The County Championship returned on Monday without any fanfare after a three week break, during which domestic cricket has been devoted to the never ending saga of the FP t20 competition.
Contradictorily the shortest form of the game lends itself to a competition longer than War and Peace and unbelievably we are still only about halfway through the league part of the tournament, so the Championship will have to settle for second place on the bill until the end of July.
Still the return of the Championship plus England's Nat West series with Australia and the parallel England A tri-one day series with India A and West Indies A means that the table to determine our leading county player of the season has resumed with relish.
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.
Anyway, with Steven Finn off having strength conditioning, Adil Rashid took advantage to move within 18 points of the 'new Glenn McGrath' with an excellent all-round performance in the Roses match; why the leg spinner is not in the England A squad, we will never know. Craig Kieswetter also moves up the table thanks to five matches in England one day colours against Scotland and Australia, despite disappointing returns against the latter. Elsewhere, Chris Tremlett's four for 94 saw Surrey prevail against Derbyshire, James Taylor's 43 not out saw Leicestershire past the post against Worcestershire and Ravi Bopara's bowling continued to impress for England A.
| Player | County | Played | Points | Points awarded* | ||
| Finn | Middlesex | 7 | 129 | County Appearance | 5 | |
| Rashid | Yorkshire | 9 | 111 | Lions Appearance | 10 | |
| Kieswetter | Somerset | 16 | 100 | Test appearance | 20 | |
| Taylor | Leics | 10 | 94 | T20I/ODI/Lions one day | 3 | |
| Gale | Yorkshire | 10 | 93 | Score of 40-49 | 3 | |
| Hildreth | Somerset | 8 | 90 | 50-99 | 5 | |
| Stokes | Durham | 8 | 76 | 100-199 | 10 | |
| Woakes | Warks | 8 | 74 | 200+ | 20 | |
| Hamilton-Brown | Surrey | 9 | 73 | 3 wickets in an innings | 3 | |
| Bopara | Essex | 7 | 62 | 4 wickets | 5 | |
| Panesar | Sussex | 8 | 56 | 5 or 6 wickets | 10 | |
| Northeast | Kent | 8 | 55 | 7wickets+ | 20 | |
| Tremlett | Surrey | 5 | 38 | Catches | 1 | |
| Hales | Notts | 3 | 32 | Stumpings | 3 | |
| Wainwright | Yorkshire | 4 | 24 | |||
| Borthwick | Durham | 4 | 22 |
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