Gus Atkinson added to concerns over England’s pace bowling by suffering a concussion during Surrey’s County Championship match against Nottinghamshire.<\/p>\n
In the week England could name their squad for the first Test against New Zealand, Atkinson was twice struck on the head by international team-mate Josh Tongue.<\/p>\n
Batting in Surrey’s first innings at Trent Bridge, Atkinson was hit in successive Tongue overs – with the second blow particularly nasty.<\/p>\n
The 28-year-old was assessed on both occasions and batted on. He eventually called for more treatment and retired on 27, replaced in the match by Reece Topley.<\/p>\n
“Gus passed the tests on the field, otherwise he would not have been able to stay out there,” said Surrey head coach Gareth Batty. <\/p>\n
“He felt like he was OK, but duty of care comes into it. I don’t know the ins and outs of what exactly happened but it clearly came to a point where he had to come off. He’s OK in himself.”<\/p>\n
Atkinson’s injury came on the same day as England team-mate Ollie Pope did not appear to bat for Surrey until number 10 because of a hand injury.<\/p>\n
England, who are set to confirm Australian Marcus North as their new national selector, will soon name a squad for the first Test against New Zealand at Lord’s that begins on 4 June.<\/p>\n
While much speculation has centred on which players could come into the batting line-up, England’s pace-bowling department is looking depleted.<\/p>\n
Atkinson and Tongue appeared to be the most likely specialist seamers to be in the squad, along with two or three others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gus Atkinson added to concerns over England’s pace bowling by suffering a concussion during Surrey’s County Championship match…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":577080,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-577079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/577079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=577079"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/577079\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/577080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=577079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=577079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=577079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}