Lancashire drive on despite weather frustration

Lancashire v Yorkshire, Liverpool, 3rd day

Lancashire’s drive towards a fourth victory in five Championship matches and a third in three on this ground may have enough legs despite the frustration of spending three and a half hours in the Victorian pavilion yesterday.

As they do not tire of pointing out with every title bid that eludes them, this is not traditionally a dry county, yet rain this season has been a blessed rarity.

Yorkshire need any help they can get after a paltry first innings highlighted the frailty of their batting form, yet in Joe Sayers they have a player whose default, unrushed approach to his craft is made for situations such as this. The only member of his side to emerge with honour on the opening day, he has made unruffled progress to his second half-century of a match in which so far he has batted for almost six hours.

He and Andrew Gale hold the key to Yorkshire’s survival, given that the unavailability of Jonny Bairstow and Gerard Brophy means they are already down to their last two regular senior batsmen. They had put on 37 out of 85 for two when a heavy shower heralded the frustratingly long stoppage.

Back out at 5.40pm in sunshine, they added a further 41 runs in 50 minutes without further loss and will need to add another 57 to make Lancashire bat again.

At the start of play, it had taken only 11 deliveries for Yorkshire to take the last two Lancashire wickets. Steve Patterson had Luke Procter leg before with his first delivery as the left-hander tried to work the ball to leg and uprooted Gary Keedy’s off stump four balls later, giving him figures of four for 51 from 24.5 overs, which will advance his claims for a regular place as Yorkshire seek to find their best attack.

Lancashire’s lead of 188 on a pitch that has played slow and low would have left Yorkshire with even more to do but for the stoppage. Lancashire are more than capable, nonetheless, of making life difficult.

Jimmy Anderson looked especially eager to make his contribution meaningful before he joins England next week, confronting Sayers eyeball-to-eyeball after an appeal for caught behind had been turned down. Sayers, evidently beginning to enjoy his cricket again in the way he did before illness laid him low last year, was unimpressed. Anderson found as much life in this pitch as anyone and was unlucky to be wicketless.

Those instead went to Glen Chapple, who heaped more pressure on the Yorkshire batsmen by not conceding a run until his seventh over, and Farveez Maharoof. Chapple struck in his fourth over with a ball that stopped on Adam Lyth and induced a tame return catch from the left-hander, whose form in the early part of last season, when he went close to the scoring 1,000 first-class runs by the end of May, looks a distant memory. It was his fifth single figure dismissal in his last seven innings.

Joe Root, the 20-year-old from Sheffield who is being obliged to carry more responsibility than he might have expected so soon in his senior career, fell to Maharoof when he was caught in two minds about whether to go forward or back to a ball that kept a touch low.