Somerset bow out
Somerset hoped to take advantage of Kieron Pollard-inflicted shell-shock when they played NSW Blues. They didn’t want a backlash, and in the end got neither. Instead they gave it away with careless batting early on, and got creamed as a result.
111/7 was never going to be enough to defend, but Somerset would have hoped to make NSW work harder for it. Had the innings gone the full 20 overs, 200 would have been well on the cards. It was unlikely that Somerset were going to qualify for the semi-finals, but they would have wanted to at least go down fighting.
But it’s been a real eye-opener for a lot of our guys. We were up against a world-class bowling attack.
said Justin Langer, highlighting something that county cricket does not have.
So that’s the end of English participation in the tournament. What to make of the counties efforts? We’ll give our verdict, written in the bloggers equivalent of a SuperOver:
Batting: Rubbish
Bowling: Ordinary
Sussex managed scores of 95/8 and 119/7, far below the standards they set in the T20 Cup. Somerset were better, but still scored below par in all but their first match against Deccan Chargers, and even that was reliant on Alfonso Thomas batting at number 9.
I’m going to stick my neck out and say that the lack of classy bowling attacks in county cricket is the reason for the poor batting. If teams are not used to facing that quality of opposition, then they will struggle to raise their game for anything more than a one-off. In the same way that you see giantkillings in the FA Cup, you know that if those teams played Premiership opposition every week, they would be beaten out of sight most times.
Why are the bowling attacks in county cricket relatively poor? Simply because they play too much, and are grooved into a steady holding pattern style – exactly as we saw from the Somserset and Sussex attacks in the CLT20.
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