Nottinghamshire close on title against Warwickshire: county cricket final round – live | County Championship
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Key events
Over to Hoppsy.
Imagine the state of mind of Mayank Agarwal. At 34, his unsung India Test career is held to be behind him, but the Karnataka captain has been summoned by Yorkshire for the last three games of the season to help protect their first division status. September has been bleak and unsettled and he came to the crease at no 3 today with two ducks and three innings to his name and a lurking fear of chilblains. At least the sun is shining, but he has struggled his way to five from 26 balls and lunch and needed prolonged treatment after he was struck on the arm by Ben Raine.
Yorkshire Expects this afternoon, but at the moment he will just be grateful to middle one and go from there. Yorkshire 28-1 in response to 346 at lunch.
Meanwhile, lunch in the media box is a confused affair because nobody can remember what they ordered. I forgot completely so reduced to lurking, vulture like, on the periphery, hoping this leads to an unclaimed cheese sandwich. This is the life.
At lunch round the grounds, Notts need another 200 to win the Championship (HH 54 not out); and Surrey have whistled Hampshire out for 248, fifty for Washington Sundar.
Lunchtime scores
Chelmsford: Essex 8-0 v Somerset 433
Southampton: Hampshire 248 v Surrey 147
Trent Bridge: Nottinghamshire 100-2 v Warwickshire 258 Notts need 200 to win the Championship
New Road: Worcestershire 123 and 7-0 v Sussex 350
Headingley: Yorkshire 28-1 v Durham 346
DIVISION TWO
Sophia Gardens: Glamorgan 265 v Lancashire 168-2
Canterbury: Kent v Derbyshire 550-4
Lord’s: Middlesex 519-7 v Gloucestershire
Wantage Road: Northamptonshire 52-1 v Leicestershire 429
More from Hutton: “It’s been a team effort. Everyone is a good age – Freddie and Farhan have played the least but a lot of players have experience, and we’ve had a season in Div one to see what it is about. All the skills we’ve been working on for the last few years are starting to settle in and we enjoy each other’s company.
Notts have had nine different centurions and seven different bowlers have taken five-wicket hauls. “Tongue and Fergie were amazing, Abbas has done a great job, and we’ve been lucky with injuries, everyone has stayed fit and it is the same with the bat.”
Fifty for Hameed!
Brett Hutton is good on Hameed on the radio. “He’s very good, he’s calm and he loves the game and the team. He wears his heart on his sleeve and he’s always a hundred percent in it, that is part of being a leader. He trusts the rest of the boys to do their job and get their prep right, thats one of the things that’s puts us in a good place. “
And here comes his fifty courtesy of a misfield – 98 balls, nine fours. He waves his bat gently at the crowd. His ninth score above fifty this season.
Warwickshire fluff their lines play their part in the fairytale, dropping HH at second slip.
HH turns Gilchrist gently round the corner and down to the rope. Six more runs for the fairytale fifty. Notts 76 for two.
Lewis Goldsworthy approaches his century at Chelmsford, Somerset 418-8, as toothless Essex trudge on.
Exit young Freddie McCann, middle pole flattened by Bamber for one.
Slater has an attack of the collie-wobbles, slashes and is caught behind. Enter young Freddie McCann. HH kneels down and has a drink. Notts 56 for one.
Apparently the BBC’s Kevin Howells will be talking to the chairman of the PCA at lunchtime, which will be worth a listen.
HH slides the ball down for a couple watched over by bronzing trees and moon-faced spotlights – 250 more runs needed for the magic number.
I’m going to be a little bit distracted today, writing a feature on top of the usual, so please forgive an occasional dearth of updates.
Notts are progressing serenely here at Trent Bridge, 40-0, and each time I look up, more fleece wrapped bodies are strolling into the white bucket seats.
Aptly, Kent’s Championship season is ending in the sort of hole where it has been stuck most of the summer. Madsen and Reece are racing each other to 200 – Derby 461-2.
No Guardian representative at Lord’s today, but five wickets for Ajeet Singh-Dale, who pockets five-wickets on his Gloucestershire swan song.
Hopps at Headingley:
Durham‘s first innings has ended on 346, Ben Raine the last man out for 101, and with the first division survival on the line, the Yorkshire dressing-room will not be without anxiety. It has been no surprise to see Raine leading the fight. In a season when Durham’s pace stocks have been found wanting, Raine has persistently been the man running in with the determination: he has 39 championship wickets, comfortably more than the rest.
In this innings, he exhibited once again his ability as a clean lower-middle order striker, but this is only his second championship century to follow one made against Worcestershire three years ago. Can Durham now provide him with any sort of support with the ball?
100 for Ben Raine
A swashbuckling end to the season for Ben Raine. Durham, incidently, are all out 346.
That Gareth Batty glare had extra-charged power last night – Hampshire have lost three wickets for 11 runs so far this morning.
Good morning Tim Maitland:
“You’ll forgive me for missing day one of the denouement, but I was distracted by a minor case of the WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!s.
“Fortunately Super Typhoon Ragasa did not turn out to be quite as apocalyptic as advertised. It’s true, my neighbour did lose the glorified shed off the top of their roof (fortunately, not in our direction. Christmas will be cancelled unless they replace that artificial tree) and another had a hefty plant pot, with plant still attached, drop on his car from two stories up (Allegedly. I say allegedly, having surveyed the damage, that’s what I think happened) to leave a sizable dent in the roof and a terminal crack in his windscreen. Overall, we got away with it quite lightly.
“Having said that, if some genius on the OBO can explain, I’d love to know why Ragasa, the biggest tropical storm in the world this year, only uprooted trees, whereas six years ago Typhoon Mangkhut took mature trees and twisted their trunks halfway up as if they were matchsticks.
“Anyway, the point of all of this drivel is to ask one simple question: is it really so difficult for English cricket to ensure that all of the counties have access to their best players for the T20 final and the promotion/relegation/championship deciders?
“It’s obviously not a simple question. Because Sport 101 – the simplest, most rudimentary rules of running a competition – is to know what next year’s competitions are going to look like BEFORE you start this year’s. Anything else is utterly confusing, distracting and divisive.
“Obviously, they couldn’t do that, but still, having the season’s success and failures decided by teams half-filled with players from “The Stiffs” is in no-one’s best interests, is it? I shall miss you and the opportunities to whinge that you provide.”
Perhaps they should just leave comments from the last day of the season’s CCLive open till April. (And I’m glad you survived!)
To keep things interesting, Matt Fisher has just taken two wickets in his first over – Albert and Brown. Hampshire 155-5.
Fans slip into the stands, lonely sparrows and paired up love birds. Who doesn’t want HH to hit the winning runs? Notts are 0-0 after two overs.
There will be 104 overs at Trent Bridge which increases Notts chances of pulling things off today – though The Cricketer’s George Dobell says it was hard going batting yesterday.
It is said that the Trent Bridge groundsman prepared three tracks just in case – a spicy one, an inbetween one and a road. No prizes for guessing which one Notts plumped for.
It wasn’t a furious Gareth Batty who spoke to the press last night at the Rosebowl, but his deputy Jim Troughton.
“Over the last four years there has been a lot of success in this group and a lot of good days. The last game (vs Notts) was a tough one because we played a lot of good cricket and there were moments we let the game slip but then gave ourselves a chance to get back into it. It could have been a lot different points wise coming here.
“There are some younger faces in this group so it is up to the senior guys to front up and make sure they are taking the load off those guys.
“Four day cricket is a tough place to be when you are on the end of a difficult situation, it is not something we have had to get used to dealing with.
“The guys will shower it off, fuel up for tomorrow and acquit ourselves better.”
Meanwhile, at Headingley, David Hopps sniffs the autumn air.
There are some who claim perfectly sincerely that avoiding relegation and reaching the semi-final of the Metro Cup would represent a reasonably successful season for Yorkshire.
But to present reaching the last four of a developmental competition as success, while ignoring yet another summer’s failure in the Blast is like telling a 11-year-old on Christmas Day not to get too upset over the absence of a Skalextric because a dressing gown will come in very useful. You don’t just get cricket on this blog, you get emotional scars, too.
And that relegation cannot yet be discounted. Yorkshire might have dominated much of the first day against Durham, their rivals in distress, but Ben Raine’s doughty assault against the second new ball (87 not out from 85 balls) sees Durham resume on 322-7 and not too far off parity. An engrossing day lies ahead.
The Notts players are warming up with a spring in both steps, heart and lungs. Three hundred runs will clinch the Championship for them today after Surrey’s shambling day at Hampshire. The sun shines on.
Thursday’s roundup
As the season’s last round of championship cricket rolled around, players paid tribute to Dickie Bird, who died on Tuesday, aged 92. At his spiritual home, Headingley, a minute’s applause was observed, the players lining up on the pitch, and a bouquet of flowers and trademark umpire’s white cap placed on Bird’s dressing‑room balcony chair.
Bird, who funded the balcony in 2015, would have enjoyed the first five overs of the day when Yorkshire reduced their fellow relegation candidates Durham to seven for two, but 93 from David Bedingham and an unbeaten 87 from Ben Raine turned the tables. Yorkshire need eight more points to be sure of Division One cricket next year, Durham may require a win because of Surrey’s impression of a soggy paper bag at the hands of fellow strugglers Hampshire.
Surrey, champions for three years on the bounce, needed a maximum point win to put pressure on the leaders, Nottinghamshire. But, albeit with a side weakened by illness and the withdrawal of England players, they were dismissed for just 147, their lowest total of the season. Dan Lawrence top scored with 36. There were three wickets each for James Fuller, Washington Sundar and Kyle Abbott, who passed fifty wickets for the summer for the sixth time. Hampshire then sailed calmly to a seven-run lead at stumps.
All of which was music to the ears of Nottinghamshire, who bowled out Warwickshire for 258 in a frenetic last session and now need just two more points – 300 runs – to secure the title. Warwickshire had revived at 244 for five but lost their last five wickets for 14 runs, Dan Mousley last man out for 74.
Elsewhere, Steve Eskinazi made a first century for Leicestershire against Northamptonshire, Middlesex’s captain, Leus du Plooy, biffed an unbeaten 171 against Gloucestershire, the Somerset academy graduate Josh Thomas hit a run-a-ball fifty on his championship debut proper, and James Rew his fifth 50 of the summer to frustrate Essex, who remain in relegation danger.
After a season of wrangling, meetings, more meetings, letters and votes, the England and Wales Cricket Board announced that the motion to remodel the County Championship structure had not received the required two-thirds majority of votes it needed to pass. The 18 first-class counties were tied at 9-9, which means the current two-division 14-game, two up, two down, competition remains.
The announcement drew an immediate retort from the Professional Cricketers’ Association. The union’s chief executive, Daryl Mitchell, said the current structure was “not fit for purpose,” while its chair, Olly Hannon-Dalby, said: “Over the past two years, we have seen increasing levels of genuine concern for player health and wellbeing and as an association we represented this in the strongest possible way. Ultimately the required minimum number of 12 county chairs did not see player welfare as a priority.”
Scores on the doors
Chelmsford: Essex v Somerset 339-6
Southampton: Hampshire 154-3 v Surrey 147
Trent Bridge: Nottinghamshire v Warwickshire 258
New Road: Worcestershire 123 v Sussex 228-5
Headingley: Yorkshire v Durham 322-7
DIVISION TWO
Sophia Gardens: Glamorgan 265 v Lancashire55-0
Canterbury: Kent v Derbyshire 389-2
Lord’s: Middlesex 394-5 v Gloucestershire
Wantage Road: Northamptonshire v Leicestershire 392-7
Preamble
Good morning from a sun-kissed Nottingham morning, just the sort of morning to win a County Championship…
