Latest news with #countycricket
BBC News
3 days ago
- General
- BBC News
England's Bashir open to leaving Somerset
England off-spinner Shoaib Bashir is open to leaving Somerset when his contract expires at the end of the season in order to play more county 21-year-old is first-choice spinner for Ben Stokes' Test team but behind left-armer Jack Leach in the pecking order at had three County Championship matches on loan at Glamorgan earlier this season and one match for Worcestershire in is now free to speak to other counties as, from 1 June each year, players with expiring contracts are permitted to negotiate with other external have named Surrey, Warwickshire and Worcestershire as potential destinations. Bashir signed a two-year deal with Somerset in 2023, and was then picked for England's tour of India the following year after playing only six first-class a modest domestic record – Bashir's average in the County Championship is 84 – he has thrived for his country under Stokes' was man of the match in the one-off Test against Zimbabwe last month with career-best match figures of 9-143, which also included Bashir becoming the youngest England man to reach 50 Test he has replaced Leach as England's number one spinner, Somerset have kept faith with the 33-year-old as their first route to Somerset's first XI is further complicated by the emergence of 19-year-old Archie Vaughan, who provides an all-round option with his off-breaks.
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
County cricket: Lancashire, Sussex and Somerset lead way in T20 Blast
When the Nationwide Building Society sponsored the three tiers below the Premier League from 1996 to 2004, research showed strong name recognition from football fans. However, further research showed that people believed 'nationwide' referred to the fact that the clubs were drawn from all over the country and were unaware of the provider of loans to the bright-eyed twentysomethings still 10 years away from hearing the dreaded phrase 'credit crunch'. The Vitality Blast invites a similar misapprehension. Launched just as England gets its international season underway, with an England Lions match and the never-ending IPL also claiming players, who could deny that the county game needs a blast of vitality? Vitality is not just a (very welcome) sponsor. It is also a call to arms for a competition that is critical to county cricket yet is seemingly shunted into whatever gaps are left when the ECB's circus music stops. Lancashire spent the first eight weeks of the season racking up more club statements than wins, last week's offering opening starkly: 'Lancashire Cricket can confirm that Dale Benkenstein has left his position as Men's Head Coach by mutual consent.' Steven Croft has assumed the position of head coach and set about a re-building job, with ex-Championship captain Keaton Jennings leading on the field. It's not as radical a change as some Lanky fans would have wanted, but they are top of the North Group with three wins from three. Jennings has led from the front with scores of 66, 95 and 24 and he was able to watch his coach's old mate, James Anderson, knock the top off Durham's innings with a spell of 3 for 17 in his four overs, which went a long way to rounding off the hat-trick. It's early days, but the clouds around Manchester are lifting. Northamptonshire are the other county in the North Group with a 100% record after wins over Yorkshire and Leicestershire. If 35-year-old captain David Willey (54 off 27 and 3 for 42), was the key figure in the first win, delivering the almost cliched strong performance on returning to an old club, it was a fellow member of the 'Anderson Brigade' who got Northants over the line in the low-scoring second match of the campaign. The 40-year-old Ravi Bopara conceded 16 runs in his three overs and then compiled 46 across 15 overs batting to take the score from 25 for 2 in the fifth to 123 for 5 in the 20th. I guess you learn that sort of nous in the course of 480 T20 matches. Sussex and Somerset top the nascent South Group, having won both of their opening fixtures, with the former nudging ahead on net run rate. Writing this column necessitates quite a lot of the eyeing of scorecards which, in turn, lends itself to certain names hoving into view more often than others. Harry Brook's avalanche of runs just before his selection for England was a case in point, as was Dan Worrall's relentless wicket-taking for Surrey. But the names that crop up most often are the players who make things happen and find ways to affect the game. They can be patronised by some but I've always liked so-called 'bits and pieces merchants'. That's what growing up on a diet of Barry Wood, David Hughes and Flat Jack does for you. That phrase would be damning Sussex's James Coles with the faintest of praise though, because the 21-year-old is enjoying a marvellous season. In at No 4 in the Blast, he opened the campaign with 77 not out and three overs for 21 against Middlesex and backed it up with 43 and 2 for 26 against Gloucestershire. Hard-hitting middle-order bats who can be relied upon for some useful slow left arm after the powerplay is done are extremely valuable assets in white-ball cricket. Coles can expect a lot of work and a lot of mentions this season. On paper, where nothing is won and only fools are made, opening fixtures against Surrey and Essex looked like a rude awakening for Somerset's T20 outfit. No matter – both were won in some comfort. Only Jason Roy, with a remarkable 92 from 146 for 9, was able to resist the Antipodean stranglehold exerted by the Kiwi, Matt Henry (3-21), and the Aussie, Riley Meredith (3-26), as Surrey went down at Taunton. Chelmsford was an illustration of how Twenty20 is played in the 2020s. There was a time when a middling target of 149 would be chased with a middling strategy – attack in the powerplay, then accumulate and accelerate towards the back end with wickets in hand. Not for Will Smeed and the Tom-Tom-Tom club of Lammonby, Kohler-Cadmore and Abell at the other end, who went off hard and kept going, the runs hammered out with 20% of the available deliveries in hand. Somerset won all four of their matches in May and have started June in the same vein. Next up? Sussex on Friday night. Blast games can come thick and fast with little time available to pull yourself out of a bad trot. Take the Birmingham Bears. On Friday night, they were ambushed at Trent Bridge by a superb Nottinghamshire chase that took down 227 with five balls in hand, Joe Clarke and Jack Haynes making 147 off 64 balls between them. A few hours later, they were back at Edgbaston and 4 for 3 against Durham's canny Callum Parkinson and pacy Zakary Foulkes – there was no coming back from there. I can raise an eyebrow (like most of us who remember the days of a Championship match starting on a Saturday, with a John Player Sunday League game in the middle and a Gillette Cup match on the end) when today's players complain of workloads. Nevertheless, scheduling those two matches to be played out in less than 24 hours on two different grounds – no doubt at the behest of TV – is unfair to players and fans. This article is from The 99.94 Cricket Blog
The Guardian
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Red-ball cricket is the soul of the game': Kane Williamson joins Middlesex
The world's third-best Test batsman has made a quiet arrival in London for the beginning of a four-month stint in county cricket. Middlesex made headlines recently by saying they were keen to sign Virat Kohli. Maybe next year. This one, they've got his friend and contemporary Kane Williamson who, with his gear stuffed into a Karachi Kings kit bag, was picked up from the airport by his new captain, Steve Eskinazi, on Wednesday morning then went straight to training on the Nursery Ground before the game against Sussex in the Blast on Thursday night. Williamson should do plenty for Middlesex's middle order, but maybe not quite so much for the viewing figures their live stream brings in on the subcontinent. Still, it feels like a coup for county cricket. It has been made possible by the support of MCC, who are paying a part of the 34-year-old's fee so that he can double up playing for London Spirit in the Hundred. To commit to spending the summer in England, Williamson has had to turn down another central contract with New Zealand, who are going on tour in Zimbabwe in July and August. Instead, he says, he will continue the arrangement he has had for the past 12 months, where he is available to play for the national team without being obliged to when their fixtures clash with other commitments. 'It worked well last year, and obviously I'm in close conversations with New Zealand cricket, and the relationship is strong, but the landscape's changing really fast.' Williamson is in the odd position of being a part of their team, and apart from their team. 'Yeah, we're still learning how to do it,' he says. 'The landscape keeps changing with the different challenges that we're presented with as cricketers. It's a work in progress. But New Zealand Cricket have been great to work with on it, I've been fortunate with that.' To be blunt, the economics of the game mean they don't have much choice. Williamson, so adept at pacing an innings, is trying to work out how best to thread his way through the years he has left in the game he plays so well. Eleven years ago, his compatriot Martin Crowe named Williamson, Kohli, Joe Root and Steve Smith the 'Fab Four' in a famous article for ESPN Cricinfo. All these years later Kohli – who is 36 – has just become the first of them to announce his retirement from Test cricket, a decision which, Williamson says, caused him to do a little reflective thinking himself. 'My first thought was 'oh gosh, there's an end point',' he says. 'Because before that, you're on the journey, there's a pursuit there. And it's not connected to those other three, but we've all been playing at the same time, and we've all competed against each other for a long time and we all know each other pretty well. So then you do start to reflect a little bit. I know Virat pretty well, we've chatted a lot over the years, but you do realise that we're not just cricketers as well, we're human beings and your life situation changes.' Unlike Kohli, Williamson still wants to play red-ball cricket. But he also has a young family to look after. They have come over with him. 'Summer's always got a nice buzz here in the UK and especially in London, so it's great to call it home for a few months.' You guess it makes a welcome change from making an itinerant living on tour, or the T20 circuit. He is looking forward to playing four or five championship matches. He says the competition helped make him into the player he is. 'I know I really valued my time in England actually playing county cricket as a young player, getting exposed and having to learn. You're just constantly having to try and work things out but getting so many opportunities to do it. Whereas in most other parts of the world you're playing half as many games a year. Sign up to The Spin Subscribe to our cricket newsletter for our writers' thoughts on the biggest stories and a review of the week's action after newsletter promotion 'The opportunities now are vast and that's an amazing thing. But my passion was for the red-ball game, that was the pinnacle, and that's where my aspirations were, growing up,' he says. 'I guess on the other side, you have the white-ball formats and they come and they go pretty quickly and there's so much of it going on, which presents a lot of fantastic opportunities, but yeah, when I talk about the soul of the game I still see that as the red-ball cricket.' Go catch him at it if you can. It's not clear how many more who think, or play, the same way will come along after he's gone.
Yahoo
29-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
‘Red-ball cricket is the soul of the game': Kane Williamson joins Middlesex
Kane Williamson in the nets at the Nursery Ground at Lord's on Wednesday, after he was picked up at the airport by Middlesex captain Steve Eskinazi. Kane Williamson in the nets at the Nursery Ground at Lord's on Wednesday, after he was picked up at the airport by Middlesex captain Steve Eskinazi. Photograph: Ray Lawrence/TGS Photo/Shutterstock The world's third-best Test batsman has made a quiet arrival in London for the beginning of a four-month stint in county cricket. Middlesex made headlines recently by saying they were keen to sign Virat Kohli. Maybe next year. This one, they've got his friend and contemporary Kane Williamson who, with his gear stuffed into a Karachi Kings kit bag, was picked up from the airport by his new captain, Steve Eskinazi, on Wednesday morning then went straight to training on the Nursery Ground before the game against Sussex in the Blast on Thursday night. Williamson should do plenty for Middlesex's middle order, but maybe not quite so much for the viewing figures their live stream brings in on the subcontinent. Still, it feels like a coup for county cricket. It has been made possible by the support of MCC, who are paying a part of the 34-year-old's fee so that he can double up playing for London Spirit in the Hundred. Advertisement To commit to spending the summer in England, Williamson has had to turn down another central contract with New Zealand, who are going on tour in Zimbabwe in July and August. Instead, he says, he will continue the arrangement he has had for the past 12 months, where he is available to play for the national team without being obliged to when their fixtures clash with other commitments. 'It worked well last year, and obviously I'm in close conversations with New Zealand cricket, and the relationship is strong, but the landscape's changing really fast.' Williamson is in the odd position of being a part of their team, and apart from their team. 'Yeah, we're still learning how to do it,' he says. 'The landscape keeps changing with the different challenges that we're presented with as cricketers. It's a work in progress. But New Zealand Cricket have been great to work with on it, I've been fortunate with that.' To be blunt, the economics of the game mean they don't have much choice. Related: Jimmy Anderson: 'I know my body has got a certain amount of deliveries left in it' Williamson, so adept at pacing an innings, is trying to work out how best to thread his way through the years he has left in the game he plays so well. Eleven years ago, his compatriot Martin Crowe named Williamson, Kohli, Joe Root and Steve Smith the 'Fab Four' in a famous article for ESPN Cricinfo. All these years later Kohli – who is 36 – has just become the first of them to announce his retirement from Test cricket, a decision which, Williamson says, caused him to do a little reflective thinking himself. Advertisement 'My first thought was 'oh gosh, there's an end point',' he says. 'Because before that, you're on the journey, there's a pursuit there. And it's not connected to those other three, but we've all been playing at the same time, and we've all competed against each other for a long time and we all know each other pretty well. So then you do start to reflect a little bit. I know Virat pretty well, we've chatted a lot over the years, but you do realise that we're not just cricketers as well, we're human beings and your life situation changes.' Unlike Kohli, Williamson still wants to play red-ball cricket. But he also has a young family to look after. They have come over with him. 'Summer's always got a nice buzz here in the UK and especially in London, so it's great to call it home for a few months.' You guess it makes a welcome change from making an itinerant living on tour, or the T20 circuit. He is looking forward to playing four or five championship matches. He says the competition helped make him into the player he is. 'I know I really valued my time in England actually playing county cricket as a young player, getting exposed and having to learn. You're just constantly having to try and work things out but getting so many opportunities to do it. Whereas in most other parts of the world you're playing half as many games a year. 'The opportunities now are vast and that's an amazing thing. But my passion was for the red-ball game, that was the pinnacle, and that's where my aspirations were, growing up,' he says. Advertisement 'I guess on the other side, you have the white-ball formats and they come and they go pretty quickly and there's so much of it going on, which presents a lot of fantastic opportunities, but yeah, when I talk about the soul of the game I still see that as the red-ball cricket.' Go catch him at it if you can. It's not clear how many more who think, or play, the same way will come along after he's gone.
News.com.au
26-05-2025
- Sport
- News.com.au
Cameron Green's third county cricket century creates serious selection questions ahead of World Test Championship final
Cameron Green peeled off a third county cricket century as spinner Matt Kuhnemann took six wickets in a one-off appearance and Travis Head left the IPL with a bang in positive signs for the Australian trio ahead of the World Test Championship final at Lord's. Selection decisions loom large for Australia ahead of the clash with South Africa on June 11 as pressure grows to get Green back into the team after he missed the entire home summer due to back surgery. Green blasted 118 in his latest effort for Gloucestershire, taking his average from eight county knocks to 73.67 from 442 runs. Against Kent he blasted 128 and an unbeaten 67 in the same game, showing an affinity for the local conditions after making 112 in his first innings since September. Green's been included in Australia's 15-player WTC final squad to play as a batter only and is amping up the heat on Test teammate Marnus Labuschagne, who began his county campaign with Glamorgan with a duck and managed just 23 in his latest effort. Labuschagne has been touted as a possible opening option, with Green able to bat anywhere from three to six, as part of a batting order that will include red-hot Head, who blasted 76 off 40 balls in his final outing for Sunrisers Hyderabad in the IPL. Head finished the tournament with 376 runs, behind only Mitch Marsh's 560 among Australians in the IPL, and will get in ample preparation in the UK with his Sunrisers not involved in the delayed finals. The Australian Test batters aren't the only ones in form, with left-arm spinner Kuhnemann, back playing after having his action cleared following a report in Sri Lanka, ripping through the Middlesex batting order in Cardiff. 5 WICKETS ON DEBUT FOR MATT KUHNEMANN ðŸ'�ðŸ'�ðŸ'�ðŸ'�ðŸ'� The Australian spinner spun a web at Sophia Gardens against Middlesex in his debut match for the Club 🙌 WATCH LIVE: #GLAMvMID #OhGlammyGlammy — Glamorgan Cricket ðŸ�† (@GlamCricket) May 25, 2025 Playing just the single game for Glamorgan with Labuschagne before joining the Australian Test camp, Kuhnemann returned figures of 6-53 as his team cruised to a 10-wicket victory. Kuhnemann is the second spinner in the Australian squad, behind Nathan Lyon as first-choice tweaker.
