Thing is, every place in the Championship is worth money, to both the club and players, so there’s still the opportunity for everyone to make money by finishing higher up the table, including, oddly, Worcestershire.
People keep repeating this with obvious hindsight, but it makes total sense to me from the perspective of trying to win a 3-day game. Campbell alluded to it in his interview.
It has rained for more or less 24 hours prior, the best chance we had of taking 20 wickets would’ve been to bowl first, bowl them out inside a day and then bat once. Worcestershire would’ve done the same.
As it was, the pitch, like so many others here in recent years, has been incredibly flat. Which I think begs further questions, because it’s been clear for some time that this fixture was a ‘must win’ if we wanted to save ourselves from the drop. Other clubs have been funky with their pitches, but we seem reluctant to yield to Vic’s propensity to producing flat decks.
Maybe the fact you get 8 points for a draw needs looking at, because there’s also a feeling that clubs now feel that it’s too ‘safe’ to not muck about and risk defeat when you can effectively get 16 points in a drawn game and only 19 in a low scoring win.
If draws keep us up, let’s be honest, we’ll all take that. So onto today, let’s hope the boys can get to atleast 350 and the rain stays away at Taunton to enable Leach and Vaughan to bowl Hampshire out.
Is it too much to ask for Sussex to turn the Yorkies over too?
