It is perforce a shorter blog tonight. I am doing it on my phone and the interface is more clunky than on my laptop, which is out of power.
We can be happy with the match situation at Swansea, not too far behind and with seven wickets in hand. If we can kick on tomorrow and hopefully gain a healthy lead, we might be able to force a result.
Top work by Tony Palladino once again, while Ben Slater, Alex Hughes and Wayne Madsen did well with the bat. I would love to see Alex progress to a ton and there is good batting to come in.
Harvey Hosein helped in a solid opening stand and the club has had two good days. At Belper, a stylish century from Daryn Smit took the second team to a lead in excess of 150 and a win looks highly likely tomorrow for them.
I travel home tomorrow, so shall follow the scores as I can, en route.
More of my thoughts from the last few days when I get a little more time over the weekend!
In closing, it was lovely to meet up with a lot of people at Belper over the past two days and enjoy some excellent cricket.
Thank you to all involved!
Good to meet you too,
ReplyDeleteVince
It may just be my natural caution after the poor third day performances in the two games against Durham, but I still think Glamorgan started with the edge here, with the opportunity to dodge the bullet of their batting on the first afternoon if they can get us out for less than 350. Unless the pitch breaks up more quickly than people seem to expect, a second innings score of 250 won't be beyond Glamorgan and leave us chasing upwards of 180 on the last day. It's been a patient start to the day, though, that suggests that batting for as much of the day as possible is uppermost in Derbyshire's minds.
ReplyDeleteSome of the lessons from Durham seem to have been learned, though there still seemed to be a lot of short stuff at tail enders when straight and full is how most of Olivier's wickets have come. The description of Alex Hughes' drop on the commentary was excruciating and made you fear how much his confidence, already low, would be affected when he came to bat. Perhaps that was his rock-bottom in a wretched season, and the fact that the only was up from there might have relaxed him. Whatever other reservations I have about him as a batsman, one thing he does that others in the team often don't, is make it count with big hundreds when he gets this far, so if he can do it again this time, it will go a long way towards the score well in excess of 400 that would give us the initiative.
It was also good to see a much more patient and professional approach than has often been evident from Derbyshire's batting this year, but some of the dismissals were disappointing. Hosein was a touch unlucky to get an inside edge (though he must have left a gap), but the video showed some lovely shots that belies the criticism about his lack of power. Slater and Madsen seemed to play with plenty of time, but both dismissals were poor. What gets into Slater's head sometimes? Partnership broken the over before, tea approaching, almost his first look at a new bowler, need for batting long obvious, and all of the hard work done, and he cuts straight to point. Madsen's dismissal was described as a mistimed hook, but looking at the video, it looked to me more like a defensive swat after he got tucked up by a short ball. It was very similar to one of his dismissals against Durham, and is an area of vulnerability that I haven't seen before. Having said that, if the rest of our out-of-touch batsmen contribute as much, we're going to be in a pretty strong position.