UrsaMinor
Member
It's hard to see Sam getting a Test Match chance now but I do think that if he had been given the chance when he was younger he could have nailed the number 3 slot that England have struggled with since Trotty retired.
As for 50 over cricket, something is wrong if someone who has been consistently rated amongst the top List A batsmen in the world only gets one, token cap. Down to England seeing 50 overs as extended T20s perhaps.
So, yes, I think he's hard done by but whenever I'm at an opposition ground, the locals all know and respect Sam Hain. That's something to be proud of.
I didn't see us as contenders at the start of the season but in the end the Championship has been thoroughly deserved. Bear in mind that we only played the two relegated counties once each yet nevertheless lost only one game. The string of utterly dominant wins that we produced in the last month means there was only one county who deserved to be crowned this year.
Well done players; well done coaching staff; well done ground staff, people who pull the pints, those who check the tickets. A great year for the Bears.
I'm at Taunton. Somerset look like they want batting points having stacked the batting and brought the boundaries in fully 15 yards all round. They'll have to get rid of Dom Sibley before they get a chance themselves though.
The locals don't seem optimistic (chortle).
Stop winding him up, Gerry!
Quandary for Somerset as they need to win but they need bonus points too. So a Jack Leach raging bunsen won't necessarily help them. 50-yard boundaries?
If Will Young's visa issues are now sorted can we nominate him as a potential substitute for when Malik discovers he's got an auntie who has suddenly been taken ill?
In fantasy Bears teams, imagine Rob Yates at first slip and Rikki Clarke at second.
Andy wrote:
Thanks mad. I notice West Bromwich Dartmouth CC is being used, was the National Counties Championship final played there again this year? Ive enjoyed this ground in the past.
Yes. In a repeat of last year's final (but the opposite result) Devon beat Buckinghamshire.
Exiled Bear wrote:
KingofSpain wrote:
Andy wrote:
Any word on whats happened to Will Young?
And when the hell did Notts sign Mukesh Kumar?!
Young travelled with the squad. There was a visa issue with the ECB that his agent failed to sort out on time. The paperwork was done but not until after the match started and he can play against Leicestershire. Not ideal to lose your overseas batsman for a crucial game and have to play Zen Malik.
How come it didn’t affect the game against Glamorgan?
Best to not ask. We might find that we fielded an ineligible player.
The choice of wicketkeeper is a balance between how many runs a poor keeper gives away through missed chances against how many more he scores himself. A poor keeper may cost a wicket a game and if that happens to be one of the opposition's top players then the keeper needs to score a lot of extra runs to make up for it.
At present, Davies isn't really scoring anything so Smith has a free ride. Ideally, we'd get Davies' head sorted and give Smith some technical coaching so that next year we had a choice of two viable keeper-batsmen rather than looking for the lesser of two evils.
And while we're on the subject, Ben Foakes should be England's Test keeper. End of.
Crikey! I left Cardiff just two and a half hours ago at the change of innings and now it's all over. Shocking by Glamorgan who had looked like they were up for a bit of a fight in the field. Never mind, that's a statement win.
It feels a bit like the Covid year when there wasn't a dominant County and any one of a handful of teams could have been champions. We did it then: who's to say we can't do it again?
Days 4 and 5 are probably going to be a tough sell.
GerryShedd wrote:
In a scathing article about the signing/non-signing of Scott Kuggeleijn, The Cricketer states that "the Utilita Bowl is a dark, dingy and soulless place at the best of times."
It's not my favourite ground but I didn't think it was that bad.
It was a lovely place when it first opened, inaccessible but worth the effort once you got there. Very pretty surroundings, the right sort of size for a county ground, trees around the berm, etc. Then they started pouring concrete and it all went downhill. The big stands seem to direct the coldest winds at you wherever you choose to sit and they seem to have very little interest in making the paying customer's experience enjoyable.
On the other hand, the Oval on a County Championship day is worse.
It would have been a breech of Law 15 to have declared, due to the situation in the game, the time lost and time remaining.
I wonder if anybody drew Notts attention to this law when they declared 8 down in the morning? They were unlikely to win (although we almost helped them) so the main purpose of the declaration was to deny us a bowling point.
The puzzle with Davies is how this has happened? This is a guy that has twice scored over 1000 runs in a season so he must have talent. Is it a mental issue? Is he working with a sports psychologist?
Reads like the same playbook. Infantino hadn't got all the preparatory schmoozing done in time though so he's been caught out.
There is a difference in that he's "providing incentives" to national associations who don't own the players (unlike the counties in cricket). I imagine the clubs would have torpedoed expansion anyway.
Unless the hearing of Umpires at club level is a lot better than their eyesight, I'm surprised they could hear anything!
We were very poor today in comparison with a weak Somerset XI. With no experienced batters or fit bowlers in reserve, it's hard to see it getting any better.
Presumably the Media team are too busy being "Edgbaston" to worry about Warwickshire County Cricket Club.
There's quite an extensive preview on the Somerset site. They seem to think Kai Smith has been hard done by this year.