Before the latest round of County Championship matches, Yorkshire were five points adrift of Middlesex. NOW THEY’RE ONLY FOUR POINTS BEHIND.
Truly, it was the definitive week of this year’s competition. Eight teams were in action and the points accrued ranged from 8 to 11 as everyone drew.
Nottinghamshire were the big winners
And by ‘winners’ we mean ‘drawers’. And by ‘drawers’ we mean ‘people who draw’ not ‘furniture components’ or ‘underwear’.
They picked up those 11 points against Durham, who scored nine. This moves Notts up to bottom of the table.
Nottinghamshire’s Jake Libby made 144, which was downright unseemly when set against all the low scoring that had preceded it. Not to be outdone, Keaton Jennings made 171 not out. How many runs has he made this season? An awful lot. 1,262, including six hundreds. No-one has scored more.
Yorkshire thrashed Hampshire
10-9. Truly, it was a shellacking.
Jack Brooks five-for for Yorkshire. Gareth Berg six-for for Hampshire.
Middlesex thrashed Warwickshire
9-8. It’s a good thing Middlesex and Yorkshire play each other in the last match of the season, or the climax could be a snail’s pace crawl to the line, weaving between the raindrops.
Five wickets for Warwickshire’s Josh Poysden (always nice to see from a leg-spinner). Five wickets for Middlesex’s Ollie Rayner (who opened the bowling).
Lancashire fully drew with Somerset
This is how you draw, with the same number of points: 10-10.
This was a less-than-excellent pitch, although it’s also worth noting that neither side’s attack is ‘all that’. Tom Abell and Peter Trego made hundreds as Somerset sauntered to 553-6. Alviro Petersen made 155 for Lancashire. Liam Livingstone, who started the season as a specialist number seven batsman, came out at three in what may or may not be ‘a development’.
I was discussing with Daisy last night the fact that Middlesex have drawn all but four of the cc matches so far.
Without looking anything up (in line with the anti-fact bias of this site), I tried to work out how many of those nine draws was a heavily rain-affected match. I concluded that eight or nine of them were.
But perhaps my memory is simply merging so many rain-ruined matches into a single, impressionistic view of the draws this year. Happy to be contradicted by a fact-wallah or looker-upper, if one of you chooses to put your head above the parapet on this topic.
The South-East seemed to have its own wet microclimate in the early months of the year and there was a long stretch where Middlesex played all their matches in that area with every fixture hit by rain – we commented on it at the time. Not too sure what’s happened since then, but that was certainly a sizeable lump of the season.
I went through and had a go. I might have missed some rain, but I counted each match as (rain) if I added up the overs and got to less than 300, which would mean that at least two sessions were lost. That strikes me as enough to ruin a match.
Middlesex
1. draw
2. draw (rain)
3. draw (rain) (saved)
4. draw (rain)
5. draw (rain) (robbed)
6. draw
7. won
8. draw (rain)
9. won
10. won
11. draw
12. won
13. draw (rain) (robbed)
Yorkshire
1. draw
2. draw (rain)
3. draw (rain)
4. won
5. draw (rain) (saved)
6. won
7. draw
8. lost
9. draw (rain)
10. won
11. draw
12. won
13. draw (rain) (robbed)
Can you do one for Somerset, please? I can’t be arsed.
For aficionados of match reports that don’t necessarily conform to King Cricket rules, I have just written up my visit to the above-mentioned Warwickshire v Middlesex match here:
http://ianlouisharris.com/2016/09/02/a-visit-to-edgbaston-primarily-for-warwickshire-v-middlesex-31-august-to-2-september-2016/
The visit was a short reprise of my visit to the equivalent fixture last year, immortalised by my Sound and the Fury match report, which King Cricket kindly published on this site about 10 days ago.
Something something Lancashire mathematical safety.
Something Something Royal London Cup Final build-up starts here
Pakistan are Pakistanning again. The most predictable thing for them to do would have been to be whitewashed – so of course they made a mockery of that, got into a winning position through a 163-run partnership, and are now stuttering majorly before the finish line.
Sam Robson is not thinking about a possible England call up.