County cricket: Surrey take a big step towards fourth straight title

The Guardian

a day ago

Sometimes sport throws up results that look as if they are crucial long before the assertion can be proved or disproved by events. If Surrey win a fourth consecutive County Championship, last week's victory – one of only two positive results in the top division in the final round of Kookaburra ball matches – will be seen as crucial.
After Dan Lawrence and Jordan Clark's pair of 80-odds had secured a decent first-innings lead, it looked like another steamrollering was in store for Durham. The home side fought back in the second innings, with solid contributions from one to seven, but, after a slight wobble, Rory Burns had the win. Surrey have a nine-point lead at the top of the table, which they will sit on until September.
The match was a triumph for slow left armer Sai Kishore, whose five for 72 added to his first-innings two for 26 and two for 119, and two for 53 in the last round. It's one thing having the money to award a two-match contract to an overseas player, but quite another to find the right one and then for them to deliver.
Nottinghamshire remain the closest pursuers of the champions, but a fourth consecutive draw has stalled their challenge. They'll need to reacquire the habits that brought three wins from four in the spring come autumn.
When Mohammad Abbas shot out three Somerset batters in his opening spell, that winning feeling looked like it was returning to Trent Bridge, but James Rew and Tom Abell batted through almost to the close, Abell dismissed off the third last ball of the day after a record stand of 313, beating the previous fourth-wicket mark for the county held by Ian Botham and Peter 'Dasher' Denning.
The home side's job was, firstly, to score enough runs not to lose and, secondly, to do so quickly enough to leave time to set up the match. The former is very much skipper Haseeb Hameed's game, as his 208 showed; the latter is not, as his strike rate of 53.6 underlined.
The visitors batted out the draw against the Notts spinners (their own, Jack Leach and Archie Vaughan, had figures of none for 180, so the batters knew it could be done) to keep their own chances of a late run for the pennant alive. But the only real winners were the pitch and the ball. And Surrey.
The only other county to have a chance for a run at the title in the three-match September denouement is Warwickshire, who fought hard for a draw at Chelmsford.
Once Essex had batted on to post 602 for six with weather on the radar, the only route to a result was for the home side to enforce the follow-on. Ed Barnard, that most resourceful of cricketers, scored a century, but rather less expected was the ton from nightwatchman Ethan Bamber. Warwickshire had no need to bat again and, purely in terms of the result, neither did Essex, but they were so obliged as the game meandered to a draw before the handshakes.
Did Essex need 600? By doing so, they left really only one route to the win. Had they pulled out at 480 or so, more options would have opened up, but also more risk too. Tom Westley will be happy with the eight points for the draw – the margin by which Essex avoid a slot in the bottom two – but it's surely time to go back to five points for the stalemate, or maybe four?
Yorkshire's second win in three saw them scrabble out of the bottom two in Division One but, almost as importantly, it underlined the confidence that is fuelling a much better second half of the season. It's a feeling their opponents, Sussex, will recognise as their 2025 red-ball season is going in the opposite direction – momentum can be a capricious companion.
Take the impressive James Coles' 47 out of the visitors' first innings and you're left with 10 batters going nowhere at Scarborough as the five home seamers shared 10 wickets, Sussex crawling to 222 in 100 overs. Adam Lyth led the reply, as he has done so often in his 19 seasons as a first-class cricketer, with a century, but it was Matthew Revis's second undefeated hundred of the festival fortnight that really twisted the knife.
Scoreboard pressure seldom comes any heavier than when facing a deficit of 333 in front of a partisan crowd and Sussex crumbled to an innings defeat, with three ducks in the top six, Matt Milnes' finishing off their thin challenge with two in two to notch a fivefer. That's a nice farewell present to the Yorkies in anticipation of his return to Kent next season.
Yorkshire are looking up, Sussex looking down. The return match at Hove suddenly looks critical for both sides' prospects in 2026.
It was one of those matches at Canterbury in which 267 overs produced 18 wickets and a draw that plumped up Leicestershire's cushion in the top two, but kept Kent rooted to the foot of the table.
It was a match for individual milestones: Rehan Ahmed notching yet another century; Tom Scriven falling one short of a maiden century from No 10; Matt Parkinson matching a career-high seven wickets in an innings; and Ben Compton batting eight and a half hours for 221, as the leaders cycled through 10 bowlers.
Cricket is always tinkering with its competitions and this match threw up two issues. What more can be done to make matches more about winning and less about the accumulation of bonus points (Gloucestershire v Middlesex was another example)? And, notwithstanding Kent's eight-point deduction for disciplinary infractions, should they be bottom on 97 points and Derbyshire third on 141, when both have won two matches from 11?
Glamorgan are the only club to have won both their matches in this Kookaburra ball round, a feat that lifts them to second place in Division Two.
The top orders proved the difference. In the first innings, Glamorgan were on 199 at the fall of the fourth wicket and Lancashire 107; second time round, the scores were 315 plays 188.
If that was the collective difference, the individual difference was Mason Crane, whose career best six for 19 and three for 107 went a long way to delivering the 20 wickets that so many other attacks around the country found tough to find. It defies belief that Crane, more than seven years after his single Test appearance for England, is still only 28 and about to enter his prime as a leg-spinner. The international ship (in red ball at least) has probably sailed, but he'll take a lot of wickets at domestic level and in franchise cricket in the decade to come.
This article is from The 99.94 Cricket Blog