KERRIGAN'S BATTING HELPS SAVE LANCS' BLUSHES

Date: 7th September 2010

A Paul Edwards copyright exclusive for L&DCC Official Website.

At Taunton: Day One of Four: Somerset, 54 for one, are 205 runs behind Lancashire, 259.

Cricket, as Aristotle might have said in one of his duller moments, is all about wickets. Taking 'em, defending 'em, playing on 'em. Yet to arrive at Taunton this morning, with the mist rapidly disappearing from the Quantocks, was to be made aware of nothing but the many joys of playing the game at this wonderful ground. Wonderful, that is, providing you were not a Lancashire batsman and that you hadn't had a glance at the pitch marked out for this match. For it was green, very green. Hightown in late March, does that help you get the picture? Added to which, the game was due to start at 10.30, so when Marcus Trescothick won the toss and invited - a wonderful word, that, as if Mark Chilton could have declined - Lancashire to bat first, there were fears that a few hours of desperate struggle against Somerset's four seamers might be ahead.

Well, yes and no. The pitch played far better than most people had predicted but that didn't prevent Lancashire struggling for much of the day. Indeed, when Kyle Hogg became the fifth lbw victim of the innings, the visitors were 169 for eight, which, by then, nobody thought a good score. Yet, bizarrely, the rest of the proceedings belonged to Lancashire. First, Sajid Mahmood, to no one's great surprise, scored 29 off 30 balls and put on 34 for the ninth wicket with Gary Keedy. The batting of the onetime Lancashire tailender has been of the revelations of the season and his innings on Tuesday took his runs total for the year to 564; then, however, Keedy was joined by Simon Kerrigan, who had scored just 29 runs, highest score, six, in 2010 before he stuck around for 80 minutes with Keedy, adding 56 to the total, of which the Brook Lane spinmeister scored 16 not out. Keedy, himself, made a typically gutsy 34, the second highest score of the innings, before he lost his middle and off poles to Ben Phillips with the new ball.

That left Lancashire with 259 on the board, and, as Keedy pointed out later, we won't know how good that total is until Somerset have batted on it. One thing's for sure though: it looked a lot more respectable once Marcus Trescothick had pulled one of Keedy's less distinguished deliveries to Tom Smith at short midwicket. In his pomp, the former England opener can make 400 look paltry and Chilton's bowlers will sleep easier in their beds tonight, knowing that they do not have to face his terrible swift sword in the morning.

As for Lancashire's top order, a mixture of good bowling, bad batting and somewhat generous umpiring accounted for their demise. Most of the good bowling came from Charl Willoughby, whose fourth wicket of the day took him to 50 first-class victims for the fifth successive year. Willoughby it was who had the benefit of Neil Mallender's lbw decision to get rid of Tom Smith but the South African needed no such good fortune to pierce Paul Horton's porous defence 10 minutes later. Alfonso Thomas needed little of Mallender's latitude to get an lbw decision against Mark Chilton, but Lancashire went into lunch on 86 for three and could be reasonably content with their morning's work, especially since Shivnarine Chanderpaul was 33 not out and batting very well indeed.

The first half of the afternoon session was a disaster for Chilton's men. Steven Croft was run out for 31 by Peter Trego's throw when he was rightly sent back by Chanderpaul, but that misfortune was relatively mundane compared to the Guyanan's decision to reverse sweep Murali Kartik just one ball after slog-sweeping him to the midwicket boundary. The result was a top edged catch and the departure of one of the few men who looked as though they could make a century on Tuesday. The West Indian's 56 was the seventh time in twelve innings that he has passed fifty for Lancashire this season, yet it remains true that he could have added a hundred or so more runs to his already impressive aggregate of 678.

Both Gareth Cross and Luke Procter were uncontroversially lbw to Willoughby and Kartik respectively, which left the visitors in sore need of the Saj, Keeds and Keggsy show, which followed soon after.