James Faulkner has maintained a strict diet of Twenty20 and one-day cricket in recent times, with the Australian all-rounder making only a dozen first-class appearances, including a solitary Test, in the last two years. His most recent assignments have included a successful World Cup campaign on home soil and time at the Indian Premier League. For the next three months his focus is very much on red-ball cricket as he aims to help Lancashire out of Division Two and further his Test ambitions. So a debut 121 off 152 balls, his first in first-class cricket, was not a bad way to start.
The Tasmanian, 25, looks to be the sort to relish a challenge such as the one he faced on his arrival at the crease after lunch. Lancashire were 102 for five and in the midst of a loss of three for 17. They soon slipped to 108 for six. The key batsman, Ashwell Prince, had been dismissed, as had Alviro Petersen, and they were two of four wickets to fall during a nervy afternoon. Lancashire needed to reach 299 to avoid the follow-on and they did so late in the day on the back of a seventh-wicket stand of 183 inside 47 overs between Faulkner and Jordan Clark, another man whose short career has been white-ball heavy.
Clark has hit six sixes in an over in a second XI match and played junior cricket in Cumbria against Ben Stokes. But this is only his sixth match in his maiden season of four-day cricket. Although Clark hit straight sixes off both spinners, Gareth Batty and Zafar Ansari, he was much more reserved on the way to his maiden half-century, a 142-ball 63. Faulkner, too, was watchful but accumulated nicely before racing through the nineties with two crunching boundaries to the cover fence off Stuart Meaker inside the final hour of the day and reached three figures off 141 balls with 11 boundaries. He gained a congratulatory slap on the back from Kevin Pietersen, his Melbourne Stars T20 team-mate, before falling late in the day. Both men were bowled by Matt Dunn, who finished with three wickets after Surrey advanced their first innings from 435 for eight at the start of play.
Given they came into this fixture 32 points ahead of Surrey at the top of Division Two, a draw will be a positive result for Lancashire when confirmed around 5pm on Wednesday.
