Tea Report: Surrey 278 v Hampshire 177-7 (64 overs)

Hampshire suffered a dog day afternoon. After the painstaking care with which Michael Brown and Michael Lumb had compiled their century stand everything went to pot after lunch.

Three wickets fell for the addition of half a dozen runs as the tea interval approached followed by a fourth ten runs later. That mini collapse began when Brown followed a late away swinger sent down by the impressive Surrey fast bowler Chris Jordan.

The 19-year-old Barbadian bowler had softened up his victim the ball before, when the batsman stepped inside a bouncer that appeared to have hit something on the way through to wicketkeeper Jon Batty.

The fuller length delivery next ball did for Brown and in Jordan’s next over he struck again when he had Lumb lbw. In between the bowler had also had Chris Benham dropped off a top edged hook, Batty ran back 30 yards dived but failed to get the ball to stick in his wicketkeeping gloves.

At least both Brown and Lumb had done what no Surrey player had managed the day before, they reached and passed the fifty mark. But what Hampshire needed was for someone to stay in. While the Brown-Lumb axis produced 133 invaluable runs on a bowler friendly pitch and atmospheric conditions that were conducive to swing, they needed to stick around for a lot longer because it was looking more and more as if Hampshire were going to fall short of their opponents’ modest first innings total.

Benham did not last very long after his escape. He pushed forward at a ball from Pakistani off-spinner Saqlain Mushtaq and was bowled.

Saqlain collected a second wicket shortly afterwards when Hampshire captain Dimitri Mascarenhas drove a ball straight back at the bowler. Worse was to follow in the penultimate over before the interval when Sean Ervine was bowled by Pedro Collins off an inside edge and Hampshire went in to tea still 101 runs behind Surrey.