stevegrant

Haaland only played a couple of games, so a sub keeper moving on is probably nothing to be particularly irked by, but the captain and best player also choosing to do so, when this is now becoming a pattern, should absolutely be questioned. What are the club going to say on a statement other than the bland platitudes that they used? "We offered new contracts but they didn't want to stay in an environment where giving game time to other teams' youth products was deemed more important than playing our own international players"?

Did we? Or did we just have a LOT more money than everyone else at the levels we were competing? The waves of departures we've seen in the last couple of summers don't really point to a lack of finance but players deciding that this isn't the environment they want to play in. We've seen veiled comments and celebrations in front of our director's box from players who have left us and more open comments from relatives of those players that infer that Spacey-Cale is (now/recently) the problem rather than the mastermind.

Surrey declared on 820/9. Some scary looking bowling figures on that scorecard Meanwhile Worcestershire declared on 679/7 and Fletcha Middleton mustered 1 off 23 balls before being pinned LBW

A full round of games where, so far, not a single batting team has put up less than 367. Obviously the weather has likely made it much harder for ground staff to prepare a "result" wicket, but the ball does seem to be having far too much of an impact. And as @Dark Munster mentions, having to use it in a game we would have been targeting to win handily has put us at a huge disadvantage against other teams in the division.

I am expecting us to take a reciprocal approach this season. If teams give us more than the 2000 they are obliged to then we will allow them to have additional tickets at St Mary's. Any team that refuses will just get the bare minimum. Not 100% sure how it works in terms of whether those unallocated away seats will be able to be sold to home fans or not, given the hard barrier on either side of the away end now.

If we've sold 31,500 season tickets, where are the away fans going?

I'm led to believe that we are actively recruiting for NEXT season already. The rules in county cricket are utterly ridiculous, that counties are already allowed to talk to players with expiring contracts regarding signing for next season, so we've been doing that. It can't be all that helpful to their current teams, though - would imagine the non-Hundred counties have a lot of rolling contracts so will have most of their first XI up for renewal this winter, and if any of them have interest from elsewhere, it could be a big distraction.

The pitch seems to have just died on its arse today, don't think we've necessarily bowled badly (although Fuller's first spell today was pretty wayward) but it's been very easy for them to accumulate runs this afternoon. Frustrating as this is one of those games where we'd have targeted victory against a team below us, but we'll extend the gap to the relegation zone by a few bonus points, and we have Worcestershire home and away in the next three games.

Not sure you'll see any captain or coach of that sort of disposition these days, think it's been well proven by now that those types of "leaders" just don't work in the modern era.

Looking at today, Essex still 49 behind with 7 wickets left. If we can chisel out the first 3 or 4 of those before lunch then I think we'll have enough time to win it. Fail to do that and we probably don't leave ourselves enough time to chase what would then probably be a target of about 200.

Proper weird innings, this. We were pretty fluid right up until about 5 overs from the bonus point cutoff at which point the runs have largely dried up, to the extent that Kyle Abbott has just hit our first boundary for 25 overs Haven't been watching as the test match is on, but surely it can only be as a result of Essex going all-out defence and putting numbers on the boundary and bowling negatively down the leg side, etc.

The other 3 sides are "just" stadium. The Itchen has too much infrastructure - offices, hospitality, dressing rooms etc - in the way Think I remember them saying the foundations for the Itchen had to be much heavier to accommodate those extra facilities, so developing that side would be very difficult if not prohibitively expensive. The others are obviously much more straightforward.

Never warmed to Nigel Quashie at any stage during his relatively and mercifully brief time with us.

Well that was abysmal tonight. We've filled the team with so many allrounders that James Fuller looks at least two places too high at 6 and there's way too much pressure on the top order to go big. We probably gave them 20 easy runs in the powerplay which made the chase tougher than it needed to be, but no demons in the wicket and we just kept hitting the ball straight to fielders. It didn't have any impact on the result, but having former Surrey all-rounder Ian Blackwell umpiring and not giving blatant wides against Mitch Santner or spotting the big front-foot no ball Chris Jordan bowled when he hit Fuller on the head doesn't do the "they're all neutral" argument many favours. Although he also missed two probable run-outs despite having access to the third umpire.