Today is my last day of live cricket watching this season – my 68th! Works out four days in every 10 spent watching cricket live!
There’s only one match in town – Surrey ripping into Yorkshire! A win and Hampshire losing means another (!) championship title for Surrey! But first there’s work to be done! These matches don’t play themselves!
Lunch arrives at 12.36 (an odd time) and I assume with something to do with making up lost time. But it sees Yorkshire reaching 171/6 – losing four wickets in the session but leading for the first time in the match by 17. Hampshire look like self-imploding so an excellent crowd at the Oval could be in for something ‘special’ this afternoon – let’s see!
And within 75 minutes of lunch, it was all over! Hampshire’s loss filtered through but not before a few more Yorkshire wickets fell – you could see their hearts weren’t in it and were all out for 208. Surrey needed 54 which they knocked off in under 6 overs.
Not quite ‘wild’ celebrations started but it was evident that this was THE competition everyone wants to win. The general consensus is that this squad does not know how to lose (and haven’t so far) and even when things looked grim, they stuck to their task.
This championship was won in May with convincing wins against Hampshire and Northamptonshire when things didn’t look great as regular readers of these ramblings will recall.
I’ve seen many things over the last 68 cricketing days – England losing both an ODI and a Test, a tie, impressive batting, bowling and fielding, great company and conversations, as well as days of quiet contemplation and often bewilderment!
And my next live cricket should be in NZ next year unless we’ve all been blown to kingdom come by Vlad the new impaler but there’ll be ramblings on other things until then.
In the interim, some of the final day highlights…
Cricket51days 