da imperador bet： From first to last, this Warwickshire-Northamptonshire County Championshipbattle was a match of oddities
Staff and agencies30-Jul-2000From first to last, this Warwickshire-Northamptonshire County Championshipbattle was a match of oddities. It was contested on a pitch far drier thanis customary at Edgbaston; it was played in the presence of a boundaryshorter than usual on the ground’s Pershore Road side; it featured adominant performance from not one, but two, Warwickshire spinners; and,most of all, it contained the sight of Northamptonshire sustaining, andactually converting, an advantage over an opponent in a season of moredowns than ups.Ostensibly, it was the bowling of off spinner Jason Brown (whose 6/90 gavehim match figures of 11/178) which won this third day for Northamptonshireand, with it, the game by a margin of 54 runs. There was nothingparticularly glamorous or demonstrative about his display but the gentlesubtleties of his flight, length and turn proved perfect for the situationas Warwickshire found itself on the wrong side of a battle to chase down atarget of 259.Brown was introduced into the attack early in the afternoon – withWarwickshire already off to a shaky start at 30/2 – and promptly proceededto extinguish any vague semblance of life from his opponents’ cause bytaking three wickets in the space of his opening ten deliveries. Thetwenty-five year old lured David Hemp (3) into adopting the erroneous ideaof meekly lobbing the ball back in his direction; extracted an outside edgefrom Trevor Penney (2); and then comprehensively beat an attempt at a sweepfrom Dougie Brown (8). Later, he returned to skid an arm ball underneaththe defences of Ashley Giles (2) and to remove Warwickshire’s two mostproductive contributors – Neil Smith (67) and Nick Knight (43) – by way oflbw decisions.For all of Brown’s brilliance, though, a similarly fruitful contributionfrom Giles (5/78) had earlier tilted the scales significantly back inWarwickshire’s direction. The left arm spinner produced an eleven wicketmatch haul of his own in the process of helping to dismiss Northants for176 before lunch. Having snared seventeen of the twenty Northamptonshirewickets to fall in the game in combination with off spinner Smith (5/66),Giles must have had every right by the end of the match to feel a touchaggrieved at the result.In the final analysis, the turning pitch – curtailing as it did theopportunity for any batsman other than Matthew Hayden (72) to play withgenuine comfort in either the third or fourth innings – was probably thebiggest winner of all in this match. But by no means far behind it wereany of Brown, Giles or Smith, whose ability – literal and metaphorical – tospin the advantage one way and then (ultimately irrevocably) back the otherthrough much of the contest always made for engrossing viewing.