As is often the case, we found ourselves agreeing with a discussion on Test Match Sofa during coverage of the Australia-Pakistan test at Headingley. This particular debate related to Adil Rashid and whether he should be elevated to the Englandtest and/or one day squad. So far this season, Rashid has taken 49 championship wickets at 27.87 and scored 524 runs at 52.40. These are stats that the likes of Tim Bresnan, Luke Wright and James Tredwell, all of whom seem ahead of Rashid in the England pecking order, could only dream of.
In our humble opinion, Rashid should go to Australia (just ahead of Monty Panesar) as the second spinner where he could expect to play at Adelaide and/or Sydney. The Yorkshire leg-spinner should certainly go to the World Cup, where three spinners will be required. But will the England selectors go where their Australian counterparts have already trod by picking fellow young leg spinner (but inferior to Rashid) Steve Smith?
Whatever his fate over the winter, Rashid stretches his lead at the top of our County Player to Watch in 2010 table, despite the return of erstwhile leader Steve Finn from his strength conditioning course. Rashid took five for 87 and scored 52 not out as Yorkshire drew with Essexin Division 1. That is Rashid's third successive championship five for and he has now amassed 24 wickets in those three matches - a rich vein of form indeed.
Elsewhere, Ravi Bopara continued his resurgence in form with a hundred in each innings in the aforementioned clash with Yorkshire. He too must be in serious contention for a place in England's Ashes squad. Monty Panesar also is right back in form, taking his second successive five for (including the wicket of England captain Andrew Strauss) as Sussex just failed to beat Middlesex in Division 2.
Other notable performances included a swashbuckling hundred from Rory Hamilton-Brown in Surrey's innings victory over Northants plus fifties from James Taylor and Alex Hales for Leicestershire against Glamorgan and Notts in their win over Warwickshire respectively.
Regular visitors to this site will know that just before the start of the county season, we named our dozen players to watch (see Part 1 and Part 2 here). We thought it would be fun to see how the 12 fare over the 2010 season, so devised what is probably a flawed points system to help assess their progress. We recently extended this list to 16, adding Andrew Gale, Chris Woakes, James Hildreth and Ben Stokes to the mix.
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