3 minute read
Now that everyone’s played four matches, the 2026 County Championship is starting to take shape. The shape it is taking is that of the 2025 County Championship.
No, really.
The top five currently looks like this.
Which isn’t really so radically different to how things finished last year.
In fact if Sussex hadn’t been handed a 12-point deduction at the start of the season, they’d be in fourth and Warwickshire would be in fifth.
People always say that county cricket is resistant to change, but this isn’t ordinarily what they mean.
How did we get/remain here?
We’ve already covered Surrey’s drawsome exploits at the Oval, so let’s take a closer look at Nottinghamshire this week. Surrey did actually win their last game, but it was cut from similarly featureless cloth (nylon?). They made 622 and failed to bowl Sussex out in the first innings after Jack Carson and Ollie Robinson made hundreds batting at nine and ten.
Nottinghamshire have been making runs too though. They actually have the top two run-scorers in the division: Joe Clarke and Ben Slater.
On top of that, Haseeb Hameed has made a hundred (we were hoping he’d make a handful and get back into the England team), while Ben Duckett has made three fifties in three matches, which has saved him the anguish of withdrawing from the IPL only to end up with neither the money nor any runs. He’d settle for that, we reckon, given the alternative.
The wickets have been shared around a bit more because Notts are one of those counties who have access to England bowlers you’ve forgotten about.
Ben Hutton and Liam Patterson-White are the staple carbs and then the county drops in all sorts of meaty goodness alongside them. Dillon Pennington is the young up-and-comer and Josh Tongue has turned up a couple of times. Fergus O’Neill is back over from Australia again as well and seemingly still unaffected by moss or verdigris (although he did suffer a rib injury in the game he played and being subbed out meant he couldn’t play the next one).
Then last week, Olly Stone took a five-for.
Olly Stone: remember him? He was in England’s Test team less than two years ago, but hasn’t been seen much since due to his wholehearted commitment to sustaining major injuries – the mark of a true fast bowler, we always think.
Stone has now played 11 matches in four seasons at Nottinghamshire, a not-entirely-surprising volume from a man who once missed near enough two years of cricket thanks to an injury sustained celebrating a wicket.
As a substance, stone has a reputation for resilience, but perhaps you want something that offers a little more give for fast bowling.