C&G Final: Kirtley shatters Lancashire illusions

Sussex's comeback paceman sets Lord's alight with five-wicket spectacular on rollercoaster day

The end-of-season one-day final at Lord's has been declared clapped out, redundant, overtaken by the instant gratification provided by Twenty20 cricket. Even its sponsors, C & G, have dumped it. But after yesterday's compelling game, it ain't necessarily so.

Sussex beat Lancashire by 15 runs with just 16 balls remaining by taking the last three wickets for six runs in nine balls when it looked as though Dominic Cork, who finished on 35 not out, might be about to replicate the memorable dramatics of 2000 when he guided England to a famous victory against West Indies here.

This final will be remembered instead as James Kirtley's match. The Sussex seamer took 5 for 27, all of them lbw, breaking Lancashire's top order and returning to clear up the tail by taking two of those last three wickets to fall.

"He was awesome," said Chris Adams, the Sussex captain. "He has more character, fight and belief than any cricketer I have ever played with." The 31-year-old Kirtley, who has struggled manfully to correct a suspect action, was of course, man of the match, and his bravura display of hostile seam bowling was a great advertisement for this tournament. It ought to make the search for a sponsor easier.

Even in the euphoria of a great climax, however, we cannot rule out the possibility that those who ought to know better will tinker the formula to death. The present danger is that the classic one-day competition has been devalued by the counties' wish to reduce the risk to their finances by replacing the knockout with nine early-season conference games. This middle-distance formula does make it less surprising that yesterday's final was between the two top teams in the top division of the Championship.

The principal plus now is that one of the teams has a chance to do the double, and Sussex, having won the trophy for the first time since 1986 - when they beat Lancashire by seven wickets - must now be strong favourites to do so. To come back from the brink of an inadequate score of 172 can do remarkable things to morale - like creating a sense of invincibility.

Lancashire may discover that the reverse is also true. Indeed, the stakes were sufficiently high for Lancashire to perform an act of naked cynicism by flying in Murali Kartik, the Indian left-arm spinner, for the final three weeks of the season. Gary Keedy, Lancashire's own native spinner, was said to have failed a fitness test on Friday, but my own cynicism leads me to believe that Kartik would have played even if Keedy was in rude good health.

Kartik's was the last Lancashire wicket to fall to Kirtley, lbw of course, for a duck. He had bowled eight tidy overs and taken 2 for 26, including the essential wicket of Michael Yardy, who stuck around when wickets were falling at the other end to end up with an equal top score for Sussex of 37.

Maybe the cricketing gods had turned their attention away from the Hair Affair to bless Sussex's efforts and show their distaste for Lancashire's opportunism, though it did not look that way at the start of the day. The clouds hung low over Lord's when Mark Chilton won the toss. There was no hesitation at all. Lancashire would bowl. This looked as if it would be a bowlers' game, and so it proved. Lancashire's seamers bowled an exemplary line on a day when all of them swung the ball late.

Cork managed to make the ball wobble on its way, not unlike a corkscrew, though the wickets fell to careless running and sharp throwing - by Cork actually - and to Sajid Mahmood, on leave from England, who took 3 for 16.

Yardy was the only Sussex batsman to dig in. His stance suggests that the bowler is running in from extra cover, and his adjustment to face the ball comes at the last minute. He is on good enough form to have been picked for the one-day squad against Pakistan, but there was none of that on show yesterday.

He was stuck on 15 for three overs, and both Robin Martin-Jenkins and Yasir Arafat caught up with him before getting an inside edge to the keeper. Yardy had consumed 97 balls and he hit just one four but without his patience and application, Sussex would have been short of their humble-looking total of 172.

Except, at the end of Kirtley's fourth over, Lancashire were three wickets down for 27 runs, just as Lancashire had been. Kirtley was, perhaps, lucky to have Stuart Law adjudged lbw when he seemed to get an edge, but all his other wickets were the result of accurate bowling on or just outside the off stump swinging away towards the slips.

Lancashire's next three wickets took the score to 72, compared to Sussex's 78 at the loss of the sixth wicket. It was tight already, and Cork made it tighter, until Kirtley won a great victory. What a good way to spend a day.