George Balderson claimed four wickets as Lancashire dominated a rain-curtailed opening day of the County Championship Division Two match with Gloucestershire in Bristol.<\/p>\n
After losing the toss, the home side had plunged to 124-6 off 44 overs by the time the weather brought play to a halt at 14:45 BST, with seamer Balderson producing figures of 4-27 from 16 overs, including a spell of 3-5 either side of lunch.<\/p>\n
Ollie Price top-scored with 35 on another miserable day for the home side, who went into the match following innings defeats in their first two games.<\/p>\n
Balderson’s contribution was all the more important given that Lancashire lost Ajeet Singh Dale to injury at the start of the sixth over against his former county. <\/p>\n
He pulled up in delivery stride clutching the top of his left hamstring and will play no further part in the match, with Ollie Sutton summoned from a second XI fixture at Leicester to take his place under the new substitute rule.<\/p>\n
With the skies gloomy and the floodlights on from the start, Lancashire skipper James Anderson won an important toss and sent down an accurate six-over spell when play commenced, conceding only seven runs and beating the bat on several occasions.<\/p>\n
With the total on 22, Cameron Bancroft advanced down the pitch to Anderson and called for a quick single to cover, failing to beat Josh Bohannon’s direct hit when rightly sent back by Ben Charlesworth.<\/p>\n
Lancashire suffered another injury problem with the score 43-1 as wicketkeeper Matty Hurst suffered a painful blow to his left hand when standing up to the stumps to Balderson. <\/p>\n
Clearly in a lot of pain, he required several minutes of treatment before continuing in some discomfort.<\/p>\n
Gloucestershire looked to be negotiating a testing morning well when Price and Charlesworth added 58 for the second wicket, but the final over before lunch saw Balderson squeeze a delivery through Price’s defence to knock back his leg stump and make it 80-2 at the interval.<\/p>\n
It proved a turning point as Balderson struck twice more in quick succession after the break, pinning Charlesworth lbw for 26 with a delivery that appeared to keep low and having Miles Hammond caught behind trying to withdraw the bat.<\/p>\n
Suddenly Gloucestershire were in trouble at 94-4 and their plight worsened when James Bracey became Balderson’s fourth victim, leg-before to a delivery that pitched on or around leg stump.<\/p>\n
Graeme van Buuren then fell for a duck, edging a routine catch to Keaton Jennings at second slip off Paul Coughlin, and it was a relief to Gloucestershire when the forecast rain arrived, with 21-year-old Tommy Boorman, making his Championship debut, unbeaten on 11. <\/p>\n
Report by ECB Reporters’ Network, supported by Rothesay.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"George Balderson claimed four wickets as Lancashire dominated a rain-curtailed opening day of the County Championship Division Two…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":536356,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1721,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-536355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-cricket","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536355","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=536355"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536355\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/536356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=536355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=536355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=536355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}