Bob Willis Trophy: Worcester v Somerset and more – live!

Ok, so… having chatted to the BBCs Kevin Howells and the rest of the Worcestershire press box:

If Somerset win, Somerset go through with Essex, unless Derbyshire can somehow beat Lancashire with a high run rate.

If Worcestershire win, and Derbyshire win, then three teams finish on 90 points. Then we have to wait for the ECB’s technical committee to meet and ruminate on whether the Covid game was “complete”. The tie breaker will then be wickets taken (“complete”) or net run rate (incomplete).

Good morning everyone and welcome to the final day of the Bob Willis Trophy group stages. For all but two counties, this is it, the end of the first-class season. We’re almost a hundred per cent sure that one of those two counties is Essex – subject to an ECB ruling at the end of the round on whether the Covid-related abandoned game at Bristol was “complete”. If not, the tie-breaker reverts to net run rate, though that only matters in the unlikely case that Derbyshire beat Lancashire. Got that? Good.

I’m currently on my way to New Road where the Championship’s most romantic sides clash swords for the other place in the final. Somerset will have slept easiest – for Worcester to win, they will have to canter to the biggest total made against Somerset this summer, and when bad light stopped play they needed another 187, with eight wickets in hand. The dream, though, is still alive.

As the green-seated train meanders through middle England, the countryside is on the turn. Leaves crinkle at the edges, trackside buddleias brown at the tips; it is the end of the party, the last few stragglers about to leave. The Bob has been great, better than we could have dreamed of in the strange unreality of May. Don’t blow out the candles just yet.

Yesterday’s news,

and the highlight from England’s T20 thrash against Australia last night. Take a bow, Adil Rashid.