Ones to watch
2011 County Championship players to watch review
Suppose we should take a look at how our 2011 County Championship players to watch fared.
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.
4 AppealsAdil Rashid is getting worse
How much worse?
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.
11 AppealsAdil Rashid has day one of the County Championship
“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.
19 AppealsCounty Championship players to watch in 2011
County Championship only. First division only.
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.
28 AppealsWe haven’t totally crippled Durham’s players
Our 2010 cricketers to watch list weighs heavily on our shoulders like a yoke of inaccuracy. It’s not been a vintage year, but thoughts that we had cursed the Durham contingent can now be banished. They’ve all come good in the same match. Well, not Will Smith. He’s not getting picked any more. The other three have done okay though.
Phil Mustard carved his second hundred of the season and then hit 51 not out and is therefore doing about a billion times better than his mates.
After 113 overs without taking a wicket, Mark Davies finally came good and finished the Nottinghamshire first innings with the frankly stupid figures of 2 for 10 off 15 overs. He then developed a sciatic nerve problem and won’t be bowling in the second innings.
And Liam Plunkett? Well, Liam’s not going to be wearing the High Visibility Tabard of England Squad Membership any time soon, but 3-66 means he hasn’t been shit in this match at least.
6 AppealsCounty cricket players to watch in 2010
We’re watching these guys when there isn’t an international match on, which is never:
4 AppealsRavi Bopara, Essex: first-class batsman to watch in 2010
The plight of Ravi Bopara makes an interesting case study. He’s trying to establish himself as a Test cricketer and only Test runs will really persuade anyone that he’s ready.
He gets a series of ducks in Tests in Sri Lanka and gets dropped. He promptly makes a one-day double hundred. He has a bad run in the Ashes and gets dropped. He promptly makes a first-class double hundred in the second division.
Too good for one level of cricket, not yet ready for the next one up. Ravi Bopara is in limbo. At least now he’s batting in the first division. Is that more meaningful? We think it is and we’re intrigued to see how he gets on.
Maybe he can actually try and make his case by playing cricket rather than having to resort to public pronouncements about being keen, but not too keen.
7 AppealsPhil Mustard: one-day wicketkeeper-batsman to watch in 2010
So much of what’s wrong with English cricket can be seen in the never-ending debate about wicketkeepers. First-class cricket’s too weak to show who’s best and because there are so many counties and therefore so many candidates, no player gets much of a run.
We are no better informed than anyone else about all of this, which is precisely our point – it’s nigh-on impossible to be well-informed with the information we have to go on. Nevertheless, one wicketkeeper we liked when he appeared in one-day matches for England was Phil Mustard.
Phil Mustard was the second-highest scorer in the Pro40 last year and it’s all 40-over stuff in 2010. Phil Mustard doesn’t know he’s supposed to be playing as an attacking opener in these matches; it’s just what he does. That’s what we like about him. Plus, wicketkeepers HAVE to open the batting in one-day matches.
7 AppealsPaul Horton: first-class batsman to watch in 2010
Like Will Smith, Paul Horton’s another who had a 2009 season of less than unbridled success. He did hit 173 in one match, but didn’t do much else.
However, if there’s one thing we’ve learnt with these Ones To Watch, it’s that they’re devious bastards and always slip in a duff season just before they come good, thereby escaping from our one-watching claws at the crucial moment. Graeme Swann, we’re looking at you.
So let’s stick with Paul Horton through thin-and-thin, just like we did with that film that said it was going to be Knight Rider in the TV guide, but which didn’t feature a single car in it and was clearly a different film, but which the eight-year-old us watched anyway, hoping the whole of the first hour would turn out to be a Michael Knight dream.
7 AppealsWill Smith, Durham: first-class batsman to watch in 2010
Will Smith was the one batsman who didn’t score runs for Durham last year, which might not immediately mark him out as being worth watching, but the year before that he was arguably their best batsman.
We’re putting the mediocre batting down to his being made captain in 2009. It’s like when someone’s knocking at the door while you’re trying to write about Will Smith of Durham: it’s a distraction and you can’t deal with both at once.
Actually, maybe it’s a bit different. Judging from the fact that Smith hit 150 in his penultimate match last season, maybe you learn to cope with both. In the other situation, eventually the knocking just stops – as does the writing about Will Smith of Durham.
6 Appeals
