stevegrant

Good to have the old Hampshire back...

Scott Currie comes in for Mason Crane at the Oval, sounds like a bit of a green top. Can't say I've seen much of Currie, apparently it's his second first-class game, so I assume he must have featured last season at some point?

Doesn't appear to be a "result" wicket, although I guess it might suddenly crumble to pieces on day 4. Not sure there's any merit in being awarded points for batting best on a road in the first innings, tbh.

Difficult to imagine a more commanding position halfway through a 4-day game with no prospect of weather ruining things. What do we reckon for first thing tomorrow, then? Bat quickly for an hour or so and then declare, effectively giving Abbas and Abbott two opening spells either side of the extended break for the funeral? Five and a half sessions should be too much for most teams on a pitch that does seem to offer a little bit if you're willing to do the hard yards. Pretty sad to see Steven Finn reduced to first change for a second division outfit and not really threatening much either.

Two pretty mediocre shots though, given the circumstances. Didn't need to play either of them, and we saw yesterday that there wasn't a lot of swing on offer after the first 10-20 overs. See the new ball off and they'll tire pretty quickly. We won't win anything in red ball cricket with the top order we have - Weatherley and Alsop tend to do something decent one innings in 4 or 5, and Holland is an all-rounder filling a hole because our batting recruitment has been shit for years. For the most part, our batting tends to start at two wickets down.

Hat-trick for Mohammed Abbas!

319 all out, decent recovery, and 3 batting bonus points.

Yeah, the video doesn't look good. Not entirely convinced by James Vince's defence of McManus either, although I guess he's never going to throw him under the bus in that scenario.

Some absolute joke bowling, but credit where it's due, these two have put the many bad balls away.

Good first morning, 109/2. Bowling's pretty unthreatening, both wickets were gifted, really. Should be looking to make hay this afternoon.

Pretty sure it started at 11 - I'm currently 3 hours ahead and it started at 2pm here... Won the toss and batting first. Assume there's still the option of the uncontested toss if the visiting captain wants to bowl first?

In a financial climate where we need to manage our money very wisely, I think this sort of move makes so much sense. Theo is a known quantity, and there really aren't many of them around. He's a known quantity not just because he's experienced and has played the best part of 15 years in the Premier League, but also because he's already demonstrated he slots into this team with this manager in this dressing room environment. That sort of integration (and the lack of needing to give the player time to settle) is hugely important. He's supposedly on £100k a week at Everton, and we're covering half of that during this loan period. At 32, and having had niggly injuries (and one big ACL tear too), he's still surprisingly quick, so I guess there's a question of whether he actually will lose any pace if we were to offer him a two or three year deal - I'd expect he'd want a 3-year deal for security, whereas we'd probably want 2 years for the same reasons, so a 2-year deal with an automatic option for a third based on certain criteria would probably make the most sense to me.

I've not seen any obvious issues recently on the monitoring I've got in place - response times seem to be acceptable (although they are an average, so obviously some will be longer than others), and the error counts seem to be low enough to be largely insignificant in the grand scheme of things. There may be individual issues, I've heard of people having problems with certain browsers with certain ISPs or router brands because of the way they cache certain information - my main suggestion if you're getting timeouts is to try clearing all caches, so that's the browser, your device's DNS cache and, if possible, your router's DNS cache too. That might provide the full reset that should get everything back on track.