Posted by What an incredible sport. What an incredible competition. Somerset beat Essex, which somehow resulted in both teams vaulting ahead of Surrey in the County Championship.
Essex started the week level on points with Surrey at the top of the table, but defeat took them three (bonus) points ahead.
Somerset’s skittlesome efforts (Essex were dismissed for 156 and 138) moved them up to second. Foolish Surrey of course neglected to play, because that’s the way we’re doing things during this phase of the Championship.
The only other match to take place in Division One saw Lancashire secure the bare minimum three points necessary to move ahead of Kent and out of bottom place. Alas, they were actually playing Kent, who soundly beat them and so soared away from them, like a helium balloon pursued by one of those battery-powered windmill hand fan things that you don’t really so much these days but which were pretty common in, ooh, it must have been the 1980s.
Lancashire so far seem on track for one of their very bad seasons. Nathan Lyon is playing pretty well, but almost nobody else is.
We have to say, we liked it better when Lancashire had Matt Parkinson. It’s a shame he went away.
Parkinson took three of Kent’s wickets.
The table
It was pointed out to us that the ECB’s version of the County Championship table, which we used in last week’s piece, (a) logs draws as ties, (b) includes the white ball irrelevance of net run rate, and (c) omits any breakdown of bonus points.
We have therefore seen fit to renounce the ECB as they are clearly incapable of displaying a table of their own competition. We have therefore turned instead to that world famous cricketing authority, Wikipedia.
Behold its early-2000s HTML table majesty!
As a bonus detail resulting from this switch, you get a small insight into our browsing history with purple hyperlinks betraying the fact we have apparently visited the Essex and Lancashire Wikipedia pages, but none of the others.
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Not so fast, KC.
The magnificent early 2000’s HTML table image shown in your feature merely tells us that, AT THE MOMENT YOU COPIED THE IMAGE, you had only clicked through the Essex and Lancashire’s links on that table .
Further, you might have clicked through several more or even all of them, then realised that made you look incredibly geeky, then zapped your history, then reloaded that Wikipedia page, then let curiosity get the better of you and click through Essex and Lancashire once more, and then copy the image.
In short, the browsing history evidence provided by the colours of the links is wafer thin. What are you trying to hide?
Otherwise, great piece. I’d be gleefully muttering the “foolish Surrey” motif for the next week or so were it not for the inconvenient truth that similarly-foolish Middlesex are taking a week off this week.
Anyone else getting sucked into trying to click the unclicked links only to instantly remember it’s just an image?
No. Some of us learn from our previous instances of instant stupidity.
In other news, Daisy and I went to see this on Saturday:
https://ianlouisharris.com/2024/05/04/howzat-missing-going-way-down-the-off-side-testmatch-by-kate-attwell-orange-tree-theatre-4-may-2024/
As KC points out above, we all occasionally get sucked into things.
See. Now I’m wary of clicking on that link of yours.
Actually, to be fair, I rarely click on any links these days, particularly when it might relate to some astoundingly awful 1980’s music video and the associated rabbit holes.