Posted by What a headline.
Okay, let’s hustle through this unsatisfactorily before another Test match starts. In fact it occurs to us that the daily email comprising this particular post will go out at almost exactly the time the match starts. We really should plan ahead.
Never mind. The headline’s written. County Championship it is.
You could start with the table?
No. It’s too time consuming to do all the cropping and uploading and we’re in a hurry. All you really need to know is that Middlesex are still top and that they’re 13 points ahead of Durham who have a game in hand.
Where did Durham come from?
Assuming that’s not a poorly-worded geographical question, they rose after positively beating Lancashire.
Lancs have foolishly allowed The Great Neil Wagner to slip from their grasp and so frankly deserve everything they get. Keaton Jennings was at the centre of Durham’s successful fourth innings chase of 247. He is having a nice season.
Middlesex beat Somerset
James Fuller’s 93 batting at ten stands out as the defining contribution from this match.
Somerset beat Nottinghamshire
Remember when Nottinghamshire were good? They were 196-0 batting first and lost. How? A Marcus Trescothick double hundred, partly.
Surrey beat Hampshire
Remember when Surrey were rubbish? Everyone made a hundred and then one of those centurions, Gareth Batty, took a bunch of wickets.
A couple of draws
Not even going to mention which sides were involved. Can’t be bothered typing it out. All we’ll say is that they were good matches for Adams, with Wheater and Lyth both making double hundreds.
not even a mild fuss about ECB scuppering the Red Rose?
You don’t do this whole “‘phoning it in” thing by halves do you KC? You’ve been working hard on your ‘phoning it in skillset in the nets, and now it’s all paying off on the big stage.
And when you ‘phone it in, you really ‘phone it in. The receiver goes flying directly into the unidentified receptacle at the speed of one of Shannon Gabriel’s first-spell bouncers being hit by Ben Stokes (England 10-4). The rest of the telephone follows it, yanking the wires (remember them?) out of the wall and leaving a gap in the wallpaper that no amount of Polyfilla can fix. The wires are straight in there as well. That ‘phone is well and truly in, and ain’t coming out in a hurry.
TL;DR: great round-up, Middlesex are top (somehow), shove it up yer.
You need something half-arseing? Come to us. We might get round to it eventually, if we can be bothered.
I don’t really care about Div 1. But I will have a good chortle if/when Leics seconds get relegated.
Lord knows how KC will cope when they split Test cricket into divisions, as looks likely.
There is a conversation to be had about whether Test runs and averages retain the same value under the two-division structure.
Go on, you start. I’ll join in later.
It’ll be a bold move to stop covering England when they inevitably end up in Div 2.
As you well know, the tagline of this site is “Mostly it’s England cricket… mostly.”
The only argument really is whether second division Test cricket outranks first division first-class cricket. We’ll decide which we’ll go with once they’ve decided that. Not both though. That would be mental.
Not sure how Adam Wheater managed to score a double hundred in a drawn match while he was making 59 and 0 for Hampshire in a match they lost by an innings. But then I can’t be bothered to dig up the scorecards so I’ll just assume he was in two places at once.
Also, if you use Chrome, I recommend Lightshot for screencapping the table. Saves some time fumbling with image editing programs and looking in file directories for sure.
He was in two matches at separate times. It had been a while since we last did a round-up.
Thanks for the Lightshot recommendation though. It remains to be seen whether the two minutes it saves from a four minute process will be sufficient for us to feel moved to action in the future, but we can but hope.
Challenge for y’all.
Can the week’s results be pithily summarised by some simple geographical, historical or lexicographical rules?
For instance “each match was won by the northernmost county and when the counties are level along an east-west axis then it was a draw”… Doesn’t work due to eg Somerset beating Notts but you get the idea.
“Team with shorter name won, same number of letters is a draw” – nope again, eg Somerset losing to Middlesex.
“Team alphabetically first won” – nope.
Harder than it looks, this.
Highest ever T20 run chase at Lord’s in front of the biggest ever domestic T20 crowd in the UK. Top of the CC table.
Middlesex!!!
Arse yer up it shove. Spake can’t I.