Avatar duly changed again.

The look on Boycott's face after he'd been informed was priceless.

Good win for Lancs yesterday, although I believe the boundaries were pretty short, hence the high scoring. 63-1 at the moment against Warwickshire at Aigburth after losing the toss. Again. Rain keeps coming and going, so that's going to affect things. Although if it ends up preventing a result, no doubt we'll hear the usual crap about it having a detrimental effect on our title bid.

The way we are batting rain might be our best bet to salvage a draw.

You know that and I know that, what Jim Cumbes comes out with is another matter entirely, however.

Good to see the ECB significantly weakening county sides for the current round of fixtures by taking players for the Lions against a collection of club standard cricketers masquerading as Sri Lanka A.

Yorkshire have lost two of their top five from the batting line-up for the game against Hampshire in Root and Bairstow.

I can see the point of the Lions during the winter giving young players experience of tours and different conditions, but is there any need for them to play games during the domestic season?

Likewise Surrey are missing Dernbach & Meaker from the pace attack, as well as Tremlett, though fortunately we've only got one CB40 match this week.

It would have made more sense for one of the counties with no fixture to play Sri Lanka A. I guess it's a political / diplomatic thing that a touring side is granted a fixture against a representative national team.

Looking at the scorecard from Southampton it seems the ECB have done Yorkshire a favour by effectively picking their top order for them!

To be fair, it is only Hampshire. Even Anthony McGrath (without a 50 in any form of cricket all season) has managed to bag himself a century.

Yorkshire 418-4 just after lunch. Scoring rate has been pretty mediocre, but Hampshire bowled two spinners for most of yesterday so got 105 overs in

I was forgetting about the quality (or otherwise) of the opposition 532 all out from 171.2 overs, with Hants two main spinners bowling 51 & 49.2 overs respectively. I guess it's more important for Yorks to make sure Hants don't close the gap in the table, and that won't happen now unless Hants can somehow score 650+ and the pitch completely disintegrates on the final day. There must be a fair chance Yorks can force the follow on and a win from here.

Saj bowled the worst ball I've ever seen in person yesterday. Absolutely loving dreadful.

Very frustrating day. The weather, over-cautious umpiring, not declaring straight away, two plumb LBW shouts turned down, three Chinese cuts missing the stumps by inches... Pretty gutting result, in the end. Still, onwards and upwards.