Every Run And Wicket In The 2011 County Championship

Posted on September 18, 2011 by Nichael Bluth in Scorer's Notes

Scorers’ Apology:

We haven’t done a proper Scorers’ Notes for a while, for reasons that we shan’t go into here. Let’s just say that we regret sending a lookalike to do some community service on our behalf and leave it at that. Anyway, let’s have a look at all the runs and wickets from the recently completed County Championship season.

We’re not really big on the insight here, it’s more just to have something nice to look at and to pick out a few exceptional performances. Don’t forget, you can click on the pictures to get a larger version.

Let’s start at the top:

County Championship Division One

 

Quite an even spread here – every team had at least one batsman that reached 1,000 runs – but you can see the importance of Marcus Trescothick to Somerset and how Warwickshire nearly won the title through everyone chipping in (bar the more substantial contribution of Varun Chopra).

Speaking of more substantial players, Samit Patel’s 756 runs say more about the weakness of Nottinghamshire’s batting than they do about him. It wouldn’t be a proper 51allout article if we didn’t have a jibe at Samit (or his international equivalent Steve Smith).

 

Moving swiftly on:

Nice to see some impressive performances from some of England’s ‘forgotten’ men – Monty Panesar, Ryan Sidebottom and Graham Onions. Also nice to see a less impressive performance from one S Harmison – we used to get really angry about his post-2004 England performances, to the extent that we were once convicted of attempting to bring a stun gun onto an aircraft travelling from Newcastle to Belfast for reasons that we probably shouldn’t go into.

This chart also emphasises why Hampshire were relegated, with nobody even making it to 40 wickets, and one of the reasons that Worcestershire somehow stayed up – Alan Richardson’s definition of an Indian summer.

County Championship Division Two

Arguably fewer exceptional performances here, but the fact that Surrey had four players who made over 1,000 runs was pretty impressive. Mark Ramprakash only made it to 700 – is it time for him to concentrate on his dancing or will we see the return of the Mark to the top flight?

 

David Masters’ performances throughout the season were genuinely astonishing. 93 wickets is loads. But he was probably helped by the fact that none of his team-mates were exactly pinching them from under his nose. When Graham Napier is your second highest wicket-taker it’s time for some soul-searching about the makeup of your attack.

It’s something of a cliche to say that bowlers win matches but it bears out in the results above – Middlesex, Northants and Surrey all had genuine strike bowlers (Messrs Murtagh, Vaas and Linley respectively), while the likes of Kent clearly didn’t.

 

Some Conclusions

A picture is worth a thousand words. If you spend all season collating an Access database of every County Cricket scorecard you should probably do something with it. Saj Mahmood was narrowly pipped by Amjad Kahn in the battle of the giants.

Let us know (via the comments form below) if you’ve spotted any errors – we’re quite proud of our database but that doesn’t mean we don’t occasionally get the different Taylors confused or forget to include entire matches.