Chris Woakes makes a comeback to professional cricket after two months

Chris Woakes made a decent comeback to professional cricket after being ruled out of cricketing action for the past two months after he suffered a side strain in the Champions Trophy opener in June against Bangladesh at The Oval. He played his first professional game after recovering by representing his county side Warwickshire at the Lord’s against Middlesex in the first division county championship game.

How the game panned out?

After electing to bat first, Warwickshire got bowled for just 126 runs with Steven Finn taking a 4-wicket haul. Woakes made 12 runs in the innings before getting out to Finn. In reply, Middlesex took a 35 run lead before getting bowled out for 161. Woakes dismissed the home team’s openers Sam Robson and Nick Gubbins but conceded 57 runs in his 11 overs.

In the second innings, the England all-rounder walked out to bat when his side was half down for 139 runs and only 103 run-lead in their bag. He played a crucial inning along with Matthews Lamb to extend the lead to a challenging one. The pair shared a 102-run stand for the 6th wicket by batting out for 32.1 overs. Woakes struck 11 fours in his 93-ball stay in which he scored 53 runs, his 20th first-class fifty. After Woakes departed at the score of 241/6, Warwickshire’s lower order added 120 further runs to set a 327-run target in front of Middlesex.

Keith Barker took out the opposition’s top 3 wickets while Chris Woakes trapped John Simpson and Ryan Higgins in front and cleaned up the Middlesex captain James Franklin, all for single digits to leave the hosts reeling at 45/6. They eventually got bowled out for 136 runs to lose the game by 190 runs. Woakes had bowling figures of 9-2-38-3 in the 2nd innings and bowling analysis of 20-2-95-5 in the match.

After his Champions Trophy lasted 3 overs, Woakes featured in a couple of 2nd XI matches last month before playing in a 1st XI match. However, he couldn’t get enough game-time to prove his fitness with T20 Blast games going around and might not be included in the squad for the upcoming day/night Test against West Indies at Edgbaston.