SURREY’S four-time County Championship-winning captain Rory Burns said he was “proud” of his three-in-a-row colleagues as he picked out the home win over Essex as a key moment in the title defence.
Surrey ended their Division 1 campaign with a draw against the 2019 winners in Chelmsford and finished seventeen points ahead of second-place Hampshire.
Burns’ side defeated Essex, who finished the campaign fourth, by 145 runs at the Kia Oval in July.
“It feels pretty good,” Burns said. “I think the raw emotion was probably more there last week. [Sunday] was a fractionally stale trophy-lift after a pretty dead rubber last game. But I’m very proud of what this group of players has achieved over the last few years. To win it once is a very hard thing to do, to win it three times in a row is incredibly impressive and I’m very proud of them.
“I think the motivation at the start of every season is when you’ve done it once you want to do it again and you know the target is on your back. There is that pride in defending it, we’ve dressed it up in different ways in trying to attack it, but we’ll sit on three in a row for a little bit and we’ll think about next year in due course.
“I think beating these guys [Essex] at home was key. At the start of the year you try and pick put who your main rivals might be, and we knew Essex were a very good team. Beating them at home at the midway-ish point of the season was a big lift and gave us quite a big buffer at that stage. That was one of the big ones. And obviously getting over the line against Durham last week, particularly after coming back from a poor performance – or rather a mad hour at the end of that Somerset game. They are two stand-outs for me.
“It was more a re-focus on the job [after the Taunton defeat], saying [to the players] we were actually still out in front and we’d much rather be in our shoes and go and get the job done at home where we’ve pretty much done it all year.
“This one [title] has probably been the most difficult. Within our squad we have got a lot of moving parts, a lot of guys going out playing for England, which is brilliant, it is one of the challenges of being us. The target is on our back, people change the conditions of how they play us. The next one is always difficult but there is no reason why we can’t do it. We’ll certainly have a month off now, then I’ll start thinking about it.”
Burns also paid tribute to Alec Stewart who is standing down as director of cricket.
Burns said: “Stewie might have lost the title but he’s always going to be there in the background, I imagine, and helping us every way he can. He’s a true Surrey man. He’s still the gaffer.”
Dom Sibley batted for more than four hours for his third century of the season to ensure there was no last-day embarrassment before Surrey lifted aloft the trophy following an attritional draw.
Surrey savoured the traditional champagne-spraying celebrations for the third successive year after a season in which they won eight of their 14 matches. However, apart from Sibley’s 189-ball 125, they were comprehensively second best against Essex as underlined by the fact they only collected two bonus points from the game.
Sibley’s innings was a mixture of forcefulness, chiefly through the covers, and watchfulness as he dominated half-century stands with Dan Lawrence and Josh Blake before he was sixth man out with Surrey still nominally 143 runs shy of making Essex bat again.
The finale to the Championship season petered out in comedy as Essex bowlers changed bowling styles before handshakes were exchanged at 4.10pm with Surrey 267-7.
Essex, bowling sensibly at the time, had taken three wickets in 10 overs in the morning to introduce a little frisson to proceedings, but the game meandered towards the draw that had been inevitable since rain washed out all but 111 minutes’ play on the first two days. The draw meant Essex finished fourth, two points behind one-time title contenders Somerset.
