Posted by Surrey have learned from Hampshire. If you want to advance your cause in the County Championship, play a match.
It seems so simple, but you’d be surprised how many teams fail to take this obvious first step. Surrey and Warwickshire were early front-runners in the Championship, but got complacent, kicked back and put their feet up for the next round of matches.
Big mistake – but the tortoises and hares then swapped roles. Both counties got back in action last week while most of the other teams were taking a bit of time off to catch up with the DIY or the gardening or whatever.
Somerset planned to get a few things ticked off their To Do list, but mostly just sat around watching telly while occasionally expressing astonishment at what day it was already.
The decision to play cricket worked out excellently for Surrey, who beat Warwickshire. However, it worked out far less well for Warwickshire, who lost to Surrey.
Middlesex and Kent also took to the field and the former have now vaulted up to third after making something like nine runs across their first two matches.
Surrey’s win was born of the bowling of Kemar Roach and Dan Worrall. The latter is one of those cricketers whose name is quite familiar without necessarily having much detail below it in our mental archives.
As a rule of thumb, successful county batters you don’t really know that well are most likely from South Africa. Successful county bowlers you don’t really know that well are most likely 30-something seamers from Australia.
We’ll be continuing with our finger-on-the-pulse county cricket coverage for most of this month. Sign up for the email here.
The Lancashire ‘go undefeated the whole season but still get relegated’ dream/nightmare is still alive.
I was there! (For the Middlesex part.)
I may have sent in a match report!
It may be far too long!
I was there for the last 45 minutes or so of play on Friday – between 6:30ish and 7:15 – at the back of the front of the Allen Stand.
I followed a fair chunk of Saturday on the stream, although I forgot to switch on again after lunch and thus missed the last five wickets of Kent’s collapse. You got a good day’s cricket Saturday, if that was your day, Balladeer, but we’ll learn none of that from your match report.
KC – you are clearly not employing ChatGPT to write your lead-in hook lines. “ If you want to do advance your cause…”. Parenthetically, I am now working out whether I am “chatting” with a human or a bot on-line by the spelling and grammar. If spot on – almost certainly a bot – unlikely to engage with let alone solve my problem. If the text is all over the place, it is almost certainly a human who will at least try to help.
The glorious times in which we live. Happy to have once again betrayed our own humanity. Will now make the correction.