The latest Daily Mail article does make more sense now, in that we had made an approach to Peter Moores to be new coach, i.e. moving the Notts trio of Moores, Hameed and Clarke all down to the south coast. However, of course, that's not going to happen now. We do desperately need another 2 really good solid county batters to be competitive in Div 1, there's only so far sentiment can take you and the current crop just aren't performing well enough.
Of course it is, we already know that. Well, except Birrell. He doesn't. You need two things at Taunton: spinners and batters. So WTF do we do? Pick four seamers. Birrell standing there like an idiot after yesterday's play, saying that in hindsight we should have selected an other spinner. That's not hindsight. It's efffing Taunton. We're going to be thrashed in this game (unless the weather saves us), just like we were thrashed against Sussex in our previous defeat. And the common theme in both games is how we quickly got the opposition five down in their first innings, only to concede a huge partnership on a wicket where huge partnerships should be impossible.
So he comes out and says that, and we still bowl Fuller ahead of Sundar this morning? I have no words to describe our utter incompetence.
Yes, we could have had Prest and Neal playing instead of Barker and Jack and not even bothered to bowl Fuller (or perhaps 4 or 5 overs with Abbott as an opening bowler) then spin, spin, spin
It's been the same for years, in white ball cricket the batters seem to have a good plan and perform more often than not. They generally look really good and it restores our confidence in them. However, put them against the red ball and, the majority of the time, they crawl along so slowly and then basically fail with low scores and averages overall. I guess they can't find that balance, they try to attack more in the Championship and we castigate them for throwing their wicket away. Perhaps we have to accept that their techniques simply aren't good enough and the white ball game allows them to hide that fact more often than not.
Umpires: "Bad light". Hants batters virtually running off, Somerset fielders literally just stand there.
I was very pleased to see Worcs not declare yesterday. It gives Durham a maximum of 96 overs to pick up batting points.
Just the 2 wickets taken from 35 overs bowled this morning by Somerset then. Still a long, long way to go but good batting from Gubbins to bat the session. Need him to bat through the next one as well.
