Derbyshire 194 and 195 Durham 273 and 118-2 Durham won by 8 wicketsBEFORE their visit to the Riverside ground Derbyshire were in poor

Derbyshire 194 and 195

Durham 273 and 118-2
Durham won by 8 wicketsBEFORE their visit to the Riverside ground Derbyshire were in poor enough form to hold a crisis meeting. Whatever words were exchanged, they may not be used as a future model on how to talk things through and resolve your difficulties. The players responded to it by losing to Durham by eight wickets yesterday, a feat which would normally merit a crisis meeting of its own.Kim Barnett, the Derbyshire captain, had no words left. He has always been candid with press and public; yesterday he was reluctant to comment. Perhaps the 93 minutes he had spent watching the dire performance of his bowlers had rendered him speechless.Three of the Derbyshire attack have played for England this summer and between them Phillip DeFreitas, Devon Malcolm and Dominic Cork have taken 104 Championship wickets, but this was not evident yesterday. Cork, of course, was absent elsewhere, but when DeFreitas and Malcolm were not short, they were wide and sometimes they were both.Here were a side in deep trouble.

Having batted fairly indifferently throughout the match – and indeed the season – they were always likely to lose from the start of the third day, but they did not make Durham work for their runs on a pitch which is still some distance from being a stroke-player’s delight.The Durham opener, Jon Longley, perhaps struggling for his place with a previous top Championship score of 35, galloped to a half-century off 61 balls. He can rarely have been allowed such freedom to cut and pull. DeFreitas went for 17 runs off his first two overs and a change of ends did not have a similar effect on his fortunes.When Derbyshire were not bowling well they were fielding badly too. The return of the English summer – bitterly cold, that is – cannot have helped, but apart from the one clear-cut chance that went begging at slip there was another just short which might have been taken in better times.Longley and his captain Mike Roseberry had taken Durham to within 17 runs of their second victory of the season (they won their opening match) when Longley was out half forward to one which kept slightly low. There was just time for John Morris to steer obligingly to slips but Roseberry, desperately short of runs, remained to the end.His side has now moved to the elevated heights of 17th in the table, exchanging places with Derbyshire This does not make them a good side. There are still too many flaws, but this will have done their confidence an abundance of good.

And it makes them better than Derbyshire, who may need more than a crisis meeting to get out of this.. Yorkshire 96 and 185

Warwickshire 449
Warwicks won by inn & 168 runsA MATCH that began in a shower of wickets neatly ended in one, although disgruntled camp followers from the Broad Acres went off muttering that the real shower was their batting line-up. Yorkshire tossed away a prosperous 179 for 2 to be dismissed for a poor 185, with their last seven wickets clattering for six runs in the space of a mere 30 balls.With lunch and the Rugby World Cup final beckoning the last four wickets actually disappeared in only six balls as Yorkshire crumbled as abjectly as a defender facing Jonah Lomu.Their defeat, by an innings and 168 runs, popped the fragile bubble of optimism engendered by four victories from their first six Championship matches. And they need only peer into the gulf in class between themselves and the current champions to realise that the notion of finally adding to their 30 Championships is somewhat premature.That is specially so as, once again, they are without their talismanic opener and skipper, Martyn Moxon. He was rapped on the hand by Allan Donald on Friday evening and X-rays showed he has rebroken his right thumb, an injury from which he had just returned. He could take no further part in this match – high and dry on 36 – and is expected to be out for three weeks.His retirement pretty much exposed the vulnerable underbelly of the Yorkshire order, particularly once the determined Michael Vaughan and stoical David Byas were separated when the former was bowled by a ball from Tim Munton which scuttled along the deck.It was the chink Warwickshire required and they poured into it like champions.

They were in formidable form in this match, delighting in embarrassing the commentators who wrote off last year’s treble as the work of one man.This was their fifth victory, moving them into second place, and its hallmark, like much of last season, was teamwork. Yesterday it was the turn of their Scottish seamer Dougie Brown to stride into the limelight, producing a spell of 4 for 5 from 3.4 overs to give him match figures of 8 for 55 and edge him one wicket ahead of Donald as the county’s leading first-class wicket-taker, with 27 at 25.He started by removing Australian batsman Michael Bevan for 22 in his first over to set the collapse in train. It was a poor shot from Bevan, playing on an ill-judged cut, as he remains cast in the slough which seems to trap every Yorkshire overseas player. He is currently averaging 30 in the Championship.Craig White, his decline as meteoric as his rise, played his second very poor shot of the match to be leg before in the next over, and the rest followed meekly. Keith Piper and Dominic Ostler took breathtaking one- handed catches to hasten the decline, which was so rapid that Munton sat on a hat-trick after removing Peter Hartley and Stuart Milburn in successive balls.. Northamptonshire 564

Leicestershire 367 and 18-0
THERE was a time in the 1970s when Northamptonshire, from Geoff Cook all the way down to Sarfraz Nawaz, were sleek with Test-class talent and yet had just a single Gillette Cup trophy, in 1976, to show for it.