County cricket

Last week’s County Championship news… today!

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Suppose we should try and catch up. We’d left it so long we were thinking about doing a double round-up after the matches taking place at the minute, but then we thought about how long that article would end up being and decided we had to do some nettle grasping.

Middlesex didn’t play…

So Yorkshire clawed back some ground. They were playing Nottinghamshire, which apparently guarantees you a load of points these days. Despite being 51-6 in their first innings, they won by 305 runs. Andy Hodd and Azeem Rafiq – neither of whom are first-choice players – salvaged that innings and then Tim Bresnan and Jack Brooks hoovered up wickets either side of a Gary Ballance hundred. When the dust settled, Yorkshire were five points adrift of the leaders.

Surrey are still winning

It’s very unsettling. They were playing Lancashire, who appear to have undergone some sort of metamorphosis in the close season, from a competent bowling/inept batting side to a competent batting/ineffectual bowling side. Mark Footitt took seven in the second innings and might finally feel a bit better about leaving Derbyshire for Surrey.

Hampshire are second from bottom

Ahead of Nottinghamshire, but they did at least draw with Somerset. Sean Ervine hit a hundred in each innings, but the match was most notable for Roelof van der Merwe and Craig Overton putting on a couple of hundred run for Somerset’s ninth wicket.

Durham are third from bottom

But have a game in hand on Hampshire. They also drew. Jeetan Patel took five for Warwickshire in their first innings, but Mark Stoneman and Scott Borthwick made daddy fifties to deliver this season’s de rigueur rain-affected draw.

Similar deliveries:

  1. Only half of this week’s Division One County Championship matches were draws!
  2. The Nottinghamshire Nosedives – another fairly half-arsed County Championship round-up
  3. 2013 County Championship – chapter 10

20 comments

    1. I’m struggling to understand how “not playing when it is your week off” constitutes Middlesex trying to cede the number 1 spot.

      On the park they look like contenders most of the time.

      1. Well obviously after I type that they conspired (yes, conspired) to wipe the Bears off the table and into their cupped hand, ready to be carried into the bin.

        It’s just that sort of lack of determination that’s the problem with these millennials.

    1. You keep saying that. We’re not a bear and we’re 70 per cent sure that none of our readers are either. Stop calling us bears. It’s baffling.

      1. We’ve always struggled with a competition that comes to a climax during the autumn, a month after the quarter finals. The teams change, form fades away, the weather intervenes, no-one watches. The final always seems so detached from all that went before.

      2. I don’t care. It’s still a trophy. You’re all just jealous.

        I’m going with my dad. We will get overexcited and then a bit tired after two pints.

      3. Yes, it is still a trophy. We weren’t meaning to belittle it, more just bemoaning the way it’s scheduled.

      4. It’s too late. All the Junior Bears are in tears, having ripped up their membership in disgust. Not easy to do with the laminated cards they give you these days.

      5. Cricket’s behind the times. Every other sport microchips its members. That way if they’re involved in a road traffic collision, the emergency services know what ground to return them to.

      6. Yon Bears ain’t gonna win jack shit batting at 2.4 runs per over, with “yes…no…sorry” running thrown in on the odd occasion when they do think about running, Sam.

        Middle, middle, middle…

      7. Ged, it would help if certain spin bowlers didn’t throw themselves theatrically to the floor, “accidentally” blocking our batsmen’s path back to the crease.

  4. So in a match at Northants offie and not in any way a bowler Rob Keogh (List A bowling average: 487) came on at first change and took 9-52.

    Ben Duckett has come out in the second innings and hit a 30 ball fifty.

    This leads us to one of two things being certain:

    1. Ben Duckett is the greatest player of unplayable turning surfaces since Jack Hobbs.

    2. Cricket is just full of random shit that doesn’t make sense

    1. 3. Half the players in division two are crap, so sometimes a half-decent player will get a ruck of wickets or runs without necessarily playing out of their skin.

    2. Missed this on account of it being in Division 2, but still, wow… how did this come about?! Struggling to decide if that, the Mo’ Irfan wide or the fan falling over the fence trying to take a catch during four four four for three and all that is the most spectacular cricketing occurence of a crazy week…

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