When, on Wednesday, Ryan Sidebottom reduced Middlesex to nought for three in this game’s first over and then, at 3.06pm that same day, Yorkshire were confirmed officially as champions, their victory parade can hardly have been seen as starting like this.
Few can have foreseen the indignity of a second and third new ball, that they would be 380 behind and that they would concede their highest score of the season, the highest third Division One innings of the season and their highest ever score against Middlesex, a 128-year-old record.
Once again Nick Compton – who came to the crease at 1.37pm on Thursday and left at 1.46pm on Friday – played party-pooper-in-chief on a typically flattened Lord’s pitch, while Toby Roland-Jones arrived fashionably late to reach a dashing, daring maiden century with 12 from the day’s final over. Middlesex’s game was as good as safe and, with Nottinghamshire beating Durham, this matters in the race for second.
No batsman in the county game knows better the locality of his off-stump than Compton. He left and left, between times picking singles and lacing the ball precisely through the covers – so docile had the pitch become that the Yorkshire Wall of three short covers made an appearance while insouciant flicks for four and a punched straight drive off Steve Patterson also caught the eye. His celebration on edging to square-leg to reach 100 was muted and, when he was eventually dismissed, it looked as if a turner from James Middlebrook was doing too much.
Compton now has 1,100 runs for the season and is a man teams can bat around – and England’s squad for the UAE is named on Tuesday. “They say timing is everything in life, don’t they?” he said. “I certainly hope that’s the case. I wanted to get a big total in this game and I’m glad that I was able to turn it on when I needed to.”
Compton lost James Franklin to a Ryan Sidebottom nip-backer but found an accomplice in John Simpson, who was equally risk averse. Simpson fell sweeping to Adam Lyth’s first ball to begin James Harris’s and Roland-Jones’s fun which, 146 runs later, was not finished at the close. Harris played straight and deftly with occasional flourishes, while Roland-Jones was more brutal, flamingo-ing the seamers, dancing down the wicket to the spinners and punishing anything short or full.
Yorkshire’s slightly one-paced attack looked thoroughly worn out but stuck to their task. Their fielding, though, was a touch shabby, with Simpson, on 28, and Roland-Jones (44) both dropped. With all three results improbably possible, the celebrations can start in earnest on Saturday.
