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Sidebottom’s day of dark mutterings, slumped shoulders and wrath
- Updated: September 7, 2016
Durham 205 for 4 (Borthwick 53, Jennings 40) trail Yorkshire 460 (Lees 132, Ballance 71, Lehmann 58) by 255 runsScorecard
Books half-price in the pavilion and the trees half as green as they were in June’s lush carelessness. For not much longer will drinkers at The Original Oak or The Skyrack spill out onto Headingley Lane in the half-light of what might masquerade as an August evening.
The abundant warmth on the second day of this vital game could not disguise the sense of gentle closure. That could be seen as much in the first yellowing of leaves on Shire Oak Road as in the announcement of new season fashions in Briggate and the Headrow. To paraphrase Louis MacNeice: Close and slow, summer is ending in Yorkshire. Six more days of this stuff at Headingley, then four at Lord’s, then…
But what a ten days they could be. The intensity of the occasion has overpowered the soft incipience of change throughout this game and so it was on the second afternoon when Yorkshire’s triumphant quartet of seamers strove to wreak havoc after their batsmen had made 460 in the first innings. As so often in September, poignancy was accompanied by climax and Yorkshire’s attempt to steal an advantage over Middlesex in the run-in for the title.
Just as news of Nick Gubbins’ attempt to sink his roots into the Trent Bridge turf reached Headingley during the second session of this game, so Yorkshire supporters knew that any rattle of Durham wickets would be heard in Nottingham. The players may insulate themselves from their rivals’ progress – does anyone quite believe that, by the way? – but spectators are not bound by such a self-denying ordinance.
Yet in two sessions there was little to disconcert James Franklin’s men. The first ten overs of Durham’s reply to Yorkshire’s formidable 460 featured boundaries, as Gale’s seamers overpitched, and one …
