Little chance of Vince keeping his place once Root and Hales are back, but Dawson has surely put pressure on Moeen. Any maybe for more than just t20 cricket.
14 man squad for tomorrow's t20, which includes Alsop, McManus, Weatherley, Crane, Wheal, Taylor and Goodwin. So as a bare minimum, four of them will be starting - but quite possibly five, if we leave out either Andrew or, more likely, Best (not that I think that'll happen though, given that alongside Wheal, they are the only seamers in the squad. It's a rather spin heavy squad). Berg joins Smith, Jimmy and Wheater in being left out, whilst McLaren's injury prevents him from replacing Sammy as our second overseas player. Vince is back, but too late in the day for it to matter.
We'll be without Dawson for our all important next four day home game vs Surrey, due to his Lions call-up. Not that it's completely certain that he'd have started, mind (it'll be interesting what XI we go with tomorrow, away to Warks - by the way, Notts don't play this week, so Warks is a chance to close the gap or even in theory get out of the bottom two altogether). At the same time, Tom Curran has also been called up so he will be missing for Surrey. It's quite possible that Dawson's unavailability will extend to our next one-day game too, at home to Kent on Tuesday 26. He'd have played four one-day matches in the previous five days, so we might decide against putting him through another (especially with yet another to then follow the follow day). But Billings and Bell-Drummond will be in the same boat for Kent.
For a side who can't bat this season, I'd have thought it might make some sense picking a player who has made 37*, 48 and 59 in their last three Championship innings. But no. Having made the ludicrous decision to drop Wheater for the Somerset game, we now decide to drop Carberry for this game - just as he was finally looking settled this season, in his new number 4 position. Instead we pick someone who has made 0 and 5 in their last two innings, across two different matches (McManus), plus another who's runs of scores are 19, 0, 18, 21, 23, 15, 3 (Dawson). Our thinking this season, across both this format and the t20 format, is just totally shot. I've been really trying to avoid it, but I'm struggling to not now think that the sooner Benks is sacked, the better. Promotion from a poor D2 aside, we've just gone nowhere since he came in.
I'm guessing we've made the right decision to pick Crane (with Dawson in support). Patel is on after just five overs of the match, and they have Poysden in their side still to come.
Was it at Edgbaston when he took 5 wickets in an innings and 8 or 9 in the match? It was definitely against Warwickshire but can't remember at which ground.
Down here. Five wickets in the first innings (including Trott for a duck), but that was it for the match as I recall. Fidel did the second innings damage. We went up there very early on last season, and were in for a great shout of a victory until Chopra batted out the whole of the final day (albeit never making any attempt to go for the victory for Warks).
I don't feel at sorry for Warks losing Rankin to injury by the way (which is particularly important given that they, like us, have gone in with 3 seamers and 2 spinners rather than 4 and 1). Firstly, that's cricket/sport. Secondly, it was against them that we lost Topley, before he was able to his job in the match too.
