One win from eight South Group games has contributed to an uncertain start to the campaign for The Oval club
Surrey captain Rory Burns admits his team needs to regroup following a sobering three weeks of Royal London One-Day Cup action, in which they won just one of their eight matches to finish bottom of the South Group.
The competition ended with a seventh defeat on Tuesday, against Somerset at Taunton, and it is at the same ground next week that Burns and Surrey will look to get back to winning ways when the Specsavers County Championship resumes on May 14.
Somerset, Kent and Warwickshire are their first opponents in a potentially tough stretch of away fixtures which begins a two-month schedule of four-day cricket.
The champions know that Somerset – last year’s runners-up – will see this next game as a massive opportunity to build on their own great start to their red ball campaign in April when they won both their fixtures to move to the top of Division One with 43 points.
By contrast, Surrey only played one championship game in last month’s four-day launch fortnight, gaining 11 points from a drawn encounter with Essex at the Kia Oval, and Burns said: “We need to draw a line under the Royal London Cup and prepare for what is an important period of red-ball cricket.
“Losing to Somerset was a disappointing end to a very disappointing competition for us. Things didn’t go according to plan at all.”
Burns, Mark Stoneman and Will Jacks – the only Surrey players to appear in all eight Royal London games – all failed to get past 200 runs for the competition and only Ben Foakes and Dean Elgar, once the South African Test opener had acclimatised properly following his arrival on April 24, showed consistent form in a top-order that never fired as a unit.
Foakes scored 328 runs at an average of 46.85 from his seven appearances, with three half-centuries, and Elgar hit two fifties in his five innings while amassing 180 runs at 45.00.
“Ben was brilliant throughout the group games but we asked too much of him,” added Burns, who also picked out the fast bowling of 21-year-old Conor McKerr as another positive to emerge from the white-ball competition.
And, with 18 players in all used during the eight games – as England one-day squad call-ups and injuries to Ollie Pope, Rikki Clarke and Jason Roy badly disrupted pre-laid plans – Surrey could not settle and giving added experience to the likes of McKerr and fellow youngsters Jamie Smith and Ryan Patel became a sensible necessity.
Morne Morkel’s 13 wickets at 18 runs apiece, in his six matches, underlined his enduring class but it was also a wise move to rest the giant paceman from two of the 50-over games.
Morkel will now look to spearhead the resumption of Surrey’s title defence.
Sam Curran’s return from the Indian Premier League, plus the anticipated returns from injury of Clarke, Scott Borthwick, Amar Virdi, Jade Dernbach and Matt Dunn during the coming weeks, will be a further boost to the county as they seek to put their Royal London woes behind them.
Report courtesy of the ECB Reporters Network
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