Ormond given torrid treatment

Surrey 475 Warwickshire 293 and 165-3

The good ship Warwickshire got stuck between a rock and a team of hard cases otherwise known as Surrey, who started to put the squeeze on this First Division match here yesterday. As the skies darkened their captain Michael Powell found himself battling hard to stay afloat.

They had lost three wickets by the time bad light drove them off shortly before the scheduled close, when they were still 17 runs away from making Surrey bat again. The Championship leaders will ensure a rocky passage today as they close in on what looks like a fifth victory.

It was a fine spell of seam bowling from James Ormond that had holed Warwickshire's first-innings reply well below their plimsoll line. No one was able to save them from having to follow on although Neil Smith had a pretty good stab at it.

Poor Ormond especially must have wondered if he had run into the storms that had been forecast for yesterday as Smith savaged him, singling out the former Leicestershire man for some humiliating treatment as he cut, drove and pulled him for six boundaries on the trot.

There was a certain amount of relief when Saqlain Mushtaq induced a bat-pad catch to get rid of Smith, but not until he had scored his second half-century of the summer, 56 of his runs coming in boundaries with a couple of sixes and 11 fours.

By then, though, Ormond had picked up his first five-wicket haul for his new county, adding Shaun Pollock, Dougie Brown and Keith Piper to his overnight victims. Pollock managed to turn in a solid fifty from 78 balls, but fell lbw two deliveries later.

Saqlain mopped up the lower order, but Melvyn Betts' wicket eluded him, which would have pained Saqlain, since the former Durham pace man had the effrontery to get off the mark with a six over midwicket.

It fell to Ed Giddins to end the resistance when Warwickshire were a tantalising 33 runs away from avoiding the follow-on. They began their second innings well but with the pitch – in its fourth day since it was the one that was used for Tuesday's England-India one-day international – beginning to show a lot of turn for the spinners it was no surprise that Ian Salisbury and Saqlain should make inroads.

The leg-spinner Salisbury claimed the first two to go, Michael Wagh and Ian Bell, and Saqlain took his match tally up to five with the wicket of Dominic Ostler. Both bowlers will expect more victims today.