County cricket

Hampshire’s innovative approach to losing ground on rivals

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Uninformative lead-in paragraph. Brace yourselves. Uninspiring but undeniably informative subheading to come.

Middlesex v Hampshire

This was our favourite match this week, largely because Hampshire scored -1 points. They did actually score a point for taking three wickets in Middlesex’s first innings of 467 but were deducted two for bowling too slowly.

Excellent work, Hampshire.

Somerset v Surrey

Hampshire’s ability to cede ground against the odds was great news for Surrey who arguably put in the performance of the season to engineer a breathtaking defeat to Somerset.

Having taken a 162-run first innings lead after bowling out the home side for 102, Surrey subsequently did everything in their power to lose. Surrey’s match-losing powers are, apparently, phenomenal.

Bowled out for 138 they then permitted Somerset to reach their target of 301 with nine wickets down despite no batsman managing to make more than 56.

Excellent work, Surrey.

Nottinghamshire v Durham

This match was more like the classic 2016 first division fare we’ve come to expect – a big fat draw.

Scott Borthwick took eight wickets bowling leg-spin either side of scoring 188 not out. Scott Borthwick is playing dream cricket.

Excellent work, Scott Borthwick.

Yorkshire v Lancashire

We know as a Lancashire supporter that we’re supposed to get really upset when Lancashire lose to Yorkshire because of that whole bitter rivalry thing, but we can never really muster the emotion. The truth is, we quite like Yorkshire – not as much as Lancashire obviously, but easily enough to subdue tears.

This match pretty much confirmed that Yorkshire are the best team around. That might seem like an odd thing to say when their specialist batsmen mustered just 135 runs across two innings, but it’s striking that they still would have won had each of them made a pair.

Yorkshire have a lot of good cricketers. With a bit of batting and a bit of bowling, Adil Rashid and Tim Bresnan all but won this match on their own. Liam Livingstone couldn’t stop them. He made 60 not out in the first innings and now averages 70 in first-class cricket.

Excellent work, The Great Neil Wagner.

The table

Someone somewhere really needs to provide a way for us to embed this.

Screengrabs it is.

CC div 1, June 1

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24 comments

  1. I for one was bitterly disappointed that this week saw the last of the teams with 100% drawing records. Somerset seemed to have it down to an art…

  2. Surprisingly, Middlesex have the most batting point.

    Oh no, wait, it’s not surprising, it’s a bloody massive road.

    1. Merchant Taylor’s School was no road, Balladeer, if my spies are to be believed. Hampshire were, by all accounts, seriously gash, slowly, with the ball.

      Lord’s isn’t totally road-like this year either. Slow lane, probably because of all that rain. It’s actually really hard to get more than 3 batting points at Lord’s if the bowlers do a tight enough job.

      1. MTS obviously not – Lord’s has seemed like a batting paradise, but of course I’ve only been there once this season, so defer to your superior knowledge.

        It has just been the rain then, although Kent would have a thing or two to say about that. If they mattered, of course.

  3. At what point are Lancs mathematically safe? I’ve been burned before…

    1. Mathematical safety is not the issue this year, APW. Hampshire and Surrey have volunteered to keep the rest of us up.

      1. Thought it may have been three down, two up this year to make way for next season’s newest incarnation, but alas it is not. You win again, Ged. This winning malarkey’s exactly what it’s cracked up to be, eh?

  5. I also have a quiet liking for Yorkshire. And I have a sneaking admiration for St Helens as well. Harold Shipman, he was a decent chap and a bloody good doctor, and it’s hard not to have a soft spot for Pol Pot.

    1. Sometimes it’s possible to take a joke too far.

      I mean, St Helens, really….

      1. It was only Yorkshire’s second home Roses victory in the past 25 seasons, apparently.

      2. That’s more like it. Less admiration and more slagging them off with facts. Like for example, did you know that Yorkshire, despite being the largest county by area in England, has the lowest IQ per head of population of any major industrialised nation? Or that statistically, one in every three Yorkshiremen has a greater than average chance of being in the bottom quartile per unit area (after tax)? Or that Yorkshire pudding is just batter pudding with added air?

  6. An overnight thought. Middlesex achieved a maximum 24 points for its win. Hampshire ended up with -1 points from the match. Has there ever been a points differential as high as 25 for one match in the county championship before?

    I know it is a geeky, more or less irrelevant question. But if we can’t ask such questions here at King Cricket, where can we ask them?

      1. We all have limits in the dignity department, Balladeer. Making a fool of myself around here sometimes does not exceed mine, whereas asking Steven a question on Cricinfo would blow my dignity limit big time.

  7. How this point table is worked that was much confusing point table. Middlesex won one match and He has 86.0 Points how they are Categories Point table. Anyway Bet online on Cricket These Cricket Matches at 24sevenbet

    1. We’re stripping the URL from this spam and allowing it because it’s funny.

      1. Wow, I’m glad he didn’t pick on Somerset as He is also won one match but point table fifth is Point category table place Middlesex who is table point tables Category. Ends.

      2. I particularly like the juxtaposition of King Cricket’s personal plural, “We”, with 24sevenbet’s singular”He” for the whole of Middlesex.

        I know Middlesex has come a bit late to the win column of the table this season, but He who laughs last, laughs longest.

        He-he.

      3. I especially liked the bit where the table is perfectly ordered by number of wins, but our gambling friend still found it confusing.

        He hare he.

      4. It is a fiendishly complicated table, Mike, I agree.

        To my inexperienced, amateurish eye, it looks to me as though you need to do some adding, multiplying and subtracting in order to disambiguate the entire table. We have Hampshire to thank for the subtraction element, of course.

        If only Bert were able to spare us some of his extremely valuable time as the KC unofficial quants person to explain the intricacies of it to us all in language we are able to understand. Or better yet, language we are unable to understand.

    2. This seems like labour-intensive spam. To see that Middlesex have 86 points and one win would have required a human, as that information is embedded in an image file. Surely the value of a single comment, that will almost definitely get removed quickly (or will never be seen in the first place), is not sufficient to warrant that?

      Anyway Comment online on Cricket These Cricket Matches at King Cricket

      1. The odd thing is that they’ve tried to publish comments a number of times before today and we’ve deleted all of them, so they don’t even have a good strike rate.

        Anyway misunderstand Cricket Points Table at CricketPointsTableMisunderstand24SevenBaffling. Ends.

      2. Perhaps they felt that adding the personal touch might help make it through?

        If so mission accomplished, in a fashion.

Comments are closed.