Essex take the field (via Twitter)

Honestly, you take the trouble to inform people how things stand in the County Championship and the damn thing only goes and gets itself decided five minutes later.

Essex won their match by an innings and let’s not bother getting too mathematical about what Lancashire would need to do to to draw out what is clearly inevitable. Let’s face it. Essex are going to win.

After the first round of matches, we said we couldn’t see them winning many games this year. “They don’t seem to have enough bowlers,” was our reasoning.

After two matches, we revised this view. “At some point Essex’s wafer thin attack is going to be too knackered to achieve anything. We’re adamant about this.”

By the end of May, we were saying: “We may have to stop thinking of Essex as being inked in for relegation what with their currently being top of the table and all.”

They’ve pretty much stayed there every since.

We still think they’ve got a wafer thin attack, but it is apparently a very robust wafer and rather more effective than we knew.

Jamie Porter was the big surprise to us – he has taken 64 wickets at 17.85. Simon Harmer has also done way better than expected and has picked up 63 wickets at 20.19.

Lancashire will doubtless be wishing that they’d managed to retain the services of The Great Neil Wagner as he is Essex’s next highest wicket-taker with 24 (albeit at 41.37). His locum, Mohammad Amir, took 14 wickets in three matches at 13.50.

Who else? Um, Ravi Bopara has 12 wickets at 40, some fella called Samuel Cook took six wickets – as did Matthew Quinn and Aaron Beard – while a bunch of people have taken three.

It’s hard to avoid the feeling that Essex have won the County Championship with half a bowling attack.

The moral of the story is that if you’re going to rely on two bowlers, make sure they’re bloody effective and just hope to hell that neither of them gets injured.

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Nice bit of SEO there. Anyone searching “what in the name of all that is good and pure is going on in the County Championship” is now highly likely to end up on this page. In your face, Google algorithm. [Watches the ad revenue roll in.]

Yes, it’s the time of year when we all return our gaze to the County Championship having been momentarily distracted by Test matches, holidays and the like. Many people will be finding themselves asking “so what the hell’s going on then?”

Yes, what the hell IS going on?

There are three matches to go, including the ones currently underway.

Essex have a bit of a buffer over Lancashire in that they could go wholly pointless in one match and still remain top of the table. Hampshire are another good chunk further behind in third.

At the bum end of the table, Warwickshire haven’t yet hit triple figures. Two teams will go down.

Is that table above accurate?

No. It’s out of date. We think it’s from just before the latest round of matches.

Actually, we screengrabbed it midway through the afternoon session. We don’t imagine they’d have updated it with bonus points from the latest round of matches, but you never know.

Any big matches to watch out for?

Essex are currently playing Warwickshire in a head v bum match. Somerset are playing Lancashire in a similar sort of match that doesn’t lend itself to anatomy in quite the same way.

Other than that, no match is obviously more important than any other, which actually means that most have something riding on them.

Any players to watch out for?

We went with these guys earlier in the season.

If we’re talking about those who’ve helped their team to near the top of the table, little-known young bucks Alastair Cook and Shivnarine Chanderpaul have been making plenty of runs. (We presume Cook will play another couple of games for Essex.)

Bowling-wise, Jamie Porter and Simon Harmer – both of Essex – are the top wicket takers, while Ryan McLaren has been doing the heavy lifting for Lancashire.

Oh, and Neil Wagner’s back is back for Essex, along with the rest of him.

Anything else?

No, not really.

So why did you go to the trouble of including the subheading?

Don’t know.

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Notts win T20 Blast (via ECB)

We rather love Twenty20 finals day, which has always seemed to strike a good balance between elite sport and village fete.

A lot of short format competitions seem to be striving for the po-faced tribalism of football, but the annual climax of the original has always erred on the side of fun. It’s a day-long festival centred on cricket. There are worse things in the world. Like AIDS.

You probably didn’t need an example.

We only managed to follow this year’s edition via the intermittent checking of scorecards. In a world of video clips, Twitter and live blogs, it was a refreshing experience. There’s something to be said for telling the story to yourself based wholly on a bunch of numbers.

We see Samit Patel did well, which is never a bad thing, and so did Steven Mullaney. We’re afraid that no matter what he does in his career, the latter will always be the guy whose mum’s his biggest supporter.

We’re also aware that the Natwest lady jammed her angular trophy into Dan Christian’s eye at the post-match presentation.

How’s it looking @timbresnan @danchristian54 pic.twitter.com/WdCdxhDDXu

— Stuart Broad (@StuartBroad8) September 2, 2017

The one thing we couldn’t find was a scorecard for the mascots race, so if someone could fill us in on how that one played out, we’d really appreciate it.

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