Ralphies, Surrey spin and why winning a game is either the best or worst thing you can do in the County Championship

2 minute read

Four weeks into the County Championship and most teams have only played three times. It’s therefore no surprise that four-match Warwickshire find themselves top of the table. They have achieved this after notching one win – exactly the same number as Hampshire, who are bottom.

That isn’t to say that everyone’s off the mark. Surrey, for example, have managed only draws so far having laboured fruitlessly on home pitches that make you think the ground should be renamed The Completely Flat.

Six Surrey batters are averaging over 50 so far this season. Jamie Smith’s 80.20 only gets him to third in that list.

As we’ve said before, a spinner might help. The closest thing they’ve got, Dan Lawrence, is their second-highest wicket-taker with five wickets at 57.60. It’s hard to avoid concluding that a specialist might have achieved more. We have endless time for Dan Lawrence’s bowling, but that doesn’t make him a bowler.

The three best parts of Dan Lawrence’s bowling action in escalating order of greatness

Another Surrey “spin option” boasts their best bowling average though: Ralphie Albert – Jimmy White’s grandson – a young all-rounder who took 3-80 in the only game he’s played.

You don’t get many Ralphies, do you? The only one that immediately springs to mind is Ralphie Cifaretto, the transcendentally objectionable character from the Sopranos, played by Joe Pantoliano.

Joe Pantoliano has apparently appeared in over 150 roles over the course of his career, so we presume he doesn’t always play a titanic wanker. Certainly feels that way though. (See also: The Matrix.)

Surrey host Sussex, who have been winning games, from Friday. It’s Warwickshire’s turn to take a breather this week.

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The post Ralphies, Surrey spin and why winning a game is either the best or worst thing you can do in the County Championship first appeared on King Cricket.

Related posts:

1. Are Surrey going to win the County Championship without hitting hundreds, taking wickets or winning games?
2. Who are Surrey’s bowlers? They’ve got them to the top of the County Championship again
3. Rory Burns is a handy man to have around as Surrey open up a gap at the top of the County Championship table

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Clamour model: Can’t James Rew just carry on breathing down people’s necks for a bit?

2 minute read

England always say they want competition for places, but whenever they actually have it, everyone gets all impatient and demands that they hurry up and make the change right now. Somerset’s James Rew will wind up in England’s Test team eventually. Is there any harm in waiting for the right circumstances to unfold? We know it’s kind of gone out of fashion a bit lately, but you all remember waiting for things, right? 

The situation is this: It is increasingly obvious that James Rew is too good for county cricket, but he generally bats at number four or lower and those England places are all very filled right now. 

You’ve no doubt heard of Joe Root; and Ben Stokes is the captain; while Jamie Smith is the one person who’s scored more runs than Rew so far this season. Harry Brook lost some of his shine over the winter, but England don’t generally drop batters who average 55 in Test cricket. 

Those places are filled.

Jiggly guff

If you’ve already concluded Rew needs to be in the side and you’re hiking your way towards that destination, the awkward facts above propel you towards the timeless fallback of ‘jiggling things about a bit’.

England are going to drop a batter (Zak Crawley) and here is a batter they want to pick. This shouldn’t be a difficult equation.

But actually it is, because if you think about it for two seconds, you realise that one way or another, someone would have to take a Dan Lawrence style hit to accommodate him. 

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Jacob Bethell has hit 100 per cent of his first-class hundreds batting at three for England. He had not previously been a number three, but they’ve decided he’s malleable enough to become one. You could argue that it wouldn’t be that big a difference to instead mould him into an opener, but why should he recommence the moulding process to accommodate someone else who isn’t a number three either? 

Jamie Smith could move up the order because he’s been batting at three for Surrey, but Smith doesn’t have to keep wicket for Surrey and also he was specifically picked for his ability to ramp things up when batting with the tail. 

Finally, Rew could open, but this is an unappealing option given he’s never done it before.

Clamour!

The BBC has said England have a “dilemma” here. But this isn’t a dilemma, is it? If a small Edison cap lightbulb blows and you have a bayonet bulb in the drawer, that’s not a dilemma. That’s having a spare of a different thing.

And it’s worth stating that having a spare is actually useful, because sooner or later every lightbulb blows. When the next bayonet pops, England will be delighted to have an immaculate, unsullied replacement ready to go, rather than something mangled and possibly broken because they previously tried to mash it into the wrong fitting like an impatient moron.

Conclusion

Nothing is spoiling here. James Rew is only getting better and England’s middle-order incumbents should also be driven forwards by his breath on their necks.

It’s always good to have something in the freezer.

The post Clamour model: Can’t James Rew just carry on breathing down people’s necks for a bit? first appeared on King Cricket.

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2. The James Anderson plan
3. Cricket bats in unusual places

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If you want to bat for England, bat for Surrey. If you want to bowl for England, bowl for Sussex. And if you want to open for England…

3 minute read

A fortnight into the County Championship and it’s hard to weigh the performances of several England Test hopefuls. In many cases who they play for seems to have had almost as much influence on outcomes as how they’re playing.

Take, for example, Jamie Smith. This time last week we pointed out that he’d most likely already retained his Test spot with a hundred even though the worth of that hundred was tempered by being scored on a less than challenging pitch.

Skullwatch: Jamie Smith looks safe then

Last week’s featherbed now looks more like one of those thin, self-inflating camping mats after Surrey’s home game against Leicestershire, in which Smith’s first innings 166 and second innings 89 were scored either side of the visitors’ 691 all out. That’s quite a total. Perhaps Surrey might like to rethink their seasons-long spin policy of relying on either part-timers or short term imports on zero hours contracts?

The upshot is that even if Smith is the top scorer in Division 1, his average of 99 is surpassed by team-mate and theoretical rival, Ben Foakes, who is averaging 127.50 thanks to a couple of not outs. Ollie Pope’s record also has a healthy look about it with a hundred and a fifty and an average of 74. But what does any of this actually mean?

Elsewhere, Ollie Robinson’s 2026 campaign to distract England from the fact he’s a bit of a bell-end¹ by taking bucketloads of wickets appears to have got off to a solid start. His 10 wickets at 15.40 does however only put him third in Sussex’s averages behind the preposterously-named Fynn Hudson-Prentice (8 wickets at 15.25) and Henry Crocombe (13 wickets at 13.76).

These three have however helped Sussex pretty much entirely overhaul the 12-point penalty that was imposed this season after the county was forced to ask the ECB for a loan.

And finally, openers

What do you make of the situation here? Ben Duckett’s made 28 runs, while the man who was to our mind the best choice to replace Zak Crawley as his partner, Haseeb Hameed, has only made 62 runs in four innings, also for Nottinghamshire.

Crawley himself has made 60 runs in four innings in Division 2 – and really they were worth even less than that. Half of his knocks were on the same pitch where no Northamptonshire batter who came to the crease failed to reach three figures.

It’s time for some unsettling disloyalty: If England’s leaders aren’t being ejected then some of the players will be… but which ones?

Durham’s Ben McKinney was loitering in the vicinity during the Ashes and he made 244 last week. Even accounting for the reduced value of a second division run, that’s pretty handy.

One way or another, cases are being built. We’ll be able to weigh all this stuff a lot more accurately and hand down some verdicts in a few weeks time.

1. With Robinson currently out of the side and Ben Duckett having seemingly taken the hint to stop airing so much delusional madness, who is England’s current, official Bollocks-Talker In Chief? Is there a vacancy? ︎

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The post If you want to bat for England, bat for Surrey. If you want to bowl for England, bowl for Sussex. And if you want to open for England… first appeared on King Cricket.

Related posts:

1. Rory Burns is a handy man to have around as Surrey open up a gap at the top of the County Championship table
2. Warwickshire’s bullying brings them level with Surrey at the top of the table
3. Are Surrey going to win the County Championship without hitting hundreds, taking wickets or winning games?

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A black standard poodle being conspicuously indifferent to a very good cricket book that you should definitely buy

< 1 minute read

If you’ve got a picture of an animal being conspicuously indifferent to cricket, please send it to king@kingcricket.co.uk.

Chess grandmaster and commentator, Peter Svidler, submitted this really quite magnificent photo of a black standard poodle being conspicuously indifferent to The 50 Most Ridiculous Ashes Moments, the cricket book we wrote with Dan Liebke.

It’s the demeanour that really makes this one for us, but the painting in the background adds a certain something too.

The dog in question is Joyce (who Peter explained is named after James, not Ed).

Joyce is in Russia, so this probably also qualifies for our other regular feature, Cricket Bats¹In Unusual Places.

1. And other cricket stuff. Quite rarely cricket bats, to be honest, but that’s the name of the feature now. What are we going to do? Change the URL? ︎

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Skullwatch: Jamie Smith looks safe then

3 minute read

Jamie Smith earned himself a mention in our previous article about which England Test players might get the boot for the next Test. We had him down as someone who’d need to play very badly in early season to lose his place, so a match-saving 132 for Surrey presumably keeps him in the team.

Things didn’t look too great for Smith in Surrey’s first innings when he was dismissed for 9 and his team-mate and England predecessor Ben Foakes then made 128.

Even if Ben Foakes is “the best wicketkeeper in the world” he’s only worth so much to England

If your county thinks another guy is a better wicketkeeper than you, there’s extra pressure to score more runs than him.

Perhaps that’s why Smith was batting at three in this match: simply to look like a more serious batter. Another interpretation is that he might be hedging his bets a bit with top order England places at even greater risk. Or maybe it’s just a Surrey thing – they have a lot of players to accommodate, after all.

It worked out for him in the second innings anyway and Dan Lawrence – another cricketer who once got suckered into batting up the order – also made a hundred.

How harshly should we judge Dan Lawrence for his fairly terrible performance as a Test opener?

Surrey’s opponents, Warwickshire, made 544, so it clearly wasn’t the most challenging pitch. Those kinds of details will be washed away by the weak shower head of time however. Come England’s next selection meeting, all that will matter is that they were probably going to stick with Smith anyway, and look, he made a hundred.

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An interesting footnote to all of this is that the bare stats of Foakes’ and Smith’s innings suggest both men made efforts to alter perceptions. The former rattled along at four an over and even deigned to wallop a six at one point, whereas Smith scored at three an over and didn’t clear the ropes once, thus obliging reporters to say that he batted ‘watchfully’.

For what it’s worth, we would guess that there was zero conscious effort to play differently from either man; that those outcomes were in fact merely products of circumstance and natural variation. Ours is a world of MAKING STATEMENTS though so let’s all just pretend it was that instead.

How can you, as an England fan, possibly tolerate this world without skulls?

Why not buy this excellent book? Click it and do so!

The post Skullwatch: Jamie Smith looks safe then first appeared on King Cricket.

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2. Even if Ben Foakes is “the best wicketkeeper in the world” he’s only worth so much to England
3. How will Ed Smith, England national selector, be remembered? We’ll tell you how Ed Smith, England national selector, will be remembered

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