Twisting the knife

Surrey v Northamptonshire: Day one at the Brit Oval

Okay: I admit it. I did have a few concerns as to how Surrey would handle the return to championship cricket.

So many times in the past good teams in both the first and second divisions have come back to the four day game once the T20 – or ‘happy slapping’ – season is over and feverishly continued to play shots as if they were suffering from ‘St Vitus’ dance!’ With this in mind, I left for work feeling optimistic if cautious. And I’m glad to say I was a good girl. I didn’t peek at the BBC cards once during the day other than to confirm that Surrey was batting first.

My curtailed listening to the commentaries means that I have no idea of the circumstances surrounding the Surrey wickets that fell. I have no idea if they played like trees, or if they were unlucky, or indeed thought “hang on a moment, I’ll just give this a bit of a bash towards the Peter May stand and...oh, b*gger. I’m out!” So if any of the team were in T20 mode, I missed it!

One batsman was definitely not playing a round of ‘crash bang wallop’: Mark Ramprakash constructed a beautifully crafted innings (from the point where I heard it, which was around 91 not out), full of his trademark shots, making sure he was there at the other end whilst rotating the strike to let the other batsmen set about the Northants bowlers. And how RHB set about them, and no mistake! The two deadly assassins formulated their own way of neutralising the opposition: the skipper bludgeoning them cudgel-like with a barrage of fours and sixes, whilst the maestro Ramprakash preferred to slowly twist the knife into the wounded Northants beast.

It’s a flowery description, but I like it!

Let’s start at the beginning. Surrey decided to give young Lancefield a go, which I liked the idea of, and he formed one half of the opening partnership with Steven Davies. Unfortunately it appears that Davies went for 5, bringing Mr R on to the field of play pretty early in the morning. Lancefield seems to have played nicely for his 31, but when he was dispatched by the wonderfully named Chigumbura, the skipper decided to make his own mark on the game. Having survived one or two dodgy sounding moments, he and Mr R formed a two-pronged, stylistically and diametrically opposed partnership that flourished after lunch. Content to give the captain free reign, the maestro continued to do his own thing whilst RHB became almost frenzied in his approach!

In the end the skipper reached what appears to have been a breathtaking century at a run a ball, but then finally his luck ran out on 102 when Chigumbura struck again to end a powerful and frenetic innings.

This brought Afzaal to the crease, but it seems he only made 7 today. It’s just not going right for Usman at the moment.

Stewart Walters played a jaunty cameo and made 31, the same as Lancefield, with six 4s and one 6 for just 20 balls, another victim of the dreaded Chigumbura, to whom I apologise for making him sound like some kind of tropical disease. At this stage the game could have gone either way. Sure, the master was still there but with most of the batting back in the hutch it would only have taken one more wicket for Surrey to potentially kick-start one of their famous collapses.

And then young Mr Spriegel stepped up to the plate, the perfect foil for Ramps, as both men took their turn to face the strike and kept the game ticking along. Neither man seemed troubled overly, with Mr R (having hit his 1000th run earlier that morning, for the 20th time in his career and the ninth time in a row) bringing up century number 112. The cricket gods we often refer to must have decided to redress the balance for the terrible thing that happened in the last game, where they deprived poor Ramps of a nailed-on century following a faulty scoreboard tally! Today should have been his fifth century of the season; instead it was his fourth, but it was no less magnificent for all that.

Both batsmen are there at the end of the day, with Spriegel on 85 not out, hopefully set to become Surrey’s third centurion of the game, and Ramps on 137 not out. The plan would appear to be to bat long and hard – and hopefully once. They will need to rack up a few more runs yet and hope to get Peters out for a ridiculously low score when Northants wield the willow, but with these two at the crease, anything seems possible. Definitely Surrey’s day today.

Let’s hope the boys got plenty of ice at the close of play...along with maybe a celebratory diet Coke for Mr R!