Sussex County Cricket Club played in Division One of the County Championship and Division Two of the Totesport League in 2005. The 2003 County Champions started the season at 6–1 to retake the title. After a draw against the Loughborough students, Sussex started their season at the Oval. It was a fixture seriously curtailed by the rain, which made a draw a certainty, though they were able to pick up 9 points. The next Championship game saw a close draw against Hampshire: a game which might have been won, but for negative play by their opponents at the crunch. They then beat Derbyshire in a thriller in the Sunday League, before a four-day loss to Nottinghamshire. The next day they went down to Yorkshire, and then on the May Day Bank Holiday their game with Durham was abandoned halfway through. On 4 May they easily beat Bedfordshire to progress to Round Two of the C&G Trophy. They then beat Warwickshire in the totesport League, before securing a convincing innings victory against the same team in the County Championship, and then going on to beat the Bangladeshi tourists by an innings and 226 runs. On 18 May they beat Nottinghamshire to reach the Quarter-Finals of the C&G Trophy. There was then a draw against Middlesex which left them sixth in Division One of the Championship at the end of May. They then drew with Division One whipping boys Glamorgan in a game reduced to 3 days because of rain. 10 June saw an easy win against the Scottish Saltires, before drawing another rain-ravaged match with Nottinghamshire. In the National League on the following Sunday, they won a top-of-the-table clash with Durham, sending them within two points of the Northern lads. In the Twenty20 Cup, there were two meetings with Essex, each team winning one – in between, there was a rained-off match with Hampshire, in which both teams scored a point. Sussex then lost two successive matches, which was thought to permanently damage their quarter-final chances, but they recovered with wins over Hampshire and Kent which sent them into third place of the South Division. However, because they had fewer wins than Derbyshire in the North Division, they were knocked out as the worst third-place finisher. Following on from their disappointing Twenty20 Cup exit, they lost by 35 runs to Hampshire at the Rose Bowl in the Championship, but recovered to