Red Rose put champions to the sword

LANCASHIRE sent out a message to the rest of the Specsavers County Championship with an emphatic win over defending champions Middlesex.

After last week’s heavy defeat at the hands of Yorkshire, Lancashire needed a morale-boosting victory to get their Division One campaign back on track.

And you can’t get much better than trouncing last year’s title winners, who hadn’t lost since September 2015 – a total of 21 games ago.

Lancashire completed the eight-wicket victory in style at Southport, and with the whole of Saturday washed out, they did it in just over two days to claim 22 points.

“We faced a challenge after Yorkshire last week and the lads have come through that brilliantly,” said head coach Glen Chapple.

“We have beaten a team that haven’t been beaten since 2015.

“When you face your first loss of the season, there is always a mental challenge which goes with that, so it is nice to come back from a defeat with a performance like this.”

Middlesex added 80 to their overnight 156-6, with Dawid Malan’s 52 and a 49-run ninth-wicket stand from Tim Murtagh (27) and Toby Roland-Jones (31) pushing Lancashire’s winning target to 108.

They lost two wickets on their way, but 38no from Haseeb Hameed and an unbeaten 34 by skipper Steven Croft saw the Red Rose home midway through the afternoon session.

And there were plenty of individual performances for Chapple to admire, with Alex Davies claiming 10 victims in the match – just one fewer than the club record set by Warren Hegg in 1989 – while Stephen Parry claimed his first five-wicket haul in Championship cricket, 10 years after his first-class debut on which he also took five wickets.

“Winning in four-day cricket is not easy, and although we have result pitches at our outgrounds, beating a team like Middlesex requires a lot of work,” added Chapple.

“We believe we can achieve things, we are a strong team, we have areas where we can become more consistent, but when we all perform we are a good team.

“We can put a long list of performances together this season and it would include everybody, it is not just one person. Everybody has had a big part to play.”

Lancashire now face high-flying Hampshire at Emirates Old Trafford next week.