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Glamorgan gamble on pitch to end bleak start to Croft era
- Updated: May 22, 2016
Essex 29 for 1 trail Glamorgan 260 (Cooke 63, Napier 5-82) by 231 runsScorecard
The sun was shining for most of the day in Cardiff as Glamorgan took on Essex but the outlook is very gloomy. The home side sit at the bottom of the County Championship table and are already 50 points off the solitary promotion spot that is available to them. The last time a season started this poorly was Glamorgan’s most recent appearance in Division One of the Championship in 2005 where the side won only once and lost 14 times. But that was in the rarefied air of the top flight, this is in a second division in which there is no real stand out team.
Having taken a punt on preparing as green a pitch as you will ever see in County Championship knowing full well that Essex would put them into bat, they started off well enough. At lunch they were 91 for 1 with Mark Wallace and Chris Cooke both looking secure enough. It looked horrible but the surface had pace, carry and even bounce. Then the inevitable Glamorgan collapse happened, something that has become so familiar for this team this year. Their average score when the fifth wicket has fallen this season is just 135. This time they lost six wickets for 73 to find themselves scrambling for late-order runs to rescue their innings.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The off-season departure of Toby Radford as coach and the ushering in of Robert Croft as a replacement was meant to be the making of this team. There are few people that are as inspiring for Glamorgan supporters as Croft, barring maybe Don Shepherd. If anyone was going to bring Welsh pride to a club that craves just that it was Croft. Quite why Glamorgan seem so short of confidence in 2016 is not clear, but Croft admitted it was a major problem in a supporters Q&A session in the lunch interval today.
“Confidence has been low and …
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