Cricket: Agony for Lancs as title bid founders

Sep 24 2007 by Our Correspondent, Liverpool Daily Post

SHUT AWAY in the precious sanctuary of their dressing room, battle-hardened cricketers wept.

In front of the pavilion, Lancashire officials cried openly. Even some of the tough old journalists avoided eye-contact with each other and wondered what on earth they could trust themselves to say about it all.

Lancashire’s glorious but failed attempt to score 489 to beat Surrey and thereby win the County Championship had just made the last day of the 2007 first-class season one of the most memorable in the history of English domestic cricket.

For on Friday evening hardly anyone had given Lancashire a hope in hell. Outplayed for three days – hammered into near-submission by two Mark Ramprakash centuries – Mark Chilton’s side had reached 27 for no wicket and needed to score 462 runs in 96 overs to win, a rate of around 4.7 an over.

And so they went for it. From the second over of the day when Paul Horton’s cracking fours helped to take 14 runs off Chris Jordan, Chilton’s players put their attacking strokes to good use.

Only Oliver Newby was dismissed for less than 26 as batsman after batsman flayed the Surrey attack and kept up with the required rate. By tea 181 runs were needed off 37 overs with five wickets in hand.

Singled out for praise and the crowd’s warmest applause was V V S Laxman whose run-a-ball innings of exactly 100 was bejewelled by 16 exquisite boundaries.

Not far behind the genius from Hyderabad was Stuart Law who made 79 off 121 balls and was one of three unlucky batsmen to be caught at the wicket down the leg-side.

When Law and Steven Croft had both departed in this fashion in the same over, Lancashire’s players might have wilted but they kept up the run chase right until the moment when Dominic Cork bottom-edged a slog-sweep into his stumps to end a very great day’s cricket.

“Chilly mate” murmured Surrey skipper Mark Butcher to Chilton as they shook hands before the presentations on the outfield. There was nothing else for him to say.

“I’ve never seen a dressing-room quite like that in my life,” said the Lancashire captain, “I don’t know what to say. It was agony.”