Surrey

Surrey have gone into games in three different centuries knowing they were favourites to lift the County Championship, and the version of the club playing now is no exception. After sixteen years without the title, a rebuild under captains Andrew Strauss and then Rory Burns brought the championship back to the Oval in 2022, and Surrey held it through 2023 and 2024 as well — three in a row. It is the twenty-second outright title in the club's history, a tally headed by the run between 1952 and 1958, when seven consecutive championships fell to a side built around Peter May and Jim Laker and still stands as the record streak in the competition.

The club was constituted in Kennington in October 1845, and the ground it settled on, the Oval, has stayed with it ever since; a redevelopment finished in 2021 lifted capacity to around 28,000. Cream and chocolate brown are the colours worn in first-class cricket, and the brown caps players have long worn in the field gave the club its nickname.

No one has scored more first-class runs for Surrey than Jack Hobbs, whose total of 61,760 has stood unmatched since his playing days. The club's academy has kept the side supplied with England players more recently, sending through Ollie Pope, Sam Curran and Jamie Smith among others.

Across London, Middlesex remain the fixture Surrey supporters mark on the calendar before any other. Matches between the two are known simply as the London Derby, and the result there is felt regardless of where either side stands in the table that season.