Over the past decade, few figures in English cricket command more authority than Simon Harmer. The South African off-spinner has been the most prolific wicket-taker in the County Championship since arriving at Essex in 2017 on a six-month contract, with his Test career stalled and options narrowing.
He has since become one of the great overseas success stories: 522 first-class wickets and counting for Essex, two County Championship titles, a Bob Willis Trophy, a return to South Africa’s Test team, and, perhaps most importantly, a sense of contentment. “My journey has been bumpy,” Harmer says from a sun-drenched beer garden near the Oval. “I can say now that I’m at peace with it.”
When he arrived at Chelmsford on a Kolpak deal, Harmer had drifted out of South Africa’s setup after only five Tests. Within months, he went from first-choice spinner to playing backup for Keshav Maharaj and Dane Piedt. Harmer could read the room. “I’m not dumb,” he says. “I know when I’m not wanted.” Essex, newly promoted to Division One, needed a spinner. Harmer needed a stage.
He was an instant success. He bagged 72 wickets at 19.19 in his first season as Essex claimed their first title in 25 years. He finished that campaign, and the six that followed, as the most prolific spinner in the country. In three of those seasons, he topped the overall wicket-taking charts. Rumors of an England call-up followed, though he insists there was never a serious chance.
When reminded of the scale of it, he shrugs. “It’s my job,” he says. “I just want to make sure that when I call it a day, I can say I was the best version of Simon Harmer that I could have been.”
There’s an edge that runs through him. He is less interested in discussing the flight and turn of a cricket ball than the psychological battle between batter and bowler. He talks about the embarrassment he felt when he was dropped by the Proteas and how he turned that into a weapon. “Everybody is going to face that shit,” he says. “How do you deal with it? Do you fade, or do you prove the fuckers wrong?”
But he is not just a scrapper. Harmer is a craftsman, one of the great problem-solvers of the modern county game. “I love working out [a batter],” he says. “That’s what gets me going. What’s he looking to do, where is he looking to score, what’s easy, what’s difficult, what field will get me a wicket? I love all that. That is the art for me.”
It is why his view on England carries weight. He has spent a decade studying their domestic batters up close. And on the Test team’s aggressive philosophy, Harmer is unconvinced by some of the thinking behind it.
“I do feel selection has gone away from scoring a thousand runs in the County Championship for a couple of years, to ‘it’s not how many you score, it’s how you score,'” he says. “If it’s easy on the eye, it’ll get you in the side.”
England, he insists, remain dangerous. “Root is like the only traditional Test cricketer in there but he’s still reverse-ramping Pat Cummins.” But he is not sure the approach blends with the fundamentals of the game. Harmer also warns that a system of 18 teams can reward mediocrity, noting that English cricketers don’t always show the same fight as their international counterparts.
