MITCHELL & CO ENJOY A TON OF FUN IN THE SUN AS ENGLAND WILT
DARYL Mitchell and Tom Blundell posted centuries as New Zealand piled the pressure on England on day two of the second Test at Trent Bridge.
The fifth-wicket pair picked up where they left off on the first evening, with Mitchell making it back to back hundreds following his efforts at Lord’s and Blundell (106) making amends after falling four short in that game.
Jack Leach had Mitchell dropped on 104, Matthew Potts’ error taking England’s costly tally of missed chances up to five in the match, before finally ending a partnership worth 236.
Blundell, having just brought up his third Test century, hacked the left-arm spinner to mid-off where captain Ben Stokes showed his side how to hang on.
New Zealand added 94 runs in the first session and another 69 before the weather turned, continuing the positive stroke play that allowed them to take charge on day one.
They had started on 318 for four, with the second new ball still relatively fresh after a brief burst on Friday evening. England were desperate for it to offer some assistance but neither James Anderson nor Stuart Broad could get it moving through the air.
Mitchell took 45 minutes to convert his overnight score of 81 into three figures, getting over the line with a rare false shot as a thick edge from Potts sailed through to the third man boundary.
He has been a revelation in the past fortnight and, at the age of 31, looks to have finally cemented his place in a competitive middle order.
He should have been on his way soon after, skying Leach down the ground on 104 to give Potts a steepling chance running round from long-on.
The seamer made good ground but inexplicably allowed the ball to slip through his hands, ricocheting for four off his knee to add insult to injury.
Potts had to rouse himself to bowl the next over and was promptly dispatched for consecutive boundaries.
He exacted a small measure of revenge when he rapped Blundell on the finger, but the wicketkeeper did not allow himself to lose focus.
Having fallen agonisingly short of a ton in the first Test, he showed no nerves at all as he breezed through the 90s.
He went to 99 with a big swing down the ground off Leach and a one-bounce four, before dashing through for one to complete the job.
His stay ended soon after, Leach finally getting some reward his 26th over as a loose stroke picked out Stokes, but leaving Mitchell to begin building a new stand with debutant Michael Bracewell.
New Zealand came out hot in the afternoon, hammering 26 from the first two overs.
Leach was smashed for 17 of those, with Mitchell using his feet and launching the spinner all the way over long-on.
He followed with the fourth sixth of his innings, to go with 20 fours.
Bracewell could not have wished for a gentler introduction at the highest level but showed he was comfortably up to it with a couple of dazzling drives off Stokes and a crunching pull shot.
England were bowling themselves into the ground when showers arrived to give them a welcome break.
Bracewell progressed serenely to 49 in his maiden innings at the highest level before he was finally dismissed by Anderson, bowling just his second spell of the day.
He got the old ball to swing away, brush the edge of a forward defensive and carry through to Joe Root at slip.
New Zealand remained in charge at 496 for six, with the beginning of the tail finally exposed in the form of Kyle Jamieson.
Jamieson came and went for 14, nicking Stuart Broad behind for the Nottinghamshire player’s first success on his return to home soil. Mitchell was still enjoying himself on 170 not out in a score of 513 for seven.
New Zealand’s innings finally came to a conclusion on 553, their highest ever in this country by a margin of two runs.
Mitchell was last man out, nicking a slower ball from Potts to give Ben Foakes a fourth catch of the match.
After watching New Zealand bat for over 145 overs, Zak Crawley was unable to detain them for more than five balls.
He was undone by Trent Boult’s quality, prodding at one they came across him and kicked up.
At the close, England had progressed to 90-1, with Ollie Pope having reached a half century.
GLAMORGAN return to red-ball action as they meet Sussex in the LV=Insurance County Championship, with the four-day contest scheduled to get underway at Sophia Gardens at 11am today, writes Andrew Hignell.
Sussex were the victors last summer by eight wickets when the two teams met at Cardiff in the opening match of the 2021 Championship season.
The contest, staged behind closed doors, was something of a personal triumph for Ollie Robinson, the Sussex seamer, who gave an object lesson in the virtues of line and length, harnessed to an ability to extract late movement.
In the process of claiming thirteen wickets, his second innings haul of 9/78 was both a career-best return, and Sussex’s best-ever in Championship cricket against Glamorgan, with Robinson, on the back of this performance and a series of other decent spells, subsequently winning a place in the England Test squad.
Sussex’s previous visit to Cardiff in 2016 had been a much closer affair with the visitors recording a narrow victory by two wickets as the South Coast club successfully chased a target of 233 on the final day.
Timm van der Gugten had given Glamorgan the perfect start as he removed Ed Joyce with the first delivery of the innings, before returning after the tea interval with a superb spell of hostile fast bowling, claimed 3/22 in the space of seven overs to put Glamorgan into the ascendancy.
But the pendulum swung decisively in Sussex’s favour as the eighth wicket pairing of Ben Brown and Danny Briggs (now with Warwickshire) added 55 in the space of nine overs with the latter using the long handle with plenty of luck as he hit the ball just over the head of the Glamorgan fielders. After Brown was dismissed, Briggs scampered a series of singles with George Garton as Sussex reached their target with 20 balls remaining.
In fifteen encounters against Sussex at Sophia Gardens, Glamorgan have been victorious on four occasions with their latest success taking place in April 1999 when both Simon Jones and Robert Croft each took five-wicket hauls, before a superb 153 from Steve James helped the Welsh county successfully chase a target of 336 on the final day to record a comprehensive victory by six wickets.