Lancashire fight back after dismissal for 168 but hosts remain in command
Paul Edwards06-Sep-2021
The regulars in the Radcliffe Road Stand enjoyed this day’s cricket and Peter Wynne-Thomas would have enjoyed it, too. Like their counterparts in other counties, many Nottinghamshire supporters still keep old-style hand-written scorebooks in which a day, a match, a season, can be recorded. Tonight those treasured manuscripts will show that Steven Mullaney’s side bowled out Lancashire for 168, thus giving their side a lead of 104. And by the time the books were being packed away on a quite glorious evening in Nottingham, that advantage had grown to 231 with five wickets lost while Brett Hutton could look back on a day in which his own five wickets had created a fine opportunity to win the match.At the other end of this great cricket ground, down a passage and round a corner, Wynne-Thomas spent much of his later working life in the Trent Bridge library surrounded by old scorebooks and forever in debt to the diligence of past generations whose veneration for the past and whose passion for accuracy matched his own. Of course PWT liked seeing Nottinghamshire do well, although he had supported the county for so long he knew there would be rough years. While he enjoyed the three-course meals, he coped with the austerity lunches.Peter, who died in July, held various posts at Trent Bridge. He was the Club’s archivist and was also made its President in 2016 but he was also one of the wider game’s finest historians and statisticians, a scholar whose absorption in Nottinghamshire cricket expanded into an interest in other counties and other countries. He would be able to tell you how many players had, like Hutton, paused their careers at Trent Bridge and spent time at another county, only to return home when opportunities with the Club seemed greater. In luncheon intervals PWT would hold informal tutorials in the library, although it would be difficult to think of a man less in need of pedagogic flummery. Instead, in shirt sleeves and with red braces to the fore, he would be generous with his knowledge and scrupulous in admitting when that knowledge of very early cricket was incomplete.So Wynne-Thomas would have been quietly contented after a morning’s play in which Nottinghamshire had taken four wickets for 83 runs and he might even have been tempted to reflect on the first of the county’s six Championships in 1907. For these are the sort of September days that help determine the destiny of English cricket’s biggest prize.As it happened, Nottinghamshire might have had more success in a session when none of Lancashire’s batters played with any great assurance against Mullaney’s seamers. The prize wicket was that of Josh Bohannon, who had begun to bat in the fourth over of the day after George Balderson had clipped Luke Fletcher straight to the precisely placed Liam Patterson-White at short midwicket. But Lancashire’s leading run-scorer is little troubled these days by a score of 32 for 3 and he was soon playing with something of the fluency he showed when milking Warwickshire for 170 last week.That said, Bohannon played and missed more often in one hour at Trent Bridge than he had in seven at Emirates Old Trafford and those warnings needed to be set against the four fine fours he struck in the space of nine balls from Dane Paterson and Hutton. It was, then, less of a shock when, having made 35 off 48 balls, he failed to cover the latter bowler’s movement and edged him to Ben Duckett. Suddenly one thought of number of loose balls sent down by Lancashire’s attack 24 hours earlier; Nottinghamshire’s first-innings 272 became newly formidable.The rest of the session strengthened that impression. Danny Lamb, who had originally come in to watch the night on Sunday evening survived for over 80 minutes on Monday morning before he edged Paterson to Moores in the next over and Nottinghamshire’s fine session was completed a minute or so before lunch when Rob Jones was beaten by Hutton’s movement off the pitch and Sam Northeast pocketed the catch at third slip.Two overs after the resumption Dane Vilas attempted no shot to a ball outside off stump and was leg before to Hutton for 15. Given that the ball was seaming about, the Lancashire skipper’s decision was plainly unwise but his obvious disappointment with the decision was understandable. The ball appeared to be missing the stumps. The rest of the innings was wrapped up in less than an hour in which 21-year-old George Lavelle’s 32 offered evidence of his exciting talent.It would be facile to lambast Lancashire’s batting after an innings in which seven players had reached double figures but none had passed 35. More persuasive, perhaps, is the argument that Hutton, Paterson and Fletcher had made good use of a surface offering pace, bounce and movement and on which no batsman, not even Nottinghamshire’s three half-centurions, has looked completely at home. That argument is strengthened by the evidence of the home side’s second innings in which Duckett’s 44 is the best contribution to date.Lancashire’s bowlers deserve credit, too, especially as they are coping without Saqib Mahmood, who is off the field with a side injury. Glen Chapple and Vilas have put together a ballsy bunch of players and there was no point in this evening session in which their cricket was not aggressive or purposeful. Vilas posted three slips and got his rewards when Tom Bailey and George Balderson took two wickets apiece. Lancashire may indeed lose this game but one imagines their batsmen will die in the trenches.As for Mahmood’s injury, Emirates Old Trafford issued a statement saying the bowler is still being assessed, a process that began this morning. So perhaps he is undergoing continuous assessment; a sort of concertina’d version of A Levels during the pandemic. Peter Wynne-Thomas would just smile quietly and tell you such things are not unknown. For wasn’t there that business with a player from Clarke’s All-England XI in 1848…?