< 1 minute read No bad thing in our eyes. We’re a great believer in scarcity making something more attractive. Take northern hairy-nosed wombats, for example. Phwoar. Similarly, four-day matches might become something other than sporting wallpaper if there are fewer of them. We had to follow the County Championship as part of our
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Middlesex fail to be anywhere other than top of the table
2 minute read Time for a County Championship update. The crucial piece of information is that Middlesex are now top. If Sussex defied their top order runlessness to take an early lead, Middlesex have for the most part adopted a different approach. Their strategy seems to involve spending quite a lot of time
Continue readingKevin Pietersen and the lonely ends of the spectra
2 minute read The Kevin Pietersen saga is often described as a soap opera. This is quite accurate because the defining feature of a soap opera is that IT NEVER ENDS. Okay, Crossroads and Eldorado did, but you get what we’re saying. For the most part they just rumble on, day after day,
Continue readingHow Sussex took the lead without really batting all that well
2 minute read Let’s exploit this gap in England’s Test series to get up to speed with this year’s County Championship and the very top of the table specifically. Currently, that means Sussex. In their first five innings of this year, the individual members of Sussex’s top five passed 50 just four times
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Why we pay no attention to the second division of the County Championship
2 minute read Earlier in the year, someone-or-other expressed their reservations about adding three teams to England’s four-day competition and dividing it into three divisions of seven. They said that it would be hard to maintain the quality. We can’t remember who it was, but this comment seemed to us to betray a
Continue readingThe multi-coloured Excel monster that is the English domestic season
2 minute read Each year, The Cricketer produces a wall chart detailing all of the summer fixtures. It works well as a visual representation of the way the English domestic game is organised. White space is in short supply. It is as much an assault on the senses as a paper wall chart
Continue readingJonathan Trott joins Yorkshire
< 1 minute read At least we think that’s what’s happened. As far as we can tell, Trott and a handful of others have signed for Yorkshire in time for the county’s tour to South Africa. Weirdly, there doesn’t seem to be any explanation why only seven of last year’s Championship-winning squad will be
Continue readingCounty Championship second division in 2014 – all you need to know
< 1 minute read Jesse Ryder took 44 wickets at 18.09 for Essex. To put that in context, Ryder has taken 99 first-class wickets in his entire career. This season, he took four five-fors and had one ten-wicket match. These were added to the no five-fors he’d previously taken to give him a career
Continue readingLancashire are still not quite relegated
< 1 minute read Scan the homepage of this website and you could easily reach some incorrect conclusions. The post about Alastair Cook has attracted 50-odd comments, so presumably that’s a hot topic, right? Not really. The vast majority are about Lancashire v Middlesex, a relegation dogfight (involving different breeds) which seems to be
Continue readingThe tallest order
< 1 minute read Lancashire started their must-win-by-a-mile match quite well, but James Harris and Ravi Patel secured a batting bonus point for Middlesex which means we now have a clearer idea of exactly what each team needs to do to survive. Lancashire need to either score 350, or declare with fewer than eight
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