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Nick Browne 49 sets visitors off well but Northamptonshire bowlers do some damage

ECB Reporters Network26-Sep-2022Northamptonshire’s seamers shared the spoils as they helped rout Essex’s batting line-up and hold the visitors to 220 for 8 on a rain-affected opening day of this LV= County Championship clash at Wantage Road.But despite wickets falling in clumps, a captain’s knock of 55 from Tom Westley helped keep Essex in the contest in a ninth-wicket stand of 68 in 20 overs with Ben Allison (37).Earlier, Ben Sanderson struck twice in two balls to arrest a lightning Essex start to the day which saw Nick Browne and Sir Alastair Cook plunder 68 runs off the first 13 overs.But when Cook fell for 31, it precipitated the first mini collapse of the day as four wickets went down in 45 balls, two of them to Sanderson and Essex went into lunch on 107 for 4 before rain prevented any play in the afternoon session.When play resumed after tea, Westley and Feroze Khushi looked fluent as they rebuilt in a stand of 47 before Essex collapsed again losing four wickets for nine runs in 32 balls. Tom Taylor picked up three wickets amid the carnage before Westley and Allison made sure honours were even at close of play.In the morning, Northamptonshire’s decision to insert Essex after winning the toss was called into question as opening pair Browne and Cook unfurled a string of boundaries.Cook found the ropes three times in Jack White’s fifth over, playing some trademark backfoot punches and cuts. Meanwhile Browne also hit a trio of boundaries off Tom Taylor’s first over, driving sweetly through the covers.Both batters had their share of luck though when Emilio Gay shelled two chances at second slip denying Gareth Berg a pair of wickets. First Gay put down a straightforward chance offered by Browne before missing a more difficult one to his left when Cook edged wide of the cordon.Taylor finally accounted for Cook when he got one to nip back and hit the stumps. The former England captain now needs 44 in the second innings to reach 1,000 runs for the season.Sanderson’s return to the attack soon reaped dividends when Browne chipped to midwicket and Dan Lawrence was bowled through the gate first ball. Gay could finally breathe a sigh of relief when he pouched a chance offered by Critchley who edged to the slips to give White his first wicket.In the evening session Khushi who hit 118 against Northamptonshire in the Royal London Cup last month looked to pick up where he had left off, driving pleasantly through extra cover and down the ground. His departure for 26, when he edged Taylor behind to keeper Ricardo Vasconcelos, sparked a further clatter of wickets.Michael Pepper was next to go when he played an extravagant shot to Berg which flew at a comfortable height to Will Young at first slip. Next Simon Harmer prodded at one from Taylor and was caught behind before White got one to nip back and castle Shane Snater to leave Essex reeling at 152 for 8.Westley though was in defiant mood, reaching his half-century off 122 balls and finding a willing partner in Allison. The Essex skipper struck six boundaries, slapping White through cover and whipping Sanderson and Berg through midwicket.Allison had a reprieve on 17 when he hooked Berg and was dropped in the deep by Sanderson but he and Westley have given Essex renewed hope after it seemed they would be bowled out well short of 200.

Tammy Beaumont sets up comfortable 59-run win with well-worked half-century

ECB Reporters Network22-Apr-2023Off-spinner Lucy Higham played the starring role with a career-best five for 19 as The Blaze made a winning debut in regional women’s cricket, launching their Rachael Heyhoe Flint Trophy campaign with a 59-run defeat of Central Sparks at Trent Bridge.Opener Tammy Beaumont top-scored with 60 for the East Midlands team, backed up by England colleague Sarah Glenn (38) and Georgie Boyce (28) and though the rebranded Lightning failed to bat out their 50 overs, Higham chipped in with 24 with the bat to give them a total of 212 to defend.England quick Issy Wong was out of sorts with the ball for Sparks, yet three wickets each for Emily Arlott, Grace Potts and spinner Georgia Davis looked to have secured a target that the West Midlands team could chase.In the event, no one could produce the stand-out performance with the bat that was needed, Katie George top-scoring with 31 at number eight as Blaze skipper Kirstie Gordon, who has taken over from Lightning captain Kathryn Bryce in the role, celebrated a winning start.After the early loss of Marie Kelly, who found short midwicket from Arlott’s first delivery to depart without scoring, Beaumont and Boyce added 66 in 11.4 overs to give The Blaze something like the start they were looking for after winning the toss.Their progress was checked by wickets in three consecutive overs by Potts, the 20-year-old right-arm seamer who was leading wicket-taker for Sparks in both 50- and 20-over cricket last season.Boyce, who had scored three of her five boundaries in a loose second over from Wong, was Potts’s first victim, leg before playing across the line, before the Bryce sisters – Kathryn and Sarah – both feathered catches to ex-Lightning wicketkeeper Abbey Freeborn.Beaumont completed a half-century from 70 balls with her ninth boundary as she and Glenn set about rebuilding the innings from 86 for four, Glenn hitting two boundaries in one over off Potts.Spinners Davis and Hannah Baker dragged the balance back towards Sparks by sharing the next four wickets, beginning with Beaumont’s dismissal for 60 after adding 45 with Glenn when off-spinner Davis struck the front pad as the opener attempted to work to leg.Davis picked up a second, holding a steepling top-edge off her own bowling to remove South Africa all-rounder Nadine de Klerk before Hannah Baker, the England Under-19 leg-spinner, turned one sharply to bowl former Sparks team-mate Glenn, who had been dropped on 22.Davis claimed her third wicket, bowling Beth Harmer middle stump, before Arlott returned to remove Gordon and Higham as The Blaze were dismissed in the 47th over.After failing to click with the ball, Wong seemed determined to make amends with the bat and, having been dropped at cover off De Klerk on two, was beginning to look a threat as she lofted Grace Ballinger for six over midwicket.But in attempting to dish out similar treatment to Glenn at the end of the England leg-spinner’s opening over she succeeded only in finding the safe hands of Higham on the boundary.After Chloe Brewer fell leg before to Kathryn Bryce, Higham struck arguably the most important blow, taking what turned into a difficult return catch as Jones – prolific in this competition in previous years – sent the ball soaring skywards off a top edge which drifted in the breeze as it came down. At the halfway point, Sparks were well off the pace at 76 for three, where The Blaze had been 130 for four.The combination of off-spinner Higham with left-armer Gordon denied Sparks the acceleration they needed and the visitors suffered further losses as Freeborn paddled straight to the fielder behind square to give Higham a second success, to which she quickly added a third, inducing Ami Campbell to offer an easy caught-and-bowled.Arlott was victim number four for Higham, via a stumping, which she raised to five by bowling Davis, either side of Gordon dismissing Davina Perrin via a catch at mid-off.George, who hit five fours in her attempt to keep Sparks in contention, fell caught and bowled by De Klerk, who completed the win by bowling Baker with the second ball of the 49th over.

Hits out at club for slow appointment process, claiming his candidacy was being treated as a backstop

ESPNcricinfo staff05-Jun-2023Colin Graves has withdrawn his offer to refinance Yorkshire’s £14.9 million debt, and will not be returning to his former role of chair at the club after criticising the length of time it has taken to appoint a successor to Lord Patel, who stepped down in March.Graves’ family trust is owed approximately £15 million by Yorkshire following his bail-out in 2002, although the club has been looking at alternative sources of investment, with prospective names in the frame including Mike Ashley, the former owner of Newcastle United, and the Saudi national investment fund.Yorkshire are due to repay £500,000 to the Graves Trust in October, with the remainder of the balance due in October 2024, although Graves himself was understood to have reached an agreement with its independent trustees to extend the repayment terms by a further three years, in exchange for his return as Yorkshire chair.However, in a letter to the interim chair, Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson, and seen by the Telegraph, Graves has now withdrawn from that agreement in principle, with a broadside at the club for effectively using him as a backstop if they failed to secure the funding elsewhere.”After five months of constant discussions, interviews, exchange of emails, it would appear that your board only require my services as chairman as a last resort. Other excellent candidates have been rejected, in a process that has proven to be arduous and disappointing to all who participated,” he wrote.Yorkshire’s financial position remains parlous in the wake of Azeem Rafiq’s revelations about institutional racism at Headingley, and the subsequent withdrawal of a host of key sponsors at the height of the crisis. In a statement, the club responded that they were “disappointed” with Graves’ pronouncements, adding that his proposal had never been a definitive offer for formal board-level discussion.”We remain at a critical point in the future of Yorkshire County Cricket Club,” the statement read. “The board is squarely focused on securing the financial security of the club and we are continuing the positive conversations around investment from various sources.”We have been notified that Colin Graves has decided to withdraw his application for chair. We are disappointed that he has decided to do so publicly and are obliged to make it absolutely clear that at no point did Colin make a clearly defined, tangible offer that the board was able to consider formally, unlike other interested parties involved in the refinance process.”We have consistently outlined that the new chair would be appointed using a fair, thorough and robust process, which is ongoing. Colin indicated that the terms of his return as chair would require total control of the board and executive. This would run counter to that process, as well as the best practice governance requirements set out in the County Governance Code that were agreed by all counties in 2019.”Colin also makes a number of allegations about the board’s actions in regard to finances which are unfounded and indicate a distinct lack of understanding of the current position of YCCC. The short- and long-term financial wellbeing of the club remains the board’s priority, and we will not be distracted by speculation which is unhelpful to our primary objective of securing the future of Yorkshire County Cricket Club and making it a welcoming club for everyone.”

Glamorgan captain makes hay on dank day as home attack suffer uncomfortable return to second tier

Andrew Miller05-Apr-2024Glamorgan 370 for 3 (Northeast 186*, Carlson 77, Root 67) vs MiddlesexIn a dank start to the year, few would be able to state with any confidence that they’ve yet heard their first cuckoo of spring. But cock an ear to the shires on this cold grey day in April, and you’d hear loud and clear the mocking laugh of the Kookaburra – an invasive species in these parts, and one that’s been flown in direct from the Antipodes to disrupt the habitat of county cricket’s native seamers.By the close, Glamorgan’s own man from the south east, Sam Northeast, was laughing longest and loudest. Ashford in Kent is not quite so far flung as the Eucalypt forests of Queensland, but for Middlesex’s toiling bowlers, Northeast might as well have been Ricky Ponting at the Gabba in 2002-03, for all the effortless dominance he exerted after being handed first use of a characteristically flat Lord’s deck.For it was a case of four washouts and one wipeout on the opening day of the 2024 County Championship. The legendary status of the Lord’s drainage meant that London’s morning downpours were never likely to cause the issues encountered at Derby or Old Trafford, but when Toby Roland-Jones won the toss for Middlesex and chose to bowl first, he could not have envisaged a first-day scoreline of 370 for 3 grinning back at him, or that his incorrectly calling counterpart would be sitting pretty on 186 not out from 266 balls.Perhaps, like Nasser Hussain in that fateful Brisbane Test 20 years ago, TRJ’s was an instinctively defensive decision, borne of his team’s memories – almost exactly a year ago to the day – of being reduced to 4 for 4 by Essex’s Jamie Porter and Sam Cook. More likely, though, it was an unthinking assumption that the ball, any ball, would do enough talking to fast-track Middlesex’s bid for an instant return to the top flight.Not so fast. Although the impact was more apparent at Lord’s than elsewhere, if you squinted through the clouds that enveloped this first day of county action, a common theme emerged, with many of the contests reflecting precisely the type of clear-skied Ashes scoreline that this ball-switching experiment has been designed to do away with – a smattering of breakthroughs within the first 15 or so overs, including Ethan Bamber’s snicking-off of Zain-ul-Hassan for this year’s maiden Championship wicket, then scant reward and a lot of hard yakka thereafter.Billy Root notched a fifty after moving up to open the batting•PA Photos/Getty Images

Both Billy Root and Kiran Carlson might have had designs on centuries of their own when each fell to a glaring misjudgement – with Root’s waft across the line to a decent deck-hitting delivery from Henry Brookes giving Middlesex’s new signing his first and only scalp in 12 energetic but under-threatening overs.Northeast did had a moment of luck on 11, when Max Holden spilled him at backward point off Bamber, but he could hardly have made it count with more aplomb. With a short boundary down the hill to the Mound Stand, he peppered his drives as the shine went off the ball and the Kookaburra’s more slender seam resolutely refused to grip.Notwithstanding a schoolboy hundred for Harrow versus Eton in 2007 (when Gary Ballance, no less, had been a team-mate), in three previous Championship matches at Lord’s, dating back to his first-ball duck for Kent as a 21-year-old in 2011, Northeast had mustered a total of 50 runs at 10.00. Now, en route to what he later described as a “bucket-list” century, he rushed past that total from just 51 balls in a joyous spring offensive. At the other end, Root was scarcely any more sluggish in getting to his fifty from 63 balls, in a second-wicket stand of 129.And, in a direct rebuttal of one of the most pervasive pre-season narratives, by mid-afternoon, the home attack was being carried by the unlikely spin twins of Josh De Caires and Leus du Plooy, a man who might already be feeling a touch of buyer’s remorse after his high-profile move from Derbyshire. Du Plooy even found some purchase in his six exploratory overs, including a snorter that bit past the outside edge to clip the back pad, but it wasn’t enough to dislodge a free-flowing Glamorgan captain.By the time he’d flicked the under-used Ryan Higgins off his toes for the 26th and final four, Northeast had romped along to 179 from 241 balls, and with almost an hour of the day still remaining, he seemed odds-on to rack up a remarkable first-day double-hundred.Instead, with the second Kookaburra offering perhaps just a fraction more assistance than the first, he took his foot off the throttle as the close approached – as is the wont of a man who, two seasons ago, racked up the Championship’s most recent quadruple-century. At the rate this innings has progressed, and with the new ball already primed for its mid-life crisis at the age of 16 overs, there’ll be plenty more where those have already come from.”I plan to be very greedy on day two,” Northeast said at the close. “It’s been a fantastic day and I’m not sure we could have dreamt of it this morning. I want to lead from the front, so it is a nice way to start that, but I’d like to be walking away from here with a victory, that’s the most important thing.”It’s been a good toss to lose at the minute. I would have had a bowl as well, but that’s the way things go. We’ll see what it’s like when our bowlers get on it. We were expecting the wicket to do a little bit more, maybe that is the Kookaburra ball. We may have to get a bit imaginative with how we go about things.”Brookes added: “The Kookaburra is different. You don’t get as much movement and the ball doesn’t stay as hard for as long, but it’s here to stay for a few games this year so we have to work hard with it, see what movement we can get and do things a little bit differently.”

Jon Filby says non-Test grounds will seek independent financial advice over Hundred future

ESPNcricinfo staff08-May-2024Sussex’s chairman has insisted that the prospect of the biggest counties launching a breakaway league to replace the Hundred is “completely not to be feared” and is not a realistic outcome from discussions over the tournament’s future.The ECB and the 18 first-class counties (plus MCC) have met regularly in recent weeks to discuss the details of proposed changes to the Hundred’s ownership model. There is broad agreement that the eight teams should be opened up to private investment, with 51% of shares being transferred from the ECB to the host county (or MCC) and the other 49% sold, with revenues distributed across the game.But the counties have not yet agreed on the way those revenues should be shared. The ECB initially asked counties to agree on a general direction of travel by May 10, but the 11 non-host counties are collectively seeking independent advice which could delay the process significantly.”The non-host county position is that, as in any financial arrangement of this type – and you’re talking hundreds of millions of pounds – that we would have our own proper, impartial advice and that’s what we’re now seeking,” Jon Filby, Sussex’s chairman, told the BBC’s podcast. “We’ll get that and then I’m sure a deal will very quickly follow.”The published excerpts of a leaked email from Richard Gould, the ECB’s chief executive, to counties on Tuesday in which he warns: “Neither current hosts nor current non-hosts are particularly enamoured with the capital structure of the deal… if we lose momentum now then parties will simply be arguing for a larger percentage of a rapidly shrinking pie.”Related

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Filby added: “I think it’s very important that we’re not rushed into it, but equally, I understand that there is a window of opportunity to get a clear position on this by the time that the Hundred comes around towards the end of this season, and that can then be a shop window for that competition. I get all of that, and I’m sure we’re on track for that.”The prospect of a breakaway by the Hundred-hosting counties has reportedly been raised, with the existing framework agreement expiring at the end of the year. Sean Jarvis, the Leicestershire chief executive, told ESPNcricinfo last week that English cricket was facing “our Premier League moment” and said that “it’s the top six or seven clubs that call the tune”.But Filby said that the non-hosting counties should hold firm. “I think a breakaway’s completely not to be feared,” he said. “I don’t think it’ll happen. Who do the teams think they’d play against, and who do they think would play for them? I don’t think it’ll happen, no.”