Vaughan fumbles chance as Australian pair impress

Durham 311-4 dec MCC 126-7

The Aussies are doing damage already. Not ones wearing baggy green caps and clutching the Ashes urn but two blokes with British passports who combined to put a spanner in the works at Lord's yesterday against an MCC team full of England hopefuls.

Michael Vaughan, playing his only innings before next weekend and the naming of the season's first Test squad, looked in reasonable touch for 47 minutes until cutting at a wide ball from Sydney-educated, hair-highlighted seamer Mitchell Claydon to depart for a dozen.

But it was Perth-born paceman Callum Thorp who really did the business for county champions Durham, capitalising on juicy bowling conditions to send back three more top-order England batting candidates – Rob Key, Stephen Moore and Ian Bell – before adding the wicket of keeper James Foster to finish his second spell with glittering figures of 13-5-15-4.

Like Claydon, Thorp plays for Durham as a non-overseas recruit because of his British parents. The 34-year-old has some form, though, when it comes to upsetting English applecarts. Back in the winter of 2002, when he made his debut for Western Australia while taking a break from his then regular work as a window cleaner, Thorp struck four times against Nasser Hussain's touring team – with Key one of those victims.

Yesterday, the captain of Kent and MCC suspected batting would be anything but an easy occupation once play finally re-started on the final afternoon of a match condemned to stalemate by the loss of 220 overs to bad weather. And he was proved right, even though English seamers Graham Onions and Liam Plunkett failed to cause too many alarms.

While Moore, who scored nearly 1,300 championship runs for Worcestershire last season to earn a winter tour with England Lions, forced effectively if not always convincingly off the back foot, Key came a cropper when edging Thorp to gully from high up the bat.

Enter Vaughan, filling the No 3 position which he is desperate to reclaim in England's Test team – if not against West Indies next month, then certainly by the time Australia provide the opposition in July.

Plunkett gave the former captain plenty of scope to practise his leave-alone after starting with a loosener which was cut square. Then Claydon, briefly a Yorkshire colleague of Vaughan's before joining Durham in 2007, began only his seventh first-class match by pitching so short and wide that the 2005 Ashes winner swatted another simple boundary.

Perhaps over-confidence, then, persuaded Vaughan to try to cut Claydon's fourth delivery. In an event, he edged a catch behind instead of shouldering arms.

"It was not the way I'd like to get him, but it's not so bad – short and wide," joked Claydon, who says, in a broad Aussie accent, that he now considers himself an Englishman. "This is where I play my cricket now."

It was when the floppy-haired Thorp switched ends that MCC's innings threatened to be swept away. Moore, having struck eight fours and comfortably top-scored with 45, snicked a drive against a ball which left him off the pitch to be well taken, low down, by keeper Phil Mustard. Then Bell and Foster succumbed in the space of six deliveries.

Bell, Owais Shah and Vaughan are the three likeliest contenders to bat at No 3 for England next month.

Well, while Shah prepares for a stint in the Indian Premier League, the other two are neck and neck in the run stakes with Bell also making 12 before feeling outside off stump and thin-edging to Mustard.

Thorp's purple patch was completed by an inswinger which pinned Foster plumb in front and, at 81 for five, MCC were looking sickly in reply to 311 for four declared. Bad light ended their discomfort on 126, though not before Plunkett's outswinger cleaned up Adil Rashid and Onions trapped Tim Bresnan.