Lancashire’s spinners bowled 36.1 overs on the fourth morning, during which seven wickets fell at a cost of 43 runs to give them an innings victory
Paul Edwards at Southport27-May-2015
ScorecardArron Lilley showed impressive control in only his third first-class appearance (file photo)•Getty Images
As it turned out, Derbyshire’s coach, Graeme Welch, was rather whistling in the dark when he talked on the third evening of this game about establishing a “cheeky little lead” on the fourth day and seeing how Lancashire coped with it. He even acknowledged as much after the match had ended twenty minutes before lunch when his side had been beaten by an innings.On a wicket which offered Lancashire spinners Simon Kerrigan and Arron Lilley more assistance than they can expect to receive from any surface during the rest of the season, Billy Godleman’s batsmen blocked, struggled and occasionally swiped. It made no difference whatever to the outcome. Just after midday Lancashire’s director of cricket, Ashley Giles sat at the Grosvenor Road End of the ground sipping a mug of coffee and watching his two not-so-slow bowlers tie some other young cricketers in knots. Before long, he was joined by James Whitaker, still the national selector, who must have been encouraged by the rhythm and control displayed by Kerrigan.The subcontinental statistics of 97 minutes’ play on this fourth day were that Lancashire bowled 36.1 overs in that time during which seven wickets fell at a cost of 43 runs. The fact that the two spinners were operating unchanged and that few attacking shots were played helped explain the remarkable over rate but it is worth storing away for the occasions when Test cricketers claim that they cannot manage even 15 overs in an hour.The spinners’ individual analyses were no less remarkable. Lilley took the first wicket when he defeated the heave to leg attempted by the nighwatchman, Tom Taylor; he also took the last when Mark Footitt, not a No. 11, one suspects, who willingly misses lunch to fight a lost cause, also attempted to hit the ball into Sandringham Road but only succeeded in getting his stumps scattered.In the morning session Lilley’s figures were 18.1-14-8-4; he may never be as economical again. The wickets of Scott Elstone, caught for nought at backward short leg by Ashwell Prince when sweeping, and David Wainwright, taken at the wicket for 11 by Alex Davies when cutting, left the offspinner with 5 for 23 in the innings and he thus managed career-best performances with both ball and bat in the match.The relatively small crowd watched it all in good humour. They knew the conclusion would not be long delayed once Kerrigan had bowled Hashim Amla for 11 with a ball that squeezed through the smallest of gaps between bat and pad. From their celebrations we may conclude that Lancashire’s cricketers felt the same way. And so by one o’clock Steven Croft’s fielders had bottles of beer in their hands and just after two o’clock they were clearing the portable seats away from the grassy mound beneath the old scorebox.For, yes, there were three teams involved in this game: Lancashire, who won; Derbyshire, who didn’t deserve to lose by an innings; and the battalion of workers whose efforts have been co-ordinated since December by officials of the County Match Delivery Group. It was, no doubt, the same at Beckenham this week and soon it will be the turn of Guildford, Colwyn Bay and Horsham and all the other outgrounds visited by the first-class game in the travelling pageant of the English season.Lancashire supporters may remember Trafalgar Road for Kerrigan and Lilley bowling out Derbyshire on the final morning. Others will recall Peter Bailey’s excellent wicket on which seamers could gain assistance, batsmen could score centuries and spinners could prosper wonderfully. It was “all worthy, all well done” as Philip Larkin wrote in “Show Saturday” his poem about the Bellingham Show in 1973.Apart from golf, there is nothing like outground cricket in English sport. It allows the players to return to the shires and to some of the clubs where they learned the game. It allows supporters to visit areas like Birkdale with its massive houses occupied by financiers, lawyers, footballers and the odd Meyer Wolfsheim. Or it could be Tunbridge Wells with its rhododendrons, its generosity and its fresh asparagus.While Prince was making his double-hundred at Southport, blazered volunteers, proud as punch to be working for nothing and wearing ties made just to mark this occasion, were making sure all the players’ needs were met. And while Southport is special and much-loved, it is not unique. Even the wise, softly spoken chairman, who was proudly wearing his loud Woosterish blazer in club colours, knows it.Outground cricket may be threatened by reforms taking place in the English game. But it is not absurd to wish, as Larkin did of the Bellingham Show, that it might “stay hidden there like strength … something people do, not noticing how time’s rolling smithy-smoke shadows much greater gestures; something they share / that breaks ancestrally into regenerate union. Let it always be there”.