Flintoff's imperious form brings relief
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Your support makes all the difference.Lancashire 186 Kent 29-1
29 April 2000
Before play began yesterday in misty light at 12.15 pm, all but two hours of the game had already been washed away. It may well be that at this stage of the season both sides will happily settle for whatever handful of points they can cobble together, but the patient crowd deserved some enterprising cricket.
They were rewarded with bustling bowling, an acrobatic diving catch at deep point by Matthew Fleming to dismiss his opposing captain, Warren Hegg, and some pugnacious batting from Andrew Flintoff and Chris Schofield. Mark Ealham scuttled in from the pavilion end on sawdust footprints, adding another brace of wickets to his overnight pair, and Min Patel offered the first spin of the game to wrap up Lancashire's innings in mid-afternoon.
Meanwhile, Flintoff and Schofield, both with England and Wales Cricket Board contracts in their kitbags, warmed the afternoon with some crisp strokeplay. Flintoff looks in imperious form. He completed the Benson and Hedges preliminaries with an average of 44, and had the sun shone yesterday perhaps he would have knuckled down to bang his way to three figures. As it was, one expansive drive too many undid him, but not before he had crunched past 50 with a beautifully timed off drive at Fleming's expense, followed immediately by a brutal pull to the square-leg boundary.
The left-handed Schofield offered the only other substantial Lancashire effort once Mark Chilton's watchful opening knock was completed. Schofield was picked just once for the B & H matches but he, too, has an early-season eye on the ball, and played some adventurous shots through the offside field.
Ealham, meanwhile, bustled on, finding a zip off the wicket that belied the moist condition of the turf. Once Patel had fooled Schofield, who danced down the pitch to a ball that was then dropped too wide and short for him, there was just time for Ed Smith to collect a third-ball duck before the first rain of the day closed in at four o'clock. Once more the weather had the final say.
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