County cricket: draws dominate as bowlers toil and weather spoils

Surrey stay top of Division One after the gods of the earth and the sky conspired to make a draw inevitable at Bristol. It didn’t look like that when Gloucestershire’s decision to bowl paid dividends, the in-form Ryan Patel and Test batters, Rory Burns and Hashim Amla, back in the hutch on the first morning. But the next nine wickets were to realise over 1,000 runs and, with the last day washed out, no result was possible.

Two batters scored double centuries but presented very contrasting cases for Test recognition. Jamie Smith is 21, hits the ball very hard with the wicketkeeper-batsman’s freedom (though, interestingly, Ollie Pope deputised for Ben Foakes in this match), and will score plenty of runs in the next 10 years – the question is for whom? Chris Dent is 10 years his senior, an opening batsman who crossed 10,000 first class runs in this match and appears to have been around forever.

Whether England’s new brooms will sweep either into the conversation (or other representatives of the ends of the spectrum they represent) may tell us much about what we probably shouldn’t call a reset.

Hampshire and Lancashire stay tucked in behind the leaders with day four rain guaranteeing a draw at the Ageas Bowl, 24 points splitting evenly.

This was a rare example this season of a pitch that nibbled consistently for the bowlers and demanded batters play themselves in carefully (and get a bit of luck), the difficulty factor reducing over time. Nobody did that better than Nick Gubbins, who made twin centuries, the key factor in Hampshire engineering a very decent chance to press for a victory that the weather took away.

Lancashire needed late order runs from Phil Salt and Tom Bailey, both dropped early on, whose eighth wicket