And why should they?

The general vibe of the County Championship of late (and honestly quite a lot of the time, not just now) is that something needs to change.

There need to be fewer teams, or at least fewer matches; they need to use a different ball; they need to play at different times of the season; and everyone needs to play whatever the hell Bazball is supposed to be this week.

But the County Championship has this kind of colossal gravity to it where no matter what you try and do, it doesn’t budge far.

It’s a bit like stretching pizza dough. You’re gently trying to tease it into the right shape without putting any holes in it, but each time you lay it out there’s a sort of latent elasticity where it starts retracting again.

So it was that the first week of the 2023 County Championship was shaped by Essex’s Jamie Porter and Hampshire’s Mohammad Abbas, both of whom took nine wickets in victories.

Porter was the top wicket taker when Essex won the Championship in 2017 and also took plenty when they won again in 2019. His team mate Simon Harmer took the most that year and he’s still around too.

Abbas meanwhile is a recurring character in our early season county coverage. We’ve just spotted that we also wrote about him exactly a year ago. Abbas now has 100 first class wickets for Hampshire at an average of just 16.5. This year he will again be complemented by Kyle Abbott and Keith Barker.

The years roll on but the song remains the same.

Or at least broadly the same because obviously things do change. Porter and Abbas are the archetypal Championship seamers, perfectly suited to UK pitches and the Dukes ball, but the Kookaburra is flying in for a couple of rounds of matches later in the year.

The two men could be forgiven for resenting this – having their skills blunted with a pudding of a ball that gives bowlers next to nothing to work with after the first few overs – but Porter in particular has far more to gain than lose. This will be a rare opportunity to demonstrate that his ability could translate to other conditions. People can’t say that you’d never take wickets with a Kookaburra when you’re doing precisely that.

Just to give a full explanation of the early Division One table, we should probably mention that Kent were the other winners. Perhaps we’re being unfair but that result doesn’t immediately feel as significant with regards to the outcome of this year’s Championship.

This is roughly what we’ll be covering this year. Stick with us by signing up for our email.

There is much debate about fairness in county cricket at the minute. Is it fair that Nottinghamshire – who finished third in the Championship last year – have to play in division two based on how they performed in 2019? Is it fair that teams in the top flight won’t play every other team twice? Is it fair that Hampshire have Mohammad Abbas?

For those new to English domestic cricket, or struggling to catch up, here’s our lowdown on the structure of the 2022 County Championship.

With an even number of teams in the first division, there was no reason why the competition couldn’t get underway with a full round of fixtures. No obvious reason anyway. Lancashire and Yorkshire sat things out anyway. You have to ease into these things.

That left us with four matches, three of which were drawn. We are therefore left drawing our Big Conclusions from the solitary victory/defeat result: Hampshire beating Somerset by 10 wickets inside three days.

One match isn’t much to go on, but that’s a pretty big win. We can therefore state with complete certainty that either Hampshire are an incredible side or Somerset are a godawful one. It’s possible both of those things are true.

Hampshire cruised to a score of 400+ but Somerset failed to reach 200 in either of their two innings either side of that. How was this so? Well, Hampshire have a pace attack comprising Kyle Abbott, Mohammad Abbas and Keith Barker (who has been taking cheap wickets and chipping in with handy runs since Darren Stevens was merely a ‘senior pro’).

That attack is not cheating exactly, but it’s not one you’d be keen to come up against early season. (Barker has taken 449 first-class wickets at 24.81, in case you’re wondering – mostly for Warwickshire.)

Not every type of bowler is equally useful in the County Championship. While fast bowlers and leg-spinners are just fundamentally more exciting, teams don’t get quite the same bang-per-buck from them as from skilful, nagging, fast-medium bowlers. Skilful, nagging, fast-medium is more often than not the most effective type of bowling and fast-medium bowlers don’t come more skilful or nagging than Mohammad Abbas.

As we’ve said, it’s not cheating to field Mohammad Abbas, but having the use of someone so good at such an important element does feel a bit unfair. It’s such an imbalance. It’s a bit Dads v Lads.

Abbas, Abbott, Barker. You wonder how good Hampshire’s attack could be if they were willing to venture deeper into the alphabet.

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2 minute readFootage emerged this week of a player who could only ever have been from Pakistan. Supposedly 15 years old – but actually 17 – Naseem Shah took 6-59 in his second first-class match via a heady masala of hooping away-swingers, yorkers and helmet-rattlers.

Meanwhile, in Abu Dhabi, Shah’s countryman Mohammad Abbas was working his way to 54 Test wickets at an average of 15.94 via his increasingly familiar method of medium-pace line and length.

It’s like the old saying goes, there’s more than one way to discover the phone number of a drug dealer who appears to be making efforts to become a property developer.

In series three of The Wire, Detective McNulty goes to Stringer Bell’s community college, tells some lies and gets his phone number from the school records. Meanwhile, his colleague Detective Freamon gets the exact same information from property purchasing records. Both methods work.

Cricket is a rich and varied sport where it makes total sense to get overexcited about watching Shah crowbar holes in a team while simultaneously marvelling at the astonishing ability of Abbas to gently unravel a batting line-up by pulling on just one or two very specific threads. Cricket is ace.

And so is Abbas. In May he took 17 wickets across two Test matches – one against Ireland and one against England – and looked every bit the archetypal early season green pitch nibbler. Bowling in much the same way, he has now taken 12 wickets against Australia in the UAE in a Test and a half. He’s succeeded in the West Indies too.

According to CricViz, Abbas bowls at the stumps more than anyone and is “unburdened by excessive pace,” typically delivering the ball at just under 80mph. He doesn’t go for runs because he doesn’t do anything wrong.

If Naseem Shah appears to be in the business of trying to persuade a sufficiently large number of stars to line up to earn him his wickets, Abbas is more like Peter Siddle, operating within a very narrow performance range where facing him is like walking a tightrope.

Maybe one day they’ll work together.