Joe Root, in his first game for Yorkshire this season, fell four runs short of his 56th first-class century when he nibbled at a ball outside his off stump and was caught behind for 96 against Sussex at Headingley.
Root, 35, bolstered his reputation as England’s finest modern batsman by scoring two big hundreds in the Ashes last winter. But, by not making another score as high as 40 in the series, he did not quite bolster it to the extent of being widely acclaimed as England’s finest ever Test batsman.
Sussex’s Henry Crocombe delivered the same sort of ball which kept dismissing Root last winter. It was well outside off stump, and could have been ignored, but Root was tempted to push at it – looking perhaps to steer a single to third man – and that slight extra bounce, which Crocombe at fast-medium extracted from a benign pitch, resulted in the ball taking Root’s outside edge and going through to the wicketkeeper.
Root’s dismissal is unlikely to make much difference to the result of this Headingley match, so benign is this pitch. It looks like being another of the high-scoring draws which characterise Division One games played with a Dukes ball in dry early season.
Finlay Bean, who is keeping wicket, and Yorkshire-born Sam Whiteman, hit centuries before Root was dismissed. “To score my first hundred, especially at home, for Yorkshire was special,” Whiteman said. “It’s still a nice wicket, but I felt good out there. Joe sort of got to 40 without you even realising. He’s super-impressive, and it probably shows why he’s going to pass Sachin’s [Tendulkar] Test record in a year or two years’ time.”
The two counties with the worst starts to this season were Kent and Gloucestershire, which explains why Zak Crawley was batting carefully in Kent’s second innings on one of the livelier pitches in this season’s championship, at New Road in Worcester. He batted for more than an hour before that big booming cover drive came out, at an inswinger, and he inside-edged a low catch to the wicketkeeper. A victory of sorts for Crawley in that his 31 off 57 balls was his highest score of this season, but defeat by an innings and two runs for Kent.
Adam Hollioake, Kent’s head coach, said: “The batting is a big worry. We haven’t batted well and, on paper, we have a very good batting line-up, so at times like this we have got to get back to the fundamentals. The mood in the group is very low and it’s my responsibility to try and pick that up. There will have to be at least one change to the team next game because Ben Compton is injured.”
Crawley’s England opening partner Ben Duckett has had a more prosperous game for Nottinghamshire, following a first-innings 62 with 93 off 120 balls. By then Warwickshire’s bowlers were realising that enforcing the follow-on was unlikely to work.
Surrey might avert their sixth consecutive draw at the Oval but they will have to make Essex collapse in their second innings. Surrey took a first-innings lead of 63 after Dan Lawrence had hit 125 against his former county.
Paul Coughlin, ex-Durham but now Lancashire, hit a fine hundred against his former county to set them 336 to win. Gloucestershire, bottom of the whole heap, turned their season around to the extent of making Derbyshire follow on, but again the prevailing environment favours batsmen and life is hard for a bowler who has to play six championship games in seven weeks on placid pitches.