Adam Lyth, Yorkshire

553 runs at 26.33

Yeah, that’s pretty shoddy.

James Hildreth, Somerset

893 runs at 38.82

That’s okay.

Ben Stokes, Durham

628 runs at 48.30 and 17 wickets at 33.00

Three hundreds, five sixes in five balls against Hampshire and selection for England. We’ll have that one.

Adil Rashid, Yorkshire

556 runs at 24.17 and 39 wickets at 43.38

Less than amazing, but we’re not losing faith in him, even if we’ll have to ignore him next year because he’ll be in the second division. Life isn’t slow, steady progress, it’s fits and starts and going backwards and forgetting where your car keys are and having a pain in your knee and not knowing whether that hoummus is okay to eat or not – THAT’S what life is.

Adil Rashid is 23-years-old. Writing off leg-spinners or batsmen when they’re 23 is moronic. Shane Warne made his Test debut at 23 and took 1-150. Rashid still has a long career ahead of him.

Paul Horton, Lancashire

1,040 runs at 37.14

That doesn’t read all that impressively and nor did Horton hit any hundreds, but it’s worth looking at the context. Horton scored the most runs for Lancashire this season. Being as Lancashire won more games than anyone, clearly Horton was making runs that mattered, it was just that they were low-scoring games.

A run doesn’t have a set value, it varies depending on the match. Paul Horton had a good season, although that would be a bit more obvious if he’d managed to add a handful to any of his biggest innings. At various points this year, he hit 93, 94, 95, 96, 97 and 99.

Oliver Newby, Lancashire

Eight wickets at 32.50

Didn’t break either leg at any point this season.

One worse.

Having taken 6-77 in Worcestershire’s first innings, Adil Rashid could only manage 5-37 in their second innings. This grave loss of form is deeply worrying.

Ben Stokes is getting better

How much better?

125 better.

Having scored 10 in Durham’s first innings, Ben Stokes then made 135 not out in their second innings. We’ve plotted this on a graph for you:

You can really appreciate that this represents improvement when you see the data in this form.

Stokes took 6-68 in between those two innings, but we don’t know much about his bowling, so we don’t know how to feel about that.

We’re pretty sure that 6-68 is good, but without plotting it on a graph, we can’t be certain.

“Day one of the County Championship?” thought Adil Rashid. “I’ll have that.”

So he did.

Rashid has kicked off with 6-77 against Worcestershire. That’s called ‘being better than everyone else,’ that is. We recognise it well from all the millions of times we’ve been one small part of the ‘everyone else’.

The end.

This in-depth coverage of the County Championship is going pretty well. You won’t get insight like this anywhere else.

We’re also lumping them all together in one post this year, because multiple posts feels like quite a big commitment.

Adam Lyth, Yorkshire

Our reasons for picking batsmen to watch are invariably the same: they’re young and we’ve got a general sense that they score runs when other people don’t, even though we haven’t really looked into it properly.

James Hildreth, Somerset

Hildreth is a rare exception. He just scores a lot of runs.

Ben Stokes, Durham

See Adam Lyth to a greater degree, but with less evidence.

Adil Rashid, Yorkshire

We watch him every year. We reckon he could take one million wickets this year. Probably no more than that though.

Paul Horton, Lancashire

We had him as one to watch in both 2009 and 2010, so we’re sticking with him through thin-and-thin. He also averaged 70 for Matabeleland Tuskers over the winter and we enjoyed writing the start of this sentence, whatever it meant.

Oliver Newby, Lancashire

This has ball-all to do with cricket and everything to do with the fact that we just fundamentally like Oliver Newby. He hasn’t got broken legs this year and we are hoping we can spur him to great feats through sheer force of will.

England helped his development no end last season by keeping him out of the majority of Yorkshire’s matches so that he could not play for them instead. Occasionally they let him bowl a single over before the captain, in keeping with English attitudes to leg-spinners, took him off and brought on someone to bowl flat, non-spinning finger-spin instead. Once in a while, he bowled well, at which point they dropped him.

Adil Rashid hit 387 runs at 77.40 last season, you know. Let him bat more. Let him bowl more.

In the summer, Rashid started the one-day series against Australia well and promptly got dropped. He got one over in the second Twenty20 match against South Africa, got carted and from then Alastair Cook opted for Joe Denly ahead of him. Yesterday, he got three overs, got a little bit of welly and was then demoted below Jonathan Trott in the bowling hierarchy.

This is what the English do with leg spinners. If you’re a seam bowler and you go for a few runs, you quite often get a chance to make amends with a few more overs – because at least you’re shit in a predictable way. If you’re a leg spinner, there are no second chances.

Even Shane Warne said that his only aim in his first over was just to stay on. Leg spin bowling isn’t something that you can switch on and switch off. It’s not a light switch or your brain when you’re at work.

• Luke Wright
• Dimitri Mascarenhas
• Tim Bresnan
• Adil Rashid

There’s room for players who chip in, rather than deciding matches on their own, but there seem to be altogether too many of them in England’s side. Dimitri Mascarenhas, for example, is a great batsman when you’ve got five overs to go, but he’s unlikely to pass 50 too often and he’s not going to run through a side with his bowling.

The other three are slightly different, in that they’re younger and are investments for the future to some degree. But there’s only so much international experience to invest. You can’t field all three of them, because none seem likely to win you a game.

At the minute, they’re 32 runs and 1-52 players.

England will naturally be looking for a seam bowling all-rounder to replace Andrew Flintoff – perhaps Rashid’s team mate, Tim Bresnan – but is that the best ploy?

With Stuart Broad offering fast-medium seam and James Anderson offering fast-medium swing, England really need a vicious fast bowler to take wickets on the world’s flat Test pitches. Is there one?

Not really and even if there were, he wouldn’t be able to bat. So why not pick a leg-spinner? If Broad, Anderson and Graham Onions can’t get wickets on a given day, a fourth bowler of similar ilk isn’t going to help one bit.

Leg-spinners can get wickets on flat pitches. Adil Rashid is a leg-spinner. And he can bat.

It’s three years since we first tipped Adil Rashid and it’s the third year he’s been one to watch. It’s probably about time things started happening.

By ‘things,’ we of course mean England recognition. Spectral badger visitation is a ‘thing’ as well, but no-one wants that to happen. Venereal disease is a ‘thing’, although we’re not sure that just happens.

The thinking on Adil Rashid runs one of two ways. (1) He’s not ready yet or (2) he’s some kind of warlock leggie who’ll bend the world to his will.

We tend to fall somewhere in the middle. We don’t want England to wait forever to pick him, but any notion that he’s some sort of magic jigsaw piece in the England puzzle is pure wishful thinking.

That England jigsaw depicts a maudlin-looking man attempting to unblock a drain with his bare hands. No single jigsaw piece can make that image change into a snarling leopard’s face. At best the maudlin-looking man will end up with congealed soap on his hands, not shit.

There are so many reasons why Adil Rashid should play for England and we don’t really see the point in waiting much longer. Just think, England could realistically field five bowlers and still have a lower order that went Flintoff, Rashid, Broad, Sidebottom, Panesar. That’d make the five-down to all out procession a tad more laboured.

Two all-rounders. Two spinners. A leg-spinner!

We’re coming out in a sweat. And a rash, but that’s unrelated.

Some county players who aren’t quite so worth watching – but you still have to.