English County Championship: Quirky Stats

Essex won their seventh County Championship in 2017, lifting the trophy the year after they had been promoted from Division Two. They became the first team to perform that back-to-back double since Nottinghamshire, who won Division Two in 2004 and the main crown the following year.

It was very much the year of Kumar Sangakkara with the bat. In his final season of first-class cricket, the Sri Lankan legend came within 16 runs of becoming just the fourth batsman to score centuries in six successive first-class innings, after a run of:

136 v Lancashire
105 v Warwickshire
114 & 120 v Middlesex
200 v Essex

Not content with that, Sangakkara then reeled off three more centuries in successive innings:

180* v Yorkshire (at Headingley)
164 v Yorkshire (at The Oval)
157 v Somerset

Sangakkara ended his Championship season with 1,491 runs at an average of 106.50 – only the ninth occasion when a batsman has scored at least a thousand runs in the competition in a season at an average of at least a hundred.

Essex’s Simon Harmer achieved something that hadn’t been managed since the Second World War: by taking successive match hauls of 14/128 against Warwickshire and 14/172 against Middlesex, the South African off-spinner became the first bowler to take at least 28 wickets in two consecutive matches since Tom Goddard in 1939.

Hamidullah Qadri became the first player born in the 2000s to feature in the County Championship and the youngster immediately made his mark. At the age of just 16 years and 203 days, he became Derbyshire’s youngest-ever first-class cricketer and bowled his side to victory with 5/60 against Glamorgan in Cardiff. He also broke Charlie Townsend’s record, set in 1893, to become the youngest bowler to take five wickets in a County Championship innings.

Nottinghamshire all-rounder Samit Patel has been on the fringes of the England team for a while and he performed a notable double with the bat last summer. The 33-year-old scored an unbeaten 257 against Gloucestershire and then followed up with 247 against Leicestershire to become the 12th player to score at least 200 in successive innings in the competition. The last to achieve the feat was Justin Langer, who performed the extraordinary double of scoring 342 for Somerset against Surrey in July 2006 and 315 against Middlesex in April 2007 in back-to-back knocks.

Shiv Chanderpaul had a successful season for Lancashire, scoring 831 Championship runs at an average of 51.93 with three centuries. At the age of 43 years and 41 days he also became the oldest player in the competition for nearly 20 years – not since Alan Butcher was called up, in the midst of an injury crisis, to play for Surrey against Derbyshire in 1998 at the age of 44 years and 213 days has an older player appeared in the Championship.

Imran Tahir took the field for Derbyshire in four County Championship matches in the 2017 season, which meant that he has represented six different counties, equalling the all-time record held by Andrew Carter and Marcus North. The South Africa leg-spinner had previously played for Middlesex (2003), Yorkshire (2007), Hampshire (2008-2009, 2011), Warwickshire (2010) and Nottinghamshire (2015-2016).

All 11 of Kent’s batsmen reached double-figures in their first innings against Gloucestershire at Canterbury – the 33rd time in County Championship history that had occurred. However, the team total was only 298, making it just the third time that a team had been dismissed for less than 300 despite all batsmen scoring at least 10.