Hain is “a little sore” so hopefully not too serious.

Crazy that some people were calling for Mousley to be dropped earlier in the tournament!

Inside-edge wrote:

Benjamin is keeping wicket

I wonder if it’s because Davies isn’t fully fit, or whether it’s just an excuse to keep Benjamin in the side…

I can only assume that Benjamin has a clause in his contract that becomes very expensive if he’s not selected.

Andy wrote:

Which rounds were with the Kookaburra? Have Davie and Yates literally only made runs against the Kookaburra. They both made half centuries in the game v Somerset, was this against the Kooka?

Poor opening partnership for years? Davies struggled last season I'll give you that but Yates compared very favourably in comparison to other regular openers.

Kookaburra were the first two games only.

Opening partnerships so far this season:

37 (Kookaburra)
343 (Kookaburra)
116 and 56
10
59 and 18
21 and 3
38 and 15
48 and 29
19 and 106

So it's not at all accurate to say that it's a poor opening partnership. There's quite a few swallows in there...

I can't be bothered to calculate this for other teams as well but I'd bet that our opening partnership compares favourably with other teams.

As has been said already, the problem for us this season hasn't been the batting, it's been bowling teams out twice.

ExiledBrummie wrote:

I love Woakes but he's lucky to get picked for England nowadays. As for Davies, promoted well above his ability to be a championship captain although I do think he's decent enought for the one dayers. My choice would be Barnard.

The whole cosy coaching set up needs a complete re boot too, hopefully not starting in Div 2 although that looks very possible.

I agree that Woakes is lucky to have been selected for the upcoming Test series, but he was player of the series in the Ashes only last summer. The lack of cricket for him in the last six months has been detrimental for sure.

Got to be one of our worst defeats. We were in control for pretty much the whole game apart from the first and last sessions. Got to ask how we allowed them to score over 400 on the final day.

A lot of these runs have been very streaky.

BristolBear wrote:

I bet we bat on tomorrow. Maybe 10-15 more overs.
104 overs in the day. Think it’s 2 lost for change of innings. 10 overs batting tomorrow gives you a chance of 10 overs with the second new ball, plus makes the run rate that little bit higher.
Robinson and Davies are nothing if not conservative when it comes to these things.

It’s only 96 overs on the final day, no matter how many overs have been lost on previous days.

meashambear wrote:

Exiled Bear wrote:

Odds of a declaration a few overs before the close?

We scored 374 on the first day so I hope not with our record of not being able to take 10 wickets

Pitch seems to have slowed down a bit though? Certainly seems hard to time it at the moment

Odds of a declaration a few overs before the close?

I think Barnard was ball watching a bit. Even when running he turned around to look when he should probably have just had his head down running. Would probably have made it if he had.

Good to see some positivity at least.

Yes, hopefully they’ll come out with more intent after tea.

The forecast doesn’t look like a complete washout tomorrow so I think we need to make the game safe before thinking about a declaration. 40 overs left today so would scoring 100 in 30 of those give us enough?

The club also posted on social media today that Davies has won 17 out of 20 T20 games he’s captained, which is a pretty impressive record.

He did only bowl 11 overs last season but he was our second most economical bowler and had the third best average. His batting was poor though.

Well the good news is that it will be difficult for him to score fewer runs than Benjamin has.

Also what is the current status of Rushworth?

Why did they run two on the first ball of that over?

meashambear wrote:

We should be doing better than this with the players that we have. We cant bowl teams out twice and we cant build innings totals because key batsmen keep getting out cheaply.........despite the fact that we have a deep looking batting line up.

A few of us said last season that there is something wrong and that Robinson should have been dispensed with along with the other coaches. Our bowling attack is toothless once the new ball has lost its shine. Miles is not good enough, Norwell not fit enough.

How is it that teams like Hampshire & Essex keep rolling out their bowlers season after season and get performances from them whilst ours break down and underperform?

We need a new leader with fresh impetus who demands and gets better performances from the players, we also need to review our player recruitment which is just not good enough. Better standards need setting all round.

To be fair, we had a pretty good red ball season last year, finishing fourth, 37 points off the top. As I recall we were actually in the title race until the last game or two.

I do agree that the bowling is more of a concern this season though. There’s only so many injuries that you can have before you begin to wonder how many of them are bad luck and how many are poor fitness or recruitment.

I’m not quite giving up on this season just yet though as we still have to play some of the weaker teams. We’ve got Somerset twice, Kent, Worcestershire and Notts. Let’s see how things play out before making too many drastic changes, but we do need to recruit another workhorse bowler that can be almost guaranteed to go injury free all season.

Jonathan Trott leads Afghanistan to the semi-finals at the expense of Australia. You love to see it.