Going to be touch and go with the weather - hopefully they can squeeze in the 5(?) overs needed before the rain arrives. Important that we stay ahead of D/L

Hassan has been very unlucky

I wonder if the potential for rain influenced the decision at the toss.

The later than originally scheduled start for Sky might hamper the chances of getting a result.

The forecast doesn’t look like a definite washout to me, it’ll be showery so all depends on if we get lucky or not with where they go.

With Woakes back it might be Barnard

I think Mousley deserves to stay in the team. He was our leading wicket taker last season after all! Plus 2/23 in the total of 195 today is excellent. It's a shame that his bowling seems to have got better at the expense of his batting

Highveld wrote:

60 runs off five overs from our overseas players, plus zero runs from two balls faced. Combined with the top three failing to go on from a reasonable start, left a situation where Sam Hain and Jacob Bethell both needed to play a large innings to secure victory. while Jacob did his part, Sam was out early, leaving an impossible run chase, as there was no support for Jacob.

Also, good to see Sue Redfern umpiring the game today, she really is an excellent umpire.

But no mention of yet another failure for Benjamin?

I think we’ll see changes for the next game. Mousley at least offers a bowling option (though it didn’t go well tonight) but Benjamin is offering nothing right now.

The wicket keeper isn’t an issue at the moment. I’d play Burgess purely as a batsman.

Sigh. It’s all very well not taking too many risks but you can’t afford to have multiple overs in a row scoring less than a run a ball. Then when you get out it puts so much pressure on those coming in

I get that we’re rebuilding a bit but we really need to start upping the rate

To be fair, you say "the last couple of failures" but didn't we win the group in both of the last two seasons? I know we then lost in the quarter finals but it's still not a bad record, and we can't have won all those games with only one or two players scoring runs (especially given the number of times we racked up 200 or more)

Presumably Moeen should be back soon, and that will strengthen the batting.

The bowling was definitely more of a weakness last season, given the number of times we scored over 200, and we’ve strengthened that considerably during the winter. If the team stays injury free we really should be making finals day as a minimum

Yates had a good season last season didn’t he?

The forecast may have also been a factor, we may have wanted to avoid batting in the rain on Sunday

To be fair lots of people on here were saying that we should drop Briggs and just play Yates, Bethell and Mousley as spinners…

I’m normally a great advocate of the follow on but in this case I think it was a fair call. Still over two days left in the game, and I can see the logic in not wanting to potentially face Harmer batting last on a deteriorating pitch

Yes, while the bowling recruitment has rightfully come under scrutiny in the last couple of seasons, there’s no doubting that the club got this signing spot on.

Their next game is against England on the 22nd. If he’s in their squad for that, will he be available for the Essex game?

I think that the depth of our bowling attack is more of an issue than overseas recruitment to be honest. An overseas is probably only going to be around for half the season in most cases these days anyway. But this is the second or third season in a row where half our bowling attack has been injured at one time. Either we're just incredibly unlucky with injuries, or our physios/training plans aren't working, or we haven't recruited players that can last a whole season. I suspect that it's the latter, especially given the age of our seamers. I do think we've been unlucky with our overseas players as it sounds as though we had someone lined up which then fell through, and the Hassan situation is also not ideal, but we should have had other players that could step in if needed. I also wouldn't write off Jamal just yet, but he needs to start performing in the Essex game.

To be fair I think we have developed that relationship with Hassan, he seems to love it here. And it is bad luck that someone else in Pakistan’s squad got injured, meaning that he got called up to sit on the bench, whichever way you look at it.