Cricket: Croft's art and craft
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Your support makes all the difference.Durham 448 Glamorgan 180-1
GLAMORGAN DISCOVERED hell yesterday in the form of a pitch which baked under an unforgiving sun and made bowlers work for everything. There was no short cut, no Charon to ferry them to the other side, they simply had to keep chipping away at the granite that is Durham these days.
The pitch tested the mettle of the bowlers from both sides and Glamorgan, in particular, were not found wanting. The off- spinner Robert Croft was exemplary, displaying his old touch with loop and variation and not a little turn and his return of 3 for 168 off 59 demanding overs was a superlative effort.
If Croft is all art and craft then Darren Thomas is all heart and graft. He was thoroughly deserving of his first five-wicket return of the season, and he too was economical going for around two runs an over.
And when it was Glamorgan's turn to dip into a pitch filled with runs Steve James and Adrian Dale, in contrast with the more circumspect Durham batsmen, rattled off the country's highest opening stand of the season in around two hours.
James finally perished on 65 when off-spinner Nicky Phillips got one to turn and bounce to present a leaping Jon Lewis with a fine one-handed take. By then the foundations for a good counter had been laid. And after Durham's performance Glamorgan will need to dig deep if they are to have even a glimmer of a chance. At the close, with Dale drawing in sight of another hundred and Jacques Kallis looking comfortable, they needed a further 119 to avoid the follow-on and were still 268 runs adrift of the imposing Durham total.
That was amassed over a day and close on two sessions and in that time none of the Glamorgan bowlers was able to remove Martin Speight. Ordinarily he would have been happy to have finished unbeaten, however he was just three short of what should have been his first hundred since August 1996, when last man Stephen Harmison shouldered arms to a ball from Thomas which knocked back his off-stump.
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