Lancashire 272 for 8 (Jennings 119, Wells 84, Hill 6-26) vs Yorkshire
From one perspective, the Roses match has become a little shop-soiled this season. This, after all, is the sixth game between Lancashire and Yorkshire since mid-May and some of those sitting in the Emirates Old Trafford pavilion this afternoon could have told you that Lancashire have triumphed in three of them whereas Yorkshire have won none. For many others, Luke Wells and Keaton Jennings' 180-run first-wicket stand counted for rather more than those victories in the Vitality Blast and the Royal London Cup because the runs were scored in the format that is the best test of a cricketer.
Such divergent preferences are among the more benevolent reflections of cricket's capacity to be shaped as time and structure require. They illustrate the richness of a game that is not simple and will never be made so, no matter how much advertising guff is thrown at it. Less than 72 hours before this match began, Tom Hartley and Matt Parkinson were skeltering around Lord's and trying to bowl four overs as cheaply as possible. Over the next three days they will be charged with trying to dismiss Yorkshire twice on a pitch that should take spin.
That plan and Dane Vilas's decision to bat first were predicated partly on the home team's ability to compile a substantial total and by the start of the evening session the confident belief was that Lancashire would amass so substantial a first-innings score that they might only have to bat once in a match for which they had selected two specialist spinners plus Wells. That conviction was strengthened as Jennings and Josh Bohannon added another fifty runs with Jennings becoming the first player in the honoured history of these games to make four centuries in consecutive innings. At 231 for 1, therefore, everything was more or less tickety-boo for Lancashire. Yet an hour or so later, tickety could hardly be glimpsed and boo was nowhere to be found. It all began when Bohannon cut Dom Bess into a puddle that was lying on the covers.
That, of course, necessitated a ball change yet the oldest ball in the box offered to the umpires still had its gold lettering on it. Jennings would later say that he could see it "kick and zip" off the surface, so it was not surprising that the medium-pacer George Hill, who had earlier dismissed Wells for 84, was not bemoaning the change. Instead he seized the replacement ball and took five wickets for five runs in 41 deliveries to finish the day with 6 for 26, his best figures in any cricket, including school matches at Sedbergh, club games anywhere else and imaginary Tests in the back garden.
Jennings, whose straight driving had been a delight, was bowled for 119 when he played fractionally across the line and lost his middle stump. Bohannon, having made 27, drove Hill to short extra-cover where the debutant Fin Bean took a low catch. Vilas fell for 2 to a brilliant one-handed effort by Tom Kohler-Cadmore, who dived to his left from first slip to complete the dismissal.
Far more conventional snares by Kohler-Cadmore accounted for Steven Croft and George Balderson in the space of five balls and helped Hill complete his maiden five-wicket return in first-class cricket - his previous best had been 2 for 21 - and the session ended with yet more success for Yorkshire as Hartley and Tom Bailey fell to successive deliveries from Ben Coad.
For a Yorkshire team still threatened with relegation Hill's spell was greeted with a measure of delight that increased with every success. Before the ball was changed Jonny Tattersall's players might have been anticipated facing a score in excess of 400 and their mood can hardly have been improved by the blow on the nose Adam Lyth received from a full-blooded clip to leg by Steven Croft which caused the opener to be led from the field. Deep in the evening session all the talk was of Jennings' achievement in following his scores of 114, 132 and 238 with a fourth century and thus eclipsing Geoff Pullar and Herbert Sutcliffe, both of whom made three successive centuries in Roses games. Yet as Hill led his colleagues off the field he surely knew that the game is now evenly poised and that he was the player who had made it so.
