Bullet one: Drinks on Lawrence after the Player of the Match award
At home, looking for a win and a place in the finals day schedule also at home, the Birmingham Bears lost a Helter-Skelter quarter-final against Essex in the last quarter-finals.
The key man for the visitors was England’s Dan Lawrence, whose occasional spin of an unconventional action that must make it difficult for the batsmen to adapt to intentional strikes gave the wicket to the harmful Dan Mousley. Back at the day job, his 62 of 49 at the head of the order fulfilled an old-fashioned anchoring role, but it’s not a bad thing if the hunt is an old-fashioned 168 with 8.4 per thousand.
Lawrence dropped out only because the ECB was ready to release him from the England team at Headingley. I don’t think anyone would give him his Chance to play in a big game, or his chance to give back to the county he leaves at the end of the Season, but not all players will be allowed to play for all games, especially in the new era of concussion substitutes. If national competitions may be affected in this way, it may be necessary to publish stricter guidelines on when this discretion is exercised.
Bullet two: another request for clarity
The pearls have been clutched for days in the Cricket world after the umpires applied the rules of the game and gave Jonny Bairstow at a loss in the second Test at Lord’s. Believe me, I would be glad not to hear about this incident again.
But, as commentator Simon Doull exclaimed, “the Spirit Of Cricket” raised its head during the last match at Edgbaston when an accidental collision in the middle of a batsman and a bowler in the middle of the field led to a spill (which ultimately did not affect the result). The details are not important for this topic of conversation, so I don’t want to invite a company to target individuals by naming them.
Cricket is played on a vast pitch, but much of the Action is confined to the 22 metres in the centre and some on either side. The players will challenge this space, often legitimately, but sometimes with an intention more rooted in the art of the game (although it is good that the batsmen cannot cross the throw line on the stumps nowadays).
Words written on paper and discussed in committee rooms cannot anticipate all the eventualities of a game, and neither should they, because Sport rightly claims to be the great unscripted drama. Whether it’s the “spirit of Cricket” (perhaps a label a little too high-minded these days) or conventions, there will always be a need for captains to see the big picture.
It might be useful to gather them at the starting of a Season and show them a series of debatable moments and explain whether or not similar circumstances will be called a “dead ball” by the referees in the next games.
Ball three: Red roses hopes float on Jordan’s excellence
It was a tale of two franchise cricketers and two captains at Old Trafford as Surrey fought their way through the 187-run defence against Lancashire. Chris Jordan played in the sixth, 13th, 17th and 19th rounds of the home team chase, but used his experience and technical skills to mix slower balls and boundary deliveries to limit Lancashire to only two fours in these sets, stopping his acceleration before it had even begun.
For Liam Livingstone, it was the opposite problem. When he came on in the autumn of the second wicket, he had to restore the momentum created by Jos Buttler, but a quartet of 13 balls left too much for Daryl Mitchell and Co. Three boundaries from the last six Overs of an innings that dropped 14 runs short suggest Jordan got his plans right, but also that Lancashire were hanging around when they should have been actioning.
Ball four: Gregory impeccable in the evaluation of the hunt
After Craig Overton and Matt Henry conspired to knock the lead out of Nottinghamshire’s innings, visitors Somerset were given the tricky task of balancing peril and reward en route to a competitive target. There is no player in the world who can rely on more experience than Samit Patel, who, along with Matthew Montgomery, built a platform from which Steve Mullaney and Imad Wasim came to 157 for six.
It looked more than “something to be bowling at” when Somerset lost their three biggest guns, Tom Banton, Will Smeed and Tom Kohler-Cadmore with over 100 to get. But Chasing has a concrete goal (and Duckworth-Lewis Star to tell you how to get out of it), and there are few cricketers more imaginative in such a situation than Captain Lewis Gregory, 57 of whom have used his knowledge of local geography to include five sixes-as many as the 15 other batsmen who watch over each other.
The outstanding team of this year’s damn won a Chance to finish the job on Saturday. You’d be a takeer to challenge against them.
