Window Cleaner

Shows how bad it is, we have a part time leg spinner bowling to a centurion opener on the first afternoon of a 4 day Championship match.

Our bowling looks pretty abysmal this morning. Warks openers continuing their good form. Think I can say already, we'll not be breaking our ,what, 51 year championship duck again this season.

And so on to Warks at the Utilita vendredi. Warks made a big score against Durham last time out and it seems that their openers are racking up the runs. A win for Hants might not be the most evident result here. Back to the Duke balls though so things might change after two rounds of batter-friendly, oft soft and shineless, soggy Kookaburras.

OK, perhaps "about done" was a bit OTT but Abbas has looked far less effective than the Lancashire seamers in this game. When there's nothing in the wicket for Abbas and Abbott nowadays they look very laboured and you just don't see the dangerosity from their bowling. They're not beating the batters very often and it's just really plugging away over after over. We need younger men, fired up with something still to prove. Still think we've got this wrong again on this showing, but let's wait and see a couple more games. Our openers make me shudder though, there again early days but I've not seen anything different from the last couple of seasons as of yet, but it's two outings so early days. Prest looked good though, Gubbins and Vince wasteful of good starts once again. I hope they're far more cautious today.

Yep, Gubbins the culprit, normally a pretty good catcher but this time he sort of fell forward after catching the ball and it sort of fell out of his hands. Hope we can eventually expect better from these openers becaue in this match it doesn't look at all great. Hope we can get Turner in soon because Abbas and Abbott look about done, apart from the odd good ball that is. Still back to the hand-made Duke balls after this game I think. More seam to work with.

Looks tough going in the field, dropping Jennings on about 30 didn't really help. Similar pattern everywhere, probably the passivity of these Kookaburra balls.

Ah, you get 8 points for a rained-off match, didn't know that. Notts in a bit of trouble against Essex though, awful batting.

No play for us today again. So just the points for a draw. Essex are making inroads into the Notts batting and they may well win. We could be nigh on 20 points behind from the outset. Perhaps the ECB should reflect on the value of seriously rain affected matches.

Cock up in the season planning department then. The ECB shouldn't plan games north of Watford Gap before mid-May.

Great start to the season. Been watching Warks-Worcs, Worcs going along pretty easily after being put in. Outfield looks soggy though.

Well, when Saints were dominating in the first half I thought that Ipswich didn't look like a promotion chasing side at all. Second half was very different.

Leicester have a bit of a scoring crisis, t'is sure. But the reffing is pretty poor.

Did Turner get any game time in the pre-season ? Didn't notice his name on the score-cards. Then again there were a lot of overs washed out once again.

I see that Crane has been loaned to Glamorgan, all formats for the coming season. Probably just as well, hardly played for us last season.

Vince having a not so great winter, average in the Big Bash and not better in the Gulf T20. Too much cricket perhaps.

Ah the cricinfo table isn't accurate then.

So the points deduction cost us second place in the end. Even for a match that we lost. Do Essex ever get points deductions for the turnip patches that they turn out to favour their spinner? Anyway good end to the season.

Don't see that happening at all. Maybe someone from another county.

Poor batting again. We just can't bat against good seamers.

Easy to say, but yesterday we were 32/4 , Vince was dropped on 16 and Dawson could have been given out caught but the umpire (and Dawson himself) thought otherwise. Yadav said he'd caught it, Dawson said oh no you didn't and the umpire went with him. So at the end of the day we got lucky this time and perhaps didn't on other occasions.

Well, a championship win at Chelmsford. Extremely well played , made a respectable first innings total, kept Essex down in their run chase and a big partnership between Vince and Dawson, when we were at 32/4, set up the win. Bring on Surrey at the Aegeas.

Well, I couldn't begin to speculate on the motivation of the players but the bowling line up for this game was just wrong, having lost the toss again. Nothing in the wicket for the slow bowlers who just got smacked around by all and sundry. So without a little more help from the weather we'll probably get beaten by an innings again. With Warks and Lancs not very far behind us on points we could easily lose 2 places in these two difficult games. Fortunately Lancs aren't getting much play though.

Probably, some rotation perhaps. As our retained list is amongst the last to be made public we don't really know yet what the plan is for next year. I can see Holland being released and maybe Crane as well if some other county is interested by him. Currie has gone on loan to Leics for their last three games so maybe he'll be off as well.

Only going with 3 seamers for this game looks to be a bad decision. Dawson is getting absolutely hammered by the Essex tail.

Bit of a poor day with the ball. We managed to get 5 Essex wickets earlier on but since tea Essex are piling on the runs. Slow bowlers looking totally ineffective.