The Last Over

Six deliveries from this week's county cricket

1. Performance of the week came from Keaton Jennings who scored hundreds in both innings to lay the foundations for Lancashire in their eventual 60-run win over Durham. Jennings notched 115 first time around before adding 155 in his second innings to help set Durham an improbable 475 runs for victory. They came closer to chasing it down than Lancashire would have liked, but a burst with the second new ball from George Balderson eventually polished off the Durham resistance as the Red Rose picked up a first win of the season.

   

   The twin hundreds, plus his 172 against Hampshire in week two, takes Jennings to three for the season, as well as a 92 last week against Notts, that leaves him averaging 61.30 for the season.

   

2. Commentating on Sussex’s thrilling 21-run win over Yorkshire this week, I was hugely impressed with Sussex’s young allrounder James Coles. In a low-scoring affair, batting proved tricky even for talents such as Joe Root and Cheteshwar Pujara, but Coles looked a classy player in both innings, top scoring in Sussex’s first and providing vital support to Tom Alsop in their second. Barely 20 years old, Coles was Sussex’s youngest ever first-class debutant aged 16, and also bowls left arm spin as well as being a fine slip fielder. Already on England’s radar after a Lions call up this winter, he’s averaging 43.50 with the bat this season and 24.90 with the ball, and looks one to keep a serious eye on.
   

The big story this week was the return to action of England skipper Ben Stokes. While he couldn’t inspire Durham to victory and made just 20 with the bat across two innings, crucially from an England point of view, he fired with the ball, taking seven wickets in the match including 5/98 second time around. Elsewhere Ollie Robinson provided a reminder of his talents with the ball, bowling brilliantly for little early reward first time around (although eventually claiming 3/25), before looking a little out of sorts for much of his second go. However just as the game looked to be slipping from Sussex’s grasp, he produced a phenomenal spell of 3/7 from 5 overs, including an absolute snorter to remove key man Adam Lyth, to grab an unlikely win (and figures of 4/42 in the innings) Meanwhile for Notts Olly Stone also kept his name in the bowling conversation with 4/62 in their loss to Hampshire.

Robinson gets the key wicket of Lyth

With the bat Zak Crawley produced an almost too on the nose example of why Brendon McCullum is happy for him “not to be a consistent cricketer”, but instead a match winner "when he gets going". Coming into the match he’d managed just 67 from six innings this season, then he got a duck in his first innings against Somerset, only to come back and rattle off 238 from 267 balls second time around. Hilarious. Elsewhere the other Ollie Robinson continued to stake his claims for England’s wicketkeeping gloves with a valiant 170* that almost dragged Durham to an improbable win, while Ollie Pope made 63 in Surrey’s rout of Worcestershire.

4. Highlight of the week came courtesy of Ricardo Vasconcelos of Northants who was bowled by David Lloyd of Derbyshire in dramatic and somewhat ignominious fashion.

5. This week almost saw two players become the first to claim their second performance of the week award, so I thought it only right to celebrate both of their performances here. The first was Dan Worrall who took 10 wickets in the match, including 6/22 in the first innings as Surrey thrashed Worcestershire by 281 runs. The second was Matt Critchley who once again starred with both bat and ball in Essex’s stunning comeback win over Warwickshire. Essex were 235 runs behind after both sides had batted once, before Critchley’s 4/24 helped bowl the opposition out for just 94. He then came out and made 99* in Essex’s 331/6 that sealed a superb victory.
   

6. Last Thursday saw the ECB talk the press through the rollout of their ‘iHawk’ technology across every domestic men's and women's match this season. The umpire-worn cameras track each delivery to provide information such as seam movement, release height, pace and swing – the aim being to gather as much information as possible in order to discover the next generation of talent at the international level.
   
   This week’s suggestion to improve county cricket: make all the data collected, as well as other more niche statistical data, freely available to the public, thereby helping to identify and create a whole new generation of analysts. Much has been made of trying to get people from a wider range of backgrounds into cricket, however the greatest barrier to playing for England still remains actually possessing the elite talent to make it at that level. However cricket analytics, an increasingly important factor in cricketing success, does not have quite the same bar, and so by democratising the availability of high-level cricket data, a whole new wealth of analytical talent could be uncovered from anywhere, the only requirements being an internet connection, an ability to parse data and a keen sense of judgement.

Results

Div 1

Surrey v Worcestershire – Surrey won by 281 runs
Essex v Warwickshire – Essex won by four wickets
Lancashire v Durham – Lancashire won by 60 runs
Nottinghamshire v Hampshire – Hampshire won by five wickets
Somerset v Kent – Somerset won by eight wickets

Div 2

Sussex v Yorkshire – Sussex won by 21 runs
Derbyshire v Northamptonshire – Match Drawn
Glamorgan v Middlesex – Middlesex won by two wickets
Leicestershire v Gloucestershire – Match Drawn

Tables