories.
It also rains quite frequently on the other side of the Pennines but everyone knows that Yorkshire's failure to win the championship more than once since 1968 is because they have had some poor teams and a divided club. It is about time the inept Lancashire committee stood up and admitted as much. Instead they can only splutter that the ECB has taken away their Test match.
Going to Old Trafford to watch Lancashire is one of my earliest and fondest memories. Every Saturday morning my Uncle Laurence would transport me from a semi-detached house in north Manchester to experience the glory days of Brian Statham, Roy Tattersall, Ken Higgs and Noddy Pullar. Laurence would surround himself with a group of acolytes as he explained to them how the cricket correspondent of the Manchester Guardian (the unfortunate though professionally admired Denys Rowbotham) didn't understand the first thing about cricket - just as Neville Cardus's appreciation of that week's concert in the Free Trade Hall was a wicked travesty of what he himself had heard and therefore knew to be true.
Cricket mixed with politics, with art, with cultural history and philosophy - a heady attraction for a small boy struggling to make sense of the world. Lancashire's failure to win the championship in some way makes me feel like it is a betrayal of what Uncle Laurence taught me as well as of the tradition of Washbrook and Statham.
I feel sure that the ghosts of both of those heroes would be placated less by the naming of an office block or a perimeter road in their honour than the flying of the championship pennant for, like Walter Huston and Kurt Weill, I haven't got time for the waiting game.
Colin Shindler is an author and has suffered with Lancashire since first watching them in 1955.