Is leaving Warwickshire, open letter by sent via email today:

I am writing to you to express my gratitude for the support and love you’ve given to me over the last seven seasons as my time with the Bears comes to an end.

Playing for this club has been an absolute honour. As a kid, all I ever wanted to do was play professional cricket. This club had faith in me when no one else did. They gave me the opportunity to fulfil my dreams. The last seven seasons have been some of the best years of my life and for that I will always be grateful.

Edgbaston is a special place. I will miss playing in front of you all and I want to thank you all for the support you have given me during my time at the club.

I want to thank all of the coaches and staff I have worked with at the club, it’s been a lot of fun and your support never went unnoticed. Lastly, I want to thank my team mates. It’s a special dressing room to be a part of and I have been lucky to have such a great bunch of team mates across the years.

I am obviously gutted that we never made it to a Finals Day and didn’t get a white ball trophy. However, I have absolutely no doubt that this team will achieve special things in all formats in the coming years and it would make nobody happier than me, to see this club lift silverware in the near future.

They say all good things must come to an end. I am extremely sad to be saying goodbye to you all, but the time is right to move on and I am excited for whatever comes next.

Unclear whether retiring from professional cricket or moving to a new county

They're a very good side, especially with Fergus O'Neill in there who seems to be taking wickets every time he plays (and can bat a bit). I'd be happy with a draw.

Jude Bellingham has bought a stake in Birmingham Phoenix

https://www.espncricinfo.com/story/jude-bellingham-buys-minority-stake-in-birmingham-phoenix-1533043

Got there in the end! It seems all our victories the last couple of seasons are very tight games.

It's a great knack to have to win the close games but it would also be nice to get a convincing win on the cards.

Huge wicket to get Benkenstein! We have to close this out from here now.

The recovery last week came from Woakes and Smith. Neither are playing today!

Whilst Essex have bowled well and the conditions are tricky we have failed to punish a lot of the bad balls. We seem to finding fielders every time and that adds pressure.

paulbear wrote:

It looks like I did the right thing by not going, bad weather or not.

My thoughts exactly. Will need an improvement in both weather and performance for me to go to the latter days.

Barker back bowling in the second innings, which is good news.

I would bring Malik in on Friday - he's got a bit of a swagger about him and if he's in the runs you would assume he's confident.

Agreed he had enough chances here and each time it was sold as we would have him for longer than we did. Sod's law would suggest he'll play a full campaign for them but in reality I expect he won't.

I can only echo what's been said already. This will be a really poor defeat, and worrying for the rest of the campaign.

The same old problems of not being able to bowl teams out after removing the top order. We won't win many games until that's sorted.

You would've hoped with the return of Welch those problems would be fixed somewhat - maybe he just needs a bit longer.

Very strange passage of play from Booth. Surely the right approach was to try and move the game forward rather than block it out when there was a new ball coming anyway. The worst case scenario would've been to be all out at the end of the day with Sussex starting a fresh tomorrow.

Added to that kept Thompson off strike for so long that his timing was gone by the time he was back on strike.

We were the only team in Div 1 to elect to bat

Very pleasing day and let's hope that now Dan has finally got his first championship hundred he can really kick on this season.

On comms they mentioned that we thought it would be best for batting on day 2 (i'm not sure why) but let's hope that's the case as it will need to be much trickier than today if we're to get another 10 Surrey wickets.

Debating whether to brave the weather tomorrow...

Nice to hear Dermot Reeve back on commentary this year

Surrey do bat deeper than most but this is the same issue we had last season, get through the top/upper middle order quite cheaply and then fail to wrap up the rest of the wickets.

Yep, the media do seem to think we've got a shot at the title.

But I don't think we have enough runs in the team. Hain and Barnard have done too much of the heavy lifting for a while so the rest of the top order need to fire and it doesn't get much tougher than Surrey in April in overcast conditions.

Will we try and prepare a flat one a la last season to go for a draw or more confidence this time round to get a win?

He's signed to "build bridges with the community"

Yes huge congratulations. In my mind it still makes sense for him to play the odd CC game but I think it'll be IPL straight into the home test series in summer.

Seems like Pope has run his race, meaning the number 3 spot is wide open for Bethell in the test team