Durham County Cricket Club started the 2005 season with odds of 20-1 to win the Second Division of the County Championship, and in one-day cricket they started the season in Division Two of the National League. However, they were promoted in both competitions - in the County Championship, they finished second after an initial run of four wins and eight matches without defeat. They only lost two of 16 Championship matches, securing promotion a week before the end of the tournament. In the National League, they were promoted with two weeks to spare, and won their last five matches - yet finished two points behind Sussex Sharks, who had a similar run. The cup competitions gave them lower final placings, however - in the C&G Trophy, they were knocked out in the first round by Derbyshire, and without internationals Mike Hussey and Paul Collingwood, who played in the NatWest Series, they lost five of eight matches in the group stages in the Twenty20 Cup to finish fifth in the North Division.
Durham played 16 first class games in 2005, winning six, drawing eight and losing two. In 20 List A matches, they won twelve, lost six, and had two no-results, while eight Twenty20 matches resulted in two wins, five losses and one no-result.
Famous quotes containing the words county, cricket and/or club:
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“Of course we women gossip on occasion. But our appetite for it is not as avid as a man’s. It is in the boys’ gyms, the college fraternity houses, the club locker rooms, the paneled offices of business that gossip reaches its luxuriant flower.”
—Phyllis McGinley (1905–1978)