A fortnight is a long time in cricket…

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Championship: Kent v Yorkshire – Canterbury, 11th – 14th July

If a week is a long time in politics, then a fortnight can be an eternity in sport.

At the end of June, Yorkshire where top of the county championship and through to the knockout phases of both the Friends Provident and the Twenty/20. With the resultant spring in our step and song in our hearts doing an excellent job of masking the sound of the papering over of cracks coming from our increasingly brittle batting line-up.

Two discordant, disappointing weeks down the line and that melodious song has been replaced with the sound of needle being knocked across vinyl. Shoddy defeats to Durham and now Kent find us hovering just outside the relegation zone in the championship. A frankly embarrassing performance against Essex saw the end of Gough’s chances for a final fling at Lord’s. Whilst a combination of clerical incompetence and not having one of ‘our old boys’ in the ECB, at least saved us from a similar fate against Durham in the pyjama pat-and-run version.

How quickly a season can change.

It doesn’t take long to work out where this particular game was lost. Just compare Yorkshire’s two innings, where 341/2 fell away to 410 and 173/4 became 196 all out, with Kent’s late rally from 305/7 to 467. A tale of two tails then. One wagging like a Jack Russell that’s got hold of the Sunday roast and the other hanging limply like Pele waiting for viagra to be invented.

We’d gone into the match missing Gough, who’s currently auditioning for his future career as a ‘Casualty’ extra. Method acting at its finest. Whilst our quest to find openers who’ll spend enough time at the wicket this season to actually get a suntan, continues to cause chaos to the rest of the batting line up. This weeks roll of the dice saw Jacques Rudolph dropped back into the middle order where he belongs, with Andy Gale moved in the opposite direction for his opportunity to take part in the regular 11:05 traipse back to the pavilion. If only trains where as punctual.

The other notable change was Young Zimbabwean Gary Ballance making his championship debut at number five. No need to worry about paperwork with Ballance though. An old school tie coming from Harrow, Middlesex, rather than Holgate, Barnsley, should ensure no difficult questions from the ECB.

For most of the first day we actually looked like getting ourselves into a winning situation, with Mags and Rudolph putting on over two hundred for the third wicket. But once that marathon partnership was broken, a combination of the second new ball, overcast conditions and excellent bowling from Azar Mahmood saw us hitting the wall. The only saving grace from the rest of our innings being when we finally limped past 400 to earn maximum batting bonus points. Not even a collapse this bad could see us fall tantalisingly short yet again.

With Kent having to start their reply in similar conditions, our seam attack failed to deliver Mahmood’s quality. It was pretty woeful stuff, with the exception being Tim Bresnan, who was unlucky to find himself demoted to second change after a recent stint taking the new ball – a decision that was thankfully reversed in the second innings. But even wayward bowling needs to be exploited, and fully exploited it was, by an innings of great determination from Robert Key.

Key is one of the unsung players of English cricket – an astute captain who can score big runs, high in the batting order. He might not have ‘the right background’ like an Andrew Strauss or the high profile of a Kevin Pietersen, but if England is ever looking for a replacement for Michael Vaughan, they could do a lot worse than Robert Key. In fact, they almost certainly will.

Despite Key’s efforts, the quick removal of Kent’s middle order by Adil gave us a good chance of a first innings lead, before an old familiar problem reared its head – our inability to quickly knock over the tail. Their last three wickets putting on 160 runs was a blow we never recovered from, with the last pairs 69 in particular, really, erm, sticking in the throat.

Now, in the modern era you have to expect this to happen occasionally. More emphasis, time and coaching than ever before are going into improving the batting of a teams lower order. Sometimes you suspect, to the detriment of the player’s main skill. But this kind of resistance happens far too often to Yorkshire and there’s no real excuse, as in the reverse swing of Rana and leggies of Adil, we should have the tools to do the job far better.

Yorkshire’s second innings followed a similar pattern to the first, with the last six wickets falling for just twenty-three. In fact our lower order was being dismissed so quickly they where having to get a hurry on as they walked off in case they got beaten back to the pavilion by the man below them on the scorecard.

The end result was a modest fourth innings target for Kent of 140. No problem then. Except they almost managed to balls up their innings as badly as we had. Much improved bowling by Hoggard and Rana had them at 63/4 and 108/7, before Jones and Arafat held their nerve to see the home side home.

It was heartening to see the improvement in our seam attack at the second time of asking and the return to form of Mags with the bat and Adil with the ball will be important in the games to come. But the success we had in the last innings just further highlights our shortcoming in the match as a whole.

We allowed Kent to score a hundred runs more than they should in their first innings, with both of our totals 50-100 runs short of what was achievable. If we’d done that, Kent would have been chasing 400 and we’d of won the game comfortably. Instead, Yorkshire’s season is in real danger of sliding away to disappointment and possible relegation.

Si’thee later,

Len

(Match photos: By kind permission of Dave Morton)

My Man of the Match: Jacques Rudolph

Result: Kent (22 points) Beat Yorkshire (8 points) by 3 wickets

~ by lentheyorkshirekitman on 15 July, 2008.