Sean Abbott hamstrung

Going home for treatment, which sounds like it must be a serious tear rather than a pull. I doubt we'll see him back for the Championship or T20.

I wonder if we did our due diligence when we signed him? Shades of Graeme Smith?

I also wonder who we might be able to whistle up at short notice to replace him in either or ideally in both formats. This is where Alec Stewart usually excels, but I sense he has his work cut out this time..

If we can't get a like-for-like replacement of similar quality, given the need to wrap Topley in cotton wool and how mediocre our other seam options are, the Moriarty/Virdi combo would become even more essential if we are to stand a chance of bowling teams out in red-ball ticket.

There's no more 4 championship till 4 July so maybe one of the Kiwis might be persuaded to hang around.
A real shame as I was impressed with Abbott who can also bat.
If there's not a replacement I can see us going with Topley, Overton, Rikki and Clark unless Dunn, McKerr or Atkinson step up.

I'm not bothered about T20 as we could pack the side with spinners.

Sam Curran will probably go into the England bubble for the Test series with India but with any luck we should have Tom Curran available.

A blow but if I was Alec Stewart. I would be gettiing the number for Matt Henry who has played in the blast before for Kent. As I understand it the Kiwis will be sending players back after the Second Test but before the WTC and with Trent Boult returning Matt would be not only available for a stint but more crucially already in the UK.

Does anyone know if Topley is also injured? I’ve seen as much on social media but haven’t been able to find a source for that.

Big loss. As soon as I saw this I was thinking if any of the NZ squad would be available

as for Topley, he has played in the warm up matches, but only bowled 1 over in the last 1. Not sure if that was due to injury or not

Further to this, the club has just announced that Topley has been ruled out for 4-6 weeks with a side strain, thereby missing the entirety of the Blast.

Hopefully, he'll be ready when the 4 day matches return.

According to the BBC he will miss the next two Championship games and all the first T20s. Surprised he's circa side strain as he hasn't played for 3 weeks. Perhaps that's the problem.

He’s been similarly injury-prone since he game through as a youngster at Essex. Pace bowling takes a toll and some players’ bodies just don’t hold up well.

Seems we are yet again in yet another injury crisis as we were last year and the season before. I remember last year Morkelplayed one match and never played again. Seems our fitness (or unfitness) regime is not fit for purpose. I can except that we can be very unlucky one season,but this is recurring problem,which we have discussed last year. We are severely handicapped with injuries like this constantly, not surprising we haven’t achieved anything in red ball cricket.

As I have said on countless times in the past, the coaching is all wrong. They are trying to train these guys to be Olympic athletes, not cricketers, pumping iron, running round the ground. Get out and play is the best training. And I don't care how good Topley is, he is just a walking injury. I'd rather have a less talented player or players who play most games, not 25% of the season. Look at Mckeer, Durnbach, Dunn, Plunkett..They are almost as bad.

I said the other day that this was a bog loss, and even more so now that Topley is also unavailable

Can Alec pull a rabbit out of the hat again