Essex County Cricket Club played their cricket during the 2005 season in Division Two of the County Championship and Division One of the Sunday League. They started the season 8-1 to win the Second Division Title, and were second in the Championship table at 9 May, but five matches without a win following that sent them down to fifth place at the Twenty20 break in June. They only intermittently broke into the top three after the Twenty20 break, and when they did their opponents behind them usually had a game in hand. They finished fifth, 15.5 points behind the promotion spot, and with 36 bowling points they picked up the fewest in the entire Division Two. In the National League, however, they only lost once in sixteen games - against Gloucestershire Gladiators in August - and won the League on 28 August with three games to play. In the C&G Trophy, they went out to Lancashire at the second round stage, while they finished fifth in the group stage of the Twenty20 Cup, two points off a guaranteed quarter-final spot.
Essex played 17 first-class games in 2005, winning six, drawing seven and losing four. They also played 18 List A games, winning 14, losing two and having two no-results, and in eight Twenty20 games they won three, lost three and had two no-results.
Famous quotes containing the words essex, county, cricket and/or club:
“The unknown always seems unbelievable, Lucas.”
—Harry Essex (b. 1910)
“I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name,—if ten honest men only,—ay, if one HONEST man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done forever.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“All cries are thin and terse;
The field has droned the summer’s final mass;
A cricket like a dwindled hearse
Crawls from the dry grass.”
—Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)
“Women ... are completely alone, though they were born and bred upon this soil, as if they belonged to another class in creation.”
—“Jennie June” Croly 1829–1901, U.S. founder of the woman’s club movement, journalist, author, editor. F, Demorest’s Illustrated Monthly Mirror of Fashions, pp. 363-4 (December 1870)