Cricket at Trent Bridge yesterday despite a chilling westerly wind blowing across the ground, but the sun shone and the small crowd of hardy souls enjoyed some enterprising batting. Notts were taking on Northants in a two day warm-up game and most of those present certainly needed warming up.
Trent Bridge
The home side batted first with Greg Smith, who has joined from Leicester, and Steve Mullaney. They scored at a steady four an over with Smith looking the more fluent until he was becalmed in the late forties. Both players reached their fifties before lunch and then retired to let the others have a go. Taylor and Patel also retired after reaching fifty and Notts declared at 312-1 with only one player actually dismissed.
The Northants side included a few new faces such as Ben Sanderson, the former Yorkshire player and Joe Ellis-Grewell, a man with more clubs than Jack Nicklaus, among many others Harrogate and Broad Oak, as well as Leeds/Bradford University, whose smart yellow trimmed sweater he was wearing. He bowled a few overs of left arm spin before lunch, but the pitch looked very batsman friendly with a very short boundary on one side. Another former Leeds/Bradford man is Germaal Hussain who has been around the county circuit, but settled at Northants last season.
Joe Ellis-Grewell leads Northants in at lunch
After lunch in an effort to get my circulation going, I made the short journey down the road to Loughborough University who were playing Leicestershire in a one day 50 over game. The Leicester innings was coming to an end as I arrived just in time to see Aadil Ali and Jigar Niak make some lusty blows to make a final score of 197-7 in their 50 overs. Angus Robson, younger brother of Sam of Middlesex, had top scored with 54. (Yet another Australian of course).
It was my first visit to the main ground at Loughborough, known as the Haslegrave ground. My previous visit, with Brian Senior, was eight years ago when we saw England Under 15s play Australia Under 15s on the junior ground. Amongst those playing that day were Joe Root and a very small James Taylor. Come to think of it he's not much bigger now. The England captain that day was Azeem Rafiq who spent some time with pre-season training at Sussex. Nothing seems to have come of that and I understand he is now setting up his own coaching business in Barnsley.
However back to today's events and both games were eventually curtailed by the late afternoon rain, which had been forecast. Northants were 42-1 at Trent Bridge, and hope to continue today and at Loughborough the University were going well on 66-2 when the rains came and the game was abandoned as a draw.
Loughborough University Haslegrave ground
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