Middlesex had started the week 30 points behind second-placed Glamorgan. <\/p>\n
They realistically needed victory in Manchester and for the Welsh county to lose to Derbyshire and after the first day was washed out, lost more time due to a wet outfield on the second.<\/p>\n
In such conditions, it was an easy call for James Anderson, captaining the Red Rose with Marcus Harris back in Australia, to put the visitors in.<\/p>\n
Only five overs were possible before rain arrived, but that was still enough for Lancashire to strike twice.<\/p>\n
Bailey had Sam Robson well caught at second slip for nine before Anderson drew the edge from left-hander Luke Hollman with a probing ball across him that was snaffled up at first slip as he went for a duck.<\/p>\n
More rain forced a two-hour stoppage before an eventful six-over period in which the visitors rattled up 48 runs.<\/p>\n
Captain Leus du Plooy and de Caires helped themselves to three boundaries apiece, aided by some generous bowling from their hosts.<\/p>\n
When play resumed again at 16:00 BST, the pair brought up a 50-partnership before du Plooy was caught behind off Tom Aspinwall for 22.<\/p>\n
And it was two in two balls for the young seamer as he got one to bounce on Ryan Higgins, which he could only fend to first slip.<\/p>\n
De Caires then put on another half-century stand with Geddes, as he went to his fifty off 65 balls but departed shortly after as he drove loosely at Bailey.<\/p>\n
Part-time medium-pacer Josh Bohannon then bowled Joe Cracknell for six with his first ball to leave Middlesex wobbling at 132-6.<\/p>\n
But Zafar Gohar offered good support to Geddes, who dug in for a fifth half-century of the summer off 80 balls, highlighted by three pulled sixes over the short leg-side boundary, until those two late Lancashire strikes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Middlesex had started the week 30 points behind second-placed Glamorgan. They realistically needed victory in Manchester and for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":142227,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1721,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-142226","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cricket","8":"tag-cricket","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142226\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/142227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}