As Twitter followers will know, I am currently on holiday with my family in the Lake District, but will naturally follow events at the 3aaa County Ground closely tonight.
It is a big game, but then they all are now. Logically, Northamptonshire having lost nine of their ten matches, we should win this one, but we will be blase about the match at our peril. They have some very good players, even if there seems a collective lack of confidence at present, after a series of poor defeats.
It will be a last home game for Wahab Riaz and will be likely played on a similar track to the Warwickshire game. The quicks will hope for a little more pace though and our batsmen will want to be able to play shots with a little more confidence.
Then it is on to high-flying Worcestershire tomorrow, so bottom follows top. It is a game that presents the biggest challenge for us on paper, as they have been playing so well, but if we focus on our game, anything is possible.
An added incentive would be to do well and boost our net run rate, as it looks increasingly likely that this will determine the final place in the group. While Worcestershire are running away with the section, the other three places are between six counties at this stage and I am just glad that it was Lancashire and not Derbyshire who 'choked' last night when needing only six from the final over to beat Durham.
I don't expect changes from the recent successful side tonight, though the line up will need tweaked in the days ahead to accommodate the arrival of Henry Nicholls.
All in good time. I will be back either after tonight's game or tomorrow with my thoughts, depending on what we are doing today.
Between times, give the boys a cheer for me.
I'm going for a home win here.
Dread to have seen the comments on here if we'd have done what Lancashire did - Pretty horrific.
ReplyDeleteStill think 3 wins from 4 will see us through
Need to win the last 3 games
ReplyDeleteIt’s possible
Unless my calculations are well out, it's possible that we can still qualify with 2 wins, although it would be more comfortable with 3. I'm assuming that Yorks will qualify quite comfortably, but if we beat Leics (which will remove any small risk that they can get into the mix on 14 points) and either Worcs or Durham, we'll end on 14 points. We'd then need Lancs to lose 3 of their 4 matches (against Yorks, Warks x 2, and Durham); Notts to lose 2 of their 4 (against Warks, Yorks x 2, and Worcs); and Warks to lose 2 of their 4 (against Notts, Lancs x 2, and Worcs). All of these are perfectly possible on recent form, so it's premature to throw in the towel even if we lose to Worcs tonight.
ReplyDeleteNot that we did much to deserve the chance with last night's performance. In fairness to Northants, they've been showing some fight in recent matches and would have beaten Warwickshire at the weekend if someone had supported Cobb. Duckett did that last night, and they are usually such good players in this format that Northants would be favourites against most teams when they both come off. it's also fair to say that Vasconcelos and Cobb both had some huge slices (literally) of luck which might have been catches on another night, but in all honesty they were encouraged to throw the bat by some terribly short bowling. It's bizarre that having watched what happened when the Northants bowlers dropped short, ours decided that it wouldn't happen to them, and didn't change when it did. There wasn't really a point at which we were in control, and I don't understand why Critchley wasn't given an over or two, particularly against Duckett. Wilson's mishandled Critchley quite badly, sometimes not bowling him enough and others too much, but the risk with Critchley is usually one over too many rather than his first couple. When the quick bowlers are flying all over the place, he's not that much of a risk anyway.
We made what should have been a very competitive total, although we probably ended up 20 runs short of where we might have. Once again, Wilson inserted himself ahead of much more powerful strikers, and while he made a quicker start than he often does, he can't hit far enough or often enough to create really big overs. It's criminal for Critchley only to have had 2 balls, and the 16th over when Madsen was out was the perfect time for him to come in. With Viljoen and Hughes also not used, Wilson's determination to bat in these situations has cost us dear in this competition so far. I thought we played the powerplay quite well - the lack of a lightning start doesn't really matter if you can accelerate well enough and Godleman and Madsen did that well and got us to a position where we should have been pushing 200.
A word again about how we've tried to use home advantage. We've now won one out of five matches at Derby, all on slow, uneven pitches with huge boundaries. This delivers a huge advantage to the opposition when they have hitters who are strong enough to put the ball into and over the stands, making the depth of the boundary irrelevant. Godleman's probably the only one we have in this category, and the rest are handicapped by the long boundaries, where even Madsen was hitting one bounce fours rather than the sixes he would have scored on other grounds. The combination of the pitches and the boundaries have really counted against us, and from the look of a fairly thin crowd tonight, hasn't really gripped the audience either.
So two away matches won't so our chances any harm, and it would be so Derbyshire for us to turn in a stellar performance against the two best teams in the group. With Slater replacing Dal, there'll be a little more depth in the batting, and it will be interesting to see how he does when he's not expected to set off playing big shots in the powerplay.