There's an article in the Cricketer, behind a paywall so I can't link it but this gives a flavour of how bad we were last year.
Essex's men lost eight straight games in the 2025 Blast season, and by my maths, they were lucky that is all it was. Their bowling was a bullet for opposition batters; they went at 10 runs an over.
Those are IPL numbers, and that is a competition with an extra batter thanks to the Impact Player rule.
Yet, in their last five games, they won three (their only wins). So if the tournament was longer, like 82 or 162 matches, maybe they were about to go on a run.
Essex were the worst bowling team. Not just bad, but completely horrible. Like they were forced to play the entire year without a seam on the ball, or the umpires were secretly dipping it in Tabasco before each delivery.
They took 77 wickets for the year, six fewer than Derbyshire, who had the second lowest. And Surrey took 109, which is slightly inflated because of the extra game (their quarter-final defeat to Northamptonshire). But these two teams were playing a different sport, and Essex weren't good at theirs.
It doesn't look on paper like Essex should be a bad bowling attack, for they had Mohammad Amir and Simon Harmer, two heavyweights. Young Luc Benkenstein did well with his leggies, and Shane Snater's inswingers are annoying.
Every other bowler for Essex went at more than 10 an over to balance these guys out. Those players include Sam Cook, Matt Critchley and Paul Walter. These are not bad bowlers.
To get a more holistic look at the teams, we take the batting average and subtract the bowling record to give us a differential. Plus is good, minus is bad. We then do the same on runs per over.
To be fair to Gloucestershire, their bowlers did actually pull back some of the damage with the ball. But on this metric, Essex were by far the worst team in the Blast last year.
And we've lost Amir from last year and Cook, who's not that good at T20 but better than the others we have. So we're likely to do even worse this year!
