It would be interesting to analyse the current Division One counties and have a look at how many have English qualified players as their top three in the batting order.

I'm guessing it would be a very small selection.

On a not unrelated note, Phil Jacques has retired from first class cricket in Australia so he can take up a UK passport on signing for Yorkshire rather than be an overseas player.

better start, dead rubber though

Pakistan all out for 99!

Can we manage a first innings lead?

(Morgan keeps his place in an unchanged England XI.)

88/4

104/6 at the close.

This has been one of the most bizarre series I can remember.

Batters poor again, felt for KP today. (Suppose Trott too). Bell must think he's run over next doors cat.

The bowlers as per were fantastic, hopefully we'll get another cameo from either Broad or Swann or maybe even Monty to get England a decent lead.

Every run the tail gets will be frustrating for Pakistan, hopefully we get a bit of luck with edges through vacant slip regions etc.

If we're chasing 140+, gulp. Brace yourself.

That's just what I'm fearing, JWP

I really don't know what's happened to our batsmen's confidence, since we smited India to all corners of the grounds, 6 months ago. The bowlers are doing a sterling job, despite Tremlett and Bresnan missing. There's a few people who need to "stand up and be counted", when they walk down the pavillion steps with a bat in their hand, next time.

I'm astounded as to Morgan's inclusion for this test. He's not REGULAR test match standard (yet)

[quote="GT"]192 all out, glorious stuff...

On the county side of things, what are people's thoughts on the Morgan Review? Shocking if you ask me, the one competition that doesn't need tinkering with is the Championship. Pillocks. And all for a Champions League that no one really cares about nor seems to be that secure for the long term. If it is going to be p*ssed about with, I'm just glad we won it again beforehand.

Talking of which, for no reason other than to brag, I'm off to Abu Dhabi the last week in March for the Champion County match against the MCC. Should be fun. [/
Hear hear! This review has produced 60 pages to basically take 2 games off championship and T 20 and revert back to 50 overs! It took months to come up with that! They did not address the issue. Too much T20!last season at OT we had combined crowds in 8 group games of less than 20000! When it was 4 home group games we got 30000! Enough said! It has it's place but is overexposed! Presume there will be a bigger crowd for the champion county match than the tests!

I'm disgusted by the Morgan Review. The various one day competitions have been tinkered with so much over the last decade I'm not really bothered what happens to them, but cutting the number of Championship matches when the current format has worked so well and produced so many exciting finishes since it was adopted in 2000 is shocking.

I'm not sure how to link it as it's on a PDF, but Morgan's proposed calendar for the 2014 season is on my desktop. The season starts on Friday 11 April with the one day knockout final on Saturday 20 September; the Champions League is scheduled to begin on 10 September. The season is still just as long, it overlaps with the Champions League, and there are still 19 dates allocated for Championship matches, the same as last season. The only difference is that each team is inactive for five out of 19 rounds instead of three out of 19 rounds.

Pakistan look to be taking control of this one now, if we don't break the Younis/Azhar Ali partnership soon we might be in trouble - as I have no confidence in us chasing anything remotely challenging at the moment.