County Championship: News on Surrey

Tim Groenewald will be missed

Good to see that I called the twelve for the Surrey game correctly last night and, while we’re a fair bit below full strength, our hosts are too. They have lost Jade Dernbach to England duty (I’m still not convinced he’s that good, but…) and Gary Wilson to Ireland commitments. So their squad lines up as follows:

Batty, Amla, Ansari, Burns, Curran, Davies, De Bruyn, Edwards, Harinath, Linley, Sibley, Solanki, Tremlett.

There are some fine players in there, with Amla an obvious danger man, Solanki a frequent thorn in our side and De Bruyn and Davies very good batsmen. Tremlett is also a fine bowler, but they have under-achieved this summer and we are the team on a roll at present.

Whisper it quietly, but I think we have the ability and the team spirit to win this and take a massive stride towards safety. We will need a massive effort from everyone and the absence of Tim Groenewald will be important, but we have the self-belief that is so important at this stage of the summer.

We now know that we can win games at this level and have beaten two of the three best sides in the country in our past two games. If we approach this game with the same attitude and don’t take a statistically inferior side for granted, we could get to Sunday with a smile on our faces.

Somerset had a decent day today at Lord’s (how did Chawla get 50?) and we’ll need to hope that we didn’t knock too much confidence out of Middlesex in the last game. Time for ‘Buck’ Rogers to do us a favour, I think.

Like all of you, I will be keeping a very close eye on this one tomorrow.

Go and do us proud, lads. You know you can do it.