Harvey hails ‘outstanding’ Zafar after win against Glamorgan
IT took Gloucestershire a mere 78 minutes to polish off Glamorgan on the fourth and final day of their LV= Insurance County Championship Division Two match at Sophia Gardens and head home with 22 points to move into second in the table.
The Welsh county resumed on 57-6, still 43 runs behind the visitors, and they were obviously intent on not falling to a third successive defeat by an innings.
The overnight batsmen Dan Douthwaite and Andrew Salter didn’t hang around as they attempted to close the gap and force Gloucestershire to bat again.
Salter immediately attacked the visiting hero of the previous day, Zafar Gohar, and took 10 runs from the opening over of the day. He took six off Ryan Higgins next over and seven off Zafar’s second to give his side an impressive start.
But his flourish was all too brief and Zafar took his fourth wicket of the innings in the 32nd over when he had Salter lbw for 19. A mere 14 balls later, Ruaidhri Smith became his fifth victim as Glamorgan slumped to 94-8. Smith attempted a reverse sweep off the left-arm spinner and was bowled around his legs having added only four runs.
Douthwaite was the next to fall, bowled by Higgins as he became the Gloucestershire seamer’s 50th Championship victim of the summer, and that left Timm van der Gugten and Michael Hogan needChris
ing to score eight runs to make Gloucestershire pad up again.
To their credit, they put on 22 for the final wicket, the third highest partnership of the innings as Glamorgan moved on to 124. Zafar finally removed Van der Gugten to end with 6-43 from 18 overs, although not before the home batsman had hit him for two big sixes.
On one of those he was caught by
Higgins as he ran towards the rope, but then failed to stop.
When it happened again, Higgins took a wonderful catch and threw it over his shoulder for Graeme van Buuren to complete the dismissal and leave Gloucestershire with a target of 15 runs to win the game.
Glamorgan opened with two spinners, Salter and Kiran Carlson, and it took nine balls for skipper Dent and Miles Hammond to complete the triumph at 11.48am.
Ian Harvey praised his side after they gained their seventh win of the season.
“We were hoping for a quick finish, but we spoke about being prepared to work hard even into the afternoon. We have been prepared to do that throughout the season and a lot of our games have gone down to the last session,” said Harvey.
“Credit to the players, they keep fighting and believing they can do it. It was great from our point of view it was over early. After the defeat last week the main thing for us was to turn it around. That’s something we have done all season and that was very pleasing.
“We dropped four catches in the first session in their second innings, but the bowlers kept bowling well and in the end we started catching them.
“We spoke about partnerships all the way through and the boys played exceptionally well.
“Zafar was outstanding and took advantage of the conditions. When you look at spinners around the country they do come into their own in the third and fourth days.
“That’s why we got hold of Zafar and he really showed what he could do in this game. It is not always going to spin, or be in your favour, but he played to the conditions and did that exceptionally well.”