David Bedingham's stint at Durham has been transformative for both player and county, and he isn't done yet, writes Wisden Cricket Monthly magazine editor Jo Harman.
It’s 20 years ago this summer that Durham recruited a veteran South African who would go on to transform the club’s fortunes. Aged 30, Dale Benkenstein’s unfulfilled international career was already behind him. Once touted as the natural captaincy successor to Hansie Cronje, 23 underwhelming ODI appearances had seen him slip out of the international reckoning and he was left to pursue a career in county cricket as a Kolpak.
Interest wasn’t forthcoming, and Benkenstein had to approach counties asking for trials, eventually landing up at Chester-le-Street. With Durham having just received the County Championship wooden spoon for the fifth time in their first 13 years as a first-class county, Benkenstein was starting from the bottom.
“It’s incredible to think a player of his ability and standing in the game in South Africa was going around looking for trials,” says Geoff Cook, Durham’s former head coach and the heartbeat of the club following their ascent to first-class status in 1992. “We were very happy to give him a game in the second team and he scored a hundred against a really good Yorkshire attack. We signed him straight away.”
Benkenstein would go on to become one of the most influential overseas recruits of the modern era, captaining Durham to victory in the 2007 Friends Provident Trophy final, the club’s first major trophy, and the County Championship title the following summer.
He passed on the captaincy to Will Smith, believing the club should be skippered by an English player, but remained hugely influential, making five hundreds and averaging 53 as Durham made it back-to-back Championship titles in 2009.
Benkenstein signed off his playing career by helping Durham to a third Championship title in 2013, retiring at the age of 39 as the club’s all-time leading run-scorer in first-class cricket before going on to coach Hampshire, Gloucestershire and now Lancashire.
“When Dale signed for Durham in 2005 the team was struggling to find its identity, any sort of shape really, and his professional approach, competitiveness and common sense immediately had a huge impact,” reflects Cook. “He was the pivotal person in gluing the team together.”
Fast forward to 2019, and Durham were back among the basement boys of county cricket. Controversially relegated in 2016 after accepting a £3.8m bailout package from the ECB, the club received the double-whammy of starting the 2017 campaign with a 48-point deduction, kiboshing their hopes of promotion before the season had even begun. With their home ground losing its Test-match status and the ECB enforcing a revised salary cap on the club – penalties which appeared draconian at the time and feel even more so with the benefit of hindsight – a steady flow of talent departed Chester-le-Street, much of it homegrown at Durham’s distinguished academy.
The club finished one from bottom in the second tier of the County Championship in 2017, two from bottom in 2018 and fifth in 2019. They were going nowhere fast.
Then in January 2020, Durham announced the signing of two South Africans: the headline news was the arrival of Farhaan Behardien, a former Proteas all-rounder who had briefly captained his country. Attracting less attention was the recruitment of David Bedingham, an uncapped 25-year-old batter who had been putting up good numbers in South Africa’s domestic competition.
As overseas signings go, it was hardly one to set the pulse racing. But as Bedingham embarks on his sixth season with Durham, he can lay claim to being the most valuable overseas player in the county game. While the off-season signings of Kane Williamson and Cameron Green were eye-catching, they’re only expected to play five Championship matches for Middlesex and Gloucestershire respectively. Bedingham, meanwhile, will be with his county for the vast majority of the season, as he has been for the previous five summers. The results have been sensational.
In 55 first-class matches for Durham, Bedingham has made 4,296 runs at an average of 58.05 and notched 16 hundreds. If there were any doubts that he could maintain his form against Division One attacks following the club’s return to the top tier last year, he quickly dispelled them, topping the run-scoring charts with 1,331 at an average of 78.29. He scored his runs at speed too, striking at 78 (the highest of any player to make 900 runs) and hitting 25 sixes (comfortably the most in Division One).
But more significant than the numbers is the overall impact that Bedingham has had on the club, echoing the influence exerted by Benkenstein two decades ago. His aggressive approach chimes perfectly with the mentality instilled by Durham’s Australian head coach Ryan Campbell since he arrived at the club ahead of the 2023 season, and his run-scoring feats have propelled the club back to the top table of the county game – to the extent that they are as good a bet as any to challenge Surrey’s dominance this summer.
“I honestly think he’s as good as I’ve seen,” Scott Borthwick, Durham’s former skipper turned player/coach, told Wisden last year after Bedingham became the first player to make hundreds in four consecutive innings for the county. “He’s an extraordinary player.”
The benefits have been reciprocal, with Bedingham crediting the county game for helping him achieve his dream of becoming a Test cricketer, the 30-year-old making his debut for South Africa in December 2023 and registering his first hundred last February against New Zealand. Given his superb record in England, he will surely line up for his country in June’s World Test Championship final at Lord’s.
“When I first came to England, I would change my technique and my trigger quite often,” he tells Wisden. “But I’ve done a lot of work over the winters and that has given me the confidence not to change things if I have a couple of low scores. That’s the biggest thing. If I’m just thinking about hitting the ball rather than my trigger and my hands, I play a lot better.
“It’s not that I know I will score runs – you can never guarantee them – but I’m batting with a clear mind. I’m not trying to score runs for myself – I’m always trying to win games for Durham, Western Province or South Africa.”
As a host of overseas players dip in and out of the county game this season, many appearing for no more than a handful of matches, Bedingham is a throwback to days gone by when international recruits would become part of the fabric of a club, returning summer after summer and making their presence felt on and off the pitch.
For Durham, back where they feel they belong after a rollercoaster 20 years, Bedingham is worth his weight in gold.
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