Cricket: Crawley century makes his point

SEVERAL OF the players who narrowly missed out on being picked for Scotland's World Cup campaign yesterday sent a message to the selectors by clinically completing the country's most decisive ever one-day tournament victory.

The "second stringers" were on duty against the Notts County Board Xl in the NatWest Trophy because the leading names were at the Durham training camp preparing to face the Australians at Worcester a week on Sunday.

Steve Crawley opened the batting and struck his maiden century for Scotland - an unbeaten 109, including a six and 14 fours - which helped his country to a nine-wicket victory at Linlithgow to earn a second-round tie at home to Dorset.

The picture had not looked so rosy as Nottinghamshire blasted 19 off their first two overs, but Scotland battled back through seamer Craig Wright and spinner Gregor Maiden to restrict the visitors to 212 from their 50 overs. Then Crawley and Bryn Lockie featured in a brilliant partnership of 141 to snuff out the county's challenge. The pair looked set to finish the job together, but Lockie was unlucky to be run out as he tried to scramble a single to cover.

Australian professional Corey Richards, who had taken a wicket in the first over of his Scotland career, comfortably survived until the end with man of the match Crawley.

The Scotland coach, Clarence Parfitt, said: "It was a terrific team effort. There were some great individual performances, but everyone played a part. After the World Cup, all potential squad members will be on a level footing for the rest of the summer and these guys did their prospects no harm at all."

The South African fast bowler, Allan Donald, believes the World Cup will not be dominated by seam bowlers to the extent that many players have predicted - the reason being the seam itself. Speaking after the team's first practice session at Hove yesterday, Donald said he was convinced that the Dukes ball to be used in the tournament had been altered in design and was now held together with a smaller seam than in the past.

"It is definitely a bit smaller and quite different from all the other Dukes balls I've ever seen," Donald said. "I think they might have done it to get higher-scoring games because there has been some criticism of the ball in the early stages of a game."

The South African team usually play with the Australian-made Kookaburra ball, which has a smaller seam than the English-made Dukes ball, but in the seven one-day matches against the West Indies earlier this year they used the Dukes ball as practice for the World Cup.

"Also the weather in the early part of the season means there'll be moisture in the pitches to give the seamers even more assistance. Certainly when we played the West Indies it was darting all over the place off the seam, which is probably why they changed it," Donald said.