I’m trying to keep my feet on the ground here, we’ve been considerably second best in this game and it seems likely that we’ll lose at some point on Monday, however I'm feeling quite defiant about what we’ve seen so far in the campaign and I don’t buy into all the doomlordery going on. I’ll outline some of my thoughts and observations below, I’m perfectly happy to admit that I could be wrong and I welcome your disagreement. Come September I may well have to eat all of this. Coming into this game several people looked at this as a key indicator for the promotion race, but through two days I don’t agree, not by any normal metric anyway. I feel like even in a loss we’re going to be ok, I’m confident we have more than enough talent and potential to be anyway.
I don’t rate this lot (Lancashire) at all based on what I’ve seen.
I’m not buying into the anger over the decision at the toss either, the bowlers let the captain down with how wayward they were on the first morning and the catching let the bowlers down when they did manage to find something. Both Jennings and Harris were dropped from regulation chances and that’s cost us around 140 runs all told. We’re 75 behind on first innings despite the top order not firing; McKinney missed a straight one, Lees and Robinson got shockers and Bedders walked into a fairly innocuous ball from a scattergun bowler. It isn’t down to the pitch or conditions being considerably better for batting yesterday and suddenly the pitch turning into a minefield today. That hasn’t happened. This isn’t a scenario where the team that wins the toss wins the game if they decide right and/or are doomed to failure if they lose it or decide wrong.
I’ll say again what I’ve said already, this pitch looks very flat, very much the norm for what we’ve become accustomed to at CLS. We’re behind in the game because we’ve not taken the game by the scruff of the neck when the opportunity has arose. We’ve lost the key phases through our own poor performance. I commented yesterday how vital a moment it was for the game when Jennings and Harris came together - we know how that went we had three chances to have them 3 down for under 70, which would’ve brought Jones in before Lunch. Three down at lunch is a shared session, four or more and we’re ahead of the game. Then we had a bit of an opening last night with the new ball but couldn’t capitalise, Coughlin went to the second delivery of the new cherry and they were 292-7 with 15.4 overs left in the day. A good hour and we’re batting on Day 1 or at worst first ball today. Then this morning we’ve woken up to mist and murk and because we’ve taken 3 wickets in four overs we’ve had to open up our innings to the new ball in the hand of the country’s greatest swing bowler under lights. We’ve had a mini recovery up to lunch and then fallen apart after it.
We’ve lost this game more than they’ve won it (I expect that’s how it ends), we’ve been inferior in the big moments largely on our own.
I do believe we’ll lose this game and I’m disappointed and a little angry with how meekly we’ve given it away to this point. Oddly though I take solace in that, because it isn’t a talent issue, the biggest concern coming into the season in my mind was that other teams would have built shrewdly towards promotion and gone past us when all came to all - through three rounds I don’t see that being the case.
