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Lancs' Hartley hits maiden hundred in Glos game
Lancs' Hartley hits maiden hundred in Glos game

BBC News

time14 hours ago

  • Sport
  • BBC News

Lancs' Hartley hits maiden hundred in Glos game

Rothesay County Championship Division Two, Cheltenham (day two)Lancashire 557: Green 160, Hartley 130, Hurst 106; Akhter 4-85Gloucestershire 179-1: Charlesworth 104*, Phillips 60*; Anderson 1-27 Glos (2pts) trail Lancs (3pts) by 378 runs with nine first-innings wickets remaining Match scorecard Chris Green and Tom Hartley produced career-best performances with the bat as Lancashire assumed the upper hand on day two of the County Championship Division Two match against Gloucestershire in made their highest individual first-class scores, Green a superb 160 from 199 balls, and Hartley 130 off 153 deliveries as the Red Rose posted a formidable 557 in their first innings. Together, the pair staged Lancashire's biggest ever ninth-wicket partnership of 212, eclipsing a long-standing record set way back in centurion Matty Hurst made a career-best 106, while Gloucestershire seamer Zaman Akhter and spinner Graeme van Buuren claimed figures of 4-85 and 3-117 respectively on an essentially sound, if slow, Festival reply, Ben Charlesworth and Joe Phillips launched a spirited counter-attack, staging an impressive unbroken alliance of 159 in 43.3 overs as Gloucestershire reached the close on 179-1, trailing by 378 runs. Charlesworth produced a dazzling display of stroke-play to finish on 104 not out, while Phillips played the supporting role to perfection, posting a stubborn 60 from 135 balls. Again without the services of injured paceman Marchant de Lange, Gloucestershire deployed four spinners, van Buuren taking two wickets in four balls to check northern progress after Lancashire resumed on Hurst had added just one run to his overnight career-best 105 when he pursued a wide delivery and sliced to Akhter at backward point, while Jack Blatherwick mis-timed a drive and skied to mid-off as the visitors slipped to was as good as it got for Gloucestershire. Pulling and driving with growing confidence, Green raised 50 from 87 balls and, together with Hartley, helped secure a third batting bonus point. The eighth wicket alliance realised 50 inside 12 overs and Green raised the hundred partnership in 151 balls with an imposing six over square leg off Ajeet Singh Dale as Lancashire went past brought up his 50 via 78 balls with a single on the leg side off Singh Dale as Lancashire reached lunch on 415-8. Green went to his hundred from 156 balls in the first over after the break, the Australian driving Todd Murphy through the off-side for the ninth four of an increasingly authoritative innings. When Hartley nudged a single from Murphy into the covers to move the score onto 445-8, he and Green had established a new Lancashire record ninth wicket partnership. Green then plundered a further two sixes off Murphy to establish his highest first- class score, surpassing the 121 made against Derbyshire at Chesterfield last month. Not to be upstaged, Hartley posted a career-best score of his own moments later, eclipsing the 73 not out made against Essex at Chelmsford in 2023. Green's sixth six at the expense of Murphy carried him to a maiden 150 and, six runs later, he claimed the highest score by a Lancashire number eight, beating the 155 shared by Wasim Akram and Glen Chapple made in 1998 and 2001 bowled Green, before Hartley drove the same bowler to the long-off boundary to register his maiden hundred from 145 balls. The England spinner then smashed a further 29 runs in eight balls, including a quartet of sixes, before hoisting Charlesworth to long-off. Gloucestershire's suffering continued as Cameron Bancroft shuffled in front of a straight delivery from Jimmy Anderson as the home side lost their first wicket with 20 on the board. But Charlesworth and Phillips mustered stubborn resistance thereafter, with Charlesworth going to a 54-ball half-century in style, straight-driving Hartley for six. Phillips offered staunch support, compiling steadily as the Kookaburra ball softened. The century partnership occupied 161 balls, after which Charlesworth allowed his natural attacking instincts to take over, the 24-year-old left-hander going to his fourth career first-class hundred from just 123 balls with 16 fours and a six. Rather more sedate in his approach, Phillips raised a chanceless 50 from 111 deliveries. Report supplied by ECB Reporters' Network, supported by Rothesay

Liam Dawson conjures one great moment on his big return to Test cricket
Liam Dawson conjures one great moment on his big return to Test cricket

The Guardian

time14 hours ago

  • Sport
  • The Guardian

Liam Dawson conjures one great moment on his big return to Test cricket

Liam Dawson stood at his mark, ball cradled in his hands, forearms level to the ground, elbows splayed, sunglasses – completely unnecessarily – in place. There was nothing bright about the situation on this grey Mancunian afternoon except the 35-year-old's immediate future. Eight years after his last opportunity, Test cricketer once more. Many players give umpires items of clothing to look after while they bowl; Dawson's habit was to hand Ahsan Raza something to take care of while he didn't. Those sunglasses were required only when he had the ball in his hands (and eventually, late into the last session, it became so dark he let Raza keep them). Batters seeking some kind of clue as to his thinking were certainly not going to learn anything from his eyes, not if he could help it. On a day when one recent England spinner, Jack Leach, took the last five wickets of a six-fer in Somerset's win against Durham, another, Tom Hartley, almost doubled his career-best first-class score with 130 for Lancashire against Gloucestershire, and a third, Rehan Ahmed, trumped them both by following a century with six wickets for Leicestershire at Derby, the current pick had to make do with more high-profile but less eye-catching results. There was very little turn as Dawson made his big return, but still he eked out one great moment. Before the game his new teammates had repeatedly mentioned being struck by one particular aspect of Dawson's character. 'He's willing to always fight for the team, he's very competitive,' Harry Brook said on Monday. 'I know the cricketer he is, but I think what does go under the radar is his competitiveness,' Ben Stokes said on Tuesday. And it was there to be seen after the first ball of his second over found Yashasvi Jaiswal's edge and Brook's hands. Not in how he sprinted to his right, yelling and punching the air before exchanging high fives and 10s with his colleagues (he has a habit, after delivering the ball, of wheeling away with his arms outstretched, albeit briefly and quietly, even when nothing interesting has resulted at all). But in the swiftness with which he broke from the celebratory huddle, thoughts already on the next challenge. By the time anyone else realised that the man of the moment was no longer among them Dawson had paced out his mark and was preparing to bowl round the wicket for the first time, to the arriving right-hander Shubman Gill. There is a pleasing air of certainty about Dawson, a player experienced enough to know precisely what he is doing and where all of his teammates should be positioned to benefit from it. On this day it was a quality Gill could only admire enviously. Half an hour before play began the India captain was asked, after losing the toss for the fourth time this series, what he would have done had the coin fallen in his favour. He replied that it was just as well he lost, because: 'I was actually confused'. And he probably said something very similar about his dismissal a few hours later, after he left a Ben Stokes delivery that, had his pad not got in the way, would have clattered into middle and off. Gill had spoken before this game of his belief that fortune has not favoured his side in this series. 'Hopefully,' he sniffed, 'in the next two matches the luck is going to be with us.' Maybe in the circumstances the result of the toss, unfortunate as it initially appeared, was the kind of break he was seeking. Sign up to The Spin Subscribe to our cricket newsletter for our writers' thoughts on the biggest stories and a review of the week's action after newsletter promotion Particularly given the decision Stokes made after winning it. As captain Stokes has already been responsible for 40% of all instances of England winning the toss and choosing to field in Tests at Old Trafford, something he has done both times the coin has fallen in his favour here (and all other English captains in history three times out of 38). Just another way in which he cocks a snook at tradition, though India will not be reading too much into the oft-quoted statistic about bowling first here – that no side in Test history has ever chosen to do so and won – given it would almost certainly have fallen had rain not when Australia visited in 2023. But India's luck, such as it was, was not to hold, on a day that saw freak damage both to one of Jaiswal's bats and, much more meaningfully, to Rishabh Pant's right foot. The main difference between the incidents was that with India's vice-captain, unlike their opener, nobody could run out from the dressing room with four new ones to choose from, the similarity that both were caused by deliveries from Chris Woakes. The 36-year-old is not normally known as a destroyer either of men or ligneous hardware, but though he is one of the least heavy metal cricketers around this was one of the more appropriate days for a beloved son of Birmingham to rip a bat in two.

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