I probably owe readers of this column an apology. Three weeks ago, in a preview to the season, I suggested odds of 16/1 for Sussex to win promotion from Division Two of the LV= County Championship might be worth a cheeky fiver.
Now, after two defeats and a backs-to-the-wall draw in their first three matches, Sussex find themselves in a familiar position at the bottom of the table. And already those odds have gone out to 22/1. I hope you kept your money in your pocket.
In the wake of the innings and 34 runs defeat to Worcestershire on Saturday, familiar targets were being lined up by the keyboard warriors but there are mitigating factors.
Injuries, particularly among the bowling attack, are crippling the red-ball team at the moment. Coach Ian Salisbury named seven either injured or unavailable after the heavy loss at New Road.
Grant Stewart, the all-rounder signed last week on a month’s loan from Kent, was summoned back to Canterbury immediately after the Worcestershire defeat, while Steven Finn, Sean Hunt, Fynn Hudson-Prentice, Jack Carson and George Garton all missed out through injury.
It won’t have improved Sussex supporters’ moods to see recent ex-players Ben Brown, Luke Wells and Danny Briggs doing so well for their new counties while Sussex subsided to Worcestershire.
Jofra Archer’s return after elbow surgery is almost certain to be when the Vitality Blast starts at the end of May rather than in the County Championship.
Meanwhile, the ECB will decide whether Ollie Robinson, who trained with the team at Worcester this week, can return when Durham visit Hove on Thursday (28 April). He was due to play this week but an infection after a visit to the dentist delayed his return.
Injuries are part and parcel of the sporting life, but Sussex are entitled to feel they have been dealt a particularly bad hand over the last few weeks.
With no opportunity to rest and rotate, young bowlers like Henry Crocombe are being asked to keep going while Tom Haines and Tom Clark, who are batsmen first and foremost, are having to bowl more fill-in than they would normally be expected to. Off-spinner Carson’s absence is being acutely felt.
Haines and Clark have already bowled 91 overs between them over what is effectively three innings, when you bear in mind Nottinghamshire only needed three overs in their second dig to complete a ten-wicket win and Derbyshire and Worcestershire both batted just once.
Clark made a century against Nottinghamshire – the first of his career – and Haines has already scored 393 runs, including his career-best 243 in the draw at Derby, but tellingly neither made much of a contribution with the bat against Worcestershire.
It will also have been a while since Mohammad Rizwan kept wicket for 270 overs in the space of a week as he did in Sussex’s last two matches.
The schedule has been pretty brutal too. Sussex will have played six weeks running by the end of this first block of Championship games. Durham’s visit is followed by a home game against Middlesex and a trip to Leicester before New Zealand arrive for the first match of their tour on Thursday 19 May.
By then Salisbury will hope to have a few more bowlers to pick from so he can at least offer the world champions some meaningful practice.
We saw at the end of last season how a combination of a tough schedule and morale-sapping defeats affected a young group of players but there are shafts of light amid the gloom.
Chet Pujara’s record at his three previous counties was modest (he averaged 28) but he’s already hit a double hundred and a hundred in two games so far and is looking to be a shrewd acquisition, as much for the experience he can pass on to the likes of Haines, Clark and Ali Orr, who shaped up well at New Road despite two fairly modest scores.
But Sussex do need to get some of their players fit again. It was fair likely that their best chance of success this season was always going to be in the Vitality Blast, which begins in just over a month.
But it won’t do a lot for the morale of everyone from players to supporters if they go into the T20 competition already out of contention for promotion in the County Championship.
It’s now over a year since they last won a four-day game and you have to go back to August 2020 for their last Championship win at Hove, and that was played in the absence of spectators because of the pandemic.
At least a three-day finish at Worcester will mean an extra day of rest and recovery time ahead of Durham’s visit.
Not much of a consolation when you’ve just been tonked by an innings, but Sussex will take any help they can get at the moment. And with Robinson back against Durham, a corner might quickly be turned.
Follow Bruce Talbot on Twitter @brucetalbot1.
